Coaching is to fix, mend or improve, and I am not broken and I’m doing ok…I don’t need a mindset coach

by Gillian Campbell


13 Nov, 2019 at 12:41 pm

I don’t believe I, my clients or any person has a broken mindset, or even a damaged way of seeing. I do believe however, we can put blinkers on at times, often to feel safe in the moment, and we forget to take them off and this alters our view. We just don’t realise that we are seeing in this filtered way. Outward mindset coaching is time to share a space where there is a chance of seeing every situation through a different lens, to see a new view and take off the blinkers we may have picked up on the way.

Why?  Well because we are in relationship all the time, be it with our family, colleagues, friends, and how we see them, how we see the world reflects how we see ourselves.  Everything we do is influenced by how we see this connectivity and these relationships.  

I am in relationship with these words as I type, I could share these words worrying about how you may see or view me.  Write driven by my fear that someone may use these words to judge me, measure me, dislike me.  Should I write to make me seem ‘nice’, kind, a good person?  Maybe I could write to impress you, to choose eloquent words from a thesaurus of my own pomposity to show you how much more I know than you and therefore how I am better than you and you need my help, my coaching services for you to be better too…Or, alternatively I share with you how hard my life has been and how I have earnt your understanding, pity even and admiration. None of these views are true, but they may feel real to me on some level.

I believe that if I wrote to meet my need for you to like me, be impressed by me, admire me or buy my coaching services, you would feel that as you read.  You will form a relationship with me, you will see me, through my words and feel the disconnect.

But most importantly on some level I know I would feel the disconnect too, I would know I was self-serving and this would sit with me and it would draw me to see myself and my relationship with all of you in a blinkered light. In addition, I could then believe I need to live up to the image I had created…

So, for me, Outward Mindset coaching sits in the space of philosophy, a way of seeing, choosing how we live, not about looking at what is broken and fixing it.  We are all whole, but at times we stop seeing all our connectivity.  The blinkers don’t break us or destroy us; they just separate us from being wholly at peace with how we sit in relationship, with ourselves, others and the world.

So, outward mindset coaching is not to mend, it is to see.

What do you think?