The Self Coaching Model - A Review

Separate facts from thoughts, then trace the feeling, action, and result.

You can understand the Self Coaching Model intellectually and still be surprised by what happens when you put your own life into it.

A thought you have always treated as a fact turns out to be optional. A result you thought was happening to you becomes something you can trace back through your actions, feelings, and thinking.

That is why practicing the Model matters. It gives you access to the cause instead of leaving you trying to change everything around you.

Separate the flowers from your opinion of them

There are flowers in a vase on the table. That is a circumstance.

The flowers are beautiful. That is a thought.

The distinction seems simple until the circumstance matters to you. Then your opinion can feel inseparable from the fact.

One question I get is whether a circumstance can be sad. In the Model, circumstances are always neutral. The sadness comes from our thoughts.

Consider someone dying. If you do not know it happened, you do not feel grief about it. When you know, what you think about that death determines your experience.

I am not suggesting you should not want to feel grief when someone you love dies. I am showing you where that feeling comes from. Someone dying after suffering may bring up very different thoughts from a young child dying in an accident.

Keep the fact in the circumstance line. Put your interpretation in the thought line.

Check how the thought actually feels

A thought is a sentence in your mind. A feeling is a vibration in your body, described with one emotion word.

We separate emotions from physical sensations such as being cold, hungry, or thirsty. The feeling line describes the emotion created by your thought.

Do not choose a thought just because it sounds pretty. Check how it feels.

You might say you do not care that someone excluded you, but feel terrible when you think it. You might say you want to help someone, while the sentence creates resentment. Pay attention to that.

The feeling shows you what is happening when you think the sentence. You cannot fill in the Model with what you believe the answers should be.

Actions include inaction

Your feelings fuel your actions. They drive what you do, what you do not do, and how you react.

Being kind, speaking to someone, avoiding a conversation, and sitting in front of the television all belong in the action line.

Even familiar behavior has thinking behind it. You may brush your teeth because you want to care for your mouth or do not want your breath to smell. The thought creates the feeling that drives the action.

Because it is habitual, you may not notice the thought. But you can go back and find it.

The result proves the original thought

Your actions create your results. The result is always going to prove the original thought because that thought created the result.

You can see this by starting at the bottom of the Model.

Suppose you do not have many friends. Look at what you have done to meet people, and what you have not done. Perhaps you avoid meeting people because you feel anxious.

What creates that anxiety? You may think people will not like you.

Now the pattern is visible. You think people will not like you, feel anxious, avoid meeting them, and have few friends. You have created evidence for your original thought.

Once you understand the pattern, you can decide whether you want to keep it.

Make sure you like your reason

A client told me she ordered what everyone else ordered at restaurants because she felt more comfortable and did not want people to judge her.

The question was not whether she was allowed to order the same food. The question was whether she liked her reason.

Your reason is in the thought line. Look there when you want to understand an action. Notice the feeling between the reason and the behavior.

You can use that process with your job, your relationships, your spending, or any other part of your life.

Work from the cause

So often, we try to control other people or change our results so we can feel better. We have the process backward.

Thoughts create feelings. Feelings drive actions. Actions create results.

When you try to change behavior without working on your thinking, you work against yourself. Understanding the thought gives you access to the feeling that drives the behavior.

Take responsibility for what you find without using it to attack yourself. Seeing why you have a result is useful. You do not need to add judgment to it.

You can enter the Model through a thought, feeling, action, or result. Ask the questions that connect the lines, and write it down.

Your brain can become efficient at repeating thoughts that do not serve you. Supervising it means deciding what you want it to think on purpose. Being able to think about your own thinking is a gift. Use it.