It seems pretty obvious doesn't it, the first rule of coaching that is, to be your own best friend, to do what is right for you, but how many of us actually do it, or even find ourselves in a situation where we have the opportunity to honour our own being even in a small way just once a day, or week even?
It can sound a pretty simple thing to do, but after years of conditioning, where we continue to place others needs before our own, be it in our work, within our family, in our society, compromising our own happiness for somebody else, living anothers purpose rather than our own, purely surviving rather than truly living. Reversing that process can feel like a very big step.
Bill Plotkin would say in his book Soulcraft that our first task in life is to learn our survival dance before we can hope to learn the second our sacred dance.
The trouble is the way civilization is set up today, the way we have become accustomed to living and working where so much energy is taken up purely surviving that it makes changing course to a better way of existing that much more difficult.
So what can we do about it?
In the first instance and using the smallest step we can commit to being more assertive about our own needs and what we truly want for ourselves amongst friends, colleagues and family. There are likely to be situations when we repeatedly compromise who we are, hold back or do not express our true feelings. We can explore the situation and work out what we are going to do about it in a non damaging, non aggressive way. So when it happens next time, we can take our opportunity to start expressing what we would truly like from the situation our self.
Begin to make decisions that are right for you, do what feels most natural to you on a more regular basis in more aspects of your life, go do the things that you want to do, starting this weekend perhaps, and then knowing you have your own best interests at heart, start to be true to yourself when you deal with others. By concentrating on who you truly are as an individual you can start to focus on what you truly want out of life, just like our surf dog Ricochet, and begin taking the first steps in your sacred dance.
