Attitude Shift: Gear Up To Go Further

To create significant change in your world, you need to be prepared to accept what’s in your control, and what’s not in your control. What’s in your control is your attitude, and like any skill, your ability to refine it and grow it. Your attitude is intangible, but it will determine how far you are able to go. One way to swiftly shift gears is to imagine what your world would look like if your problems didn’t exist. Solution-focused coaching puts the emphasis on this idea of possibility.

The first premise in coaching is that you have the capacity for self-healing and self-organization within your specific context. Having a coach alongside you is valuable in that they can model a non-judgmental attitude and create trust, but they are putting you in charge of the search for solutions. 

In solution focused coaching, a tough but essential question posed to you, the client, is to imagine a world where all of your problems are solved - what would be the result? What would you see, feel, hear? What would be the evidence of this new reality?

With this question, you can leapfrog over all the tactical elements to simply describe the results of your problem being solved. This focus on what would exist instead of the problem helps to motivate you to find and design solutions, although initially you are simply opening yourself up to a new direction, not an explicit action. A coach in this stage would ask subsequent questions to help you recover solutions that already exist but have been forgotten or lie dormant.

The facts of your world remain the same; the people you deal with, the conditions you live in, don’t change; it's your attitude towards these things that changes. What is altered are the limits of the world your will has placed on it. 

With this shift in attitude you are more open to recognizing the facts as they are. You change your relationship to existing things. The actual change that takes place is your attitude towards the world, not the world itself. It’s a recognition of “what is”. It seems so simple a statement, but this recognition of existing facts allows you to lessen your grip on judgement and move towards something new.

This recognition is the gate that opens us up to change. By recognizing what is, we no longer try to change something compulsively, and with less resistance, we find internal peace.

What if you had less judgement of your reality, and more acceptance of “what is”, including past experiences? They simply are. How could this shift your goal setting? Would your goals in fact be even more aligned, bolder, if you could tap into all of who you are without judgement?