“I’m Not a Coach”
The Inner Critic Strikes Again
My coaching business is expanding. I’m coaching significantly more and my belief in what I do has never been stronger. I am becoming the coach I’ve long envisioned, fueled by reinvigorated purpose - an unrelenting call to serve people in this very specific way. It would only make sense then, I guess, that I simultaneously find myself thrust into coaching my four-year-old son’s T-ball team. Looking back at what I thought to be a hyper-focused attention on “coaching more,” I now realize I could have been more specific.
Reluctantly, I’ve embraced the opportunity to coach in a completely different but also surprisingly similar context. In that embrace and without any direct experience or direction from anyone running the league, I recently found myself fumbling through coaching a drill. And in that moment, my inner critic found an opportunity to come at me and come at me hard, quickly leading me to turn to a nearby parent and say:
“I’m not a coach.”
The amount of self-reflective work you’ve done will largely dictate your response to your inner critic. Some respond in blind faith of the critic’s voice and opinion, and in severe cases end up rejecting their true selves and their highest of ambitions. Others have so deeply explored the critic’s motives that they’re able to quickly reject it or reframe it and move on. I’m deeply grateful to often experience the latter, as I did directly after I uttered those four words to a fellow dad who replied by saying, “Well, you’re doing a great job.” Even more remarkable is that my response to myself came before I even finished saying the words, accompanied by an immediate internal and non-verbal counterattack:
“What are you talking about? What an absurd thing to say!”
I immediately recognized the absurdity of claiming to be anything other than a coach in an unprecedented time where all signs point to coaching. In riding a wave of recent productivity and success, my inner critic stood out like a sore thumb.
You’ve realized your inner critic isn’t an occasional nuisance that can be ignored, but a completely unchallenged authority covertly dictating your (in)actions. You’ve designated your inner critic as an arbiter of truth, unwittingly restricting yourself and keeping you from the life you want. You’re over it, and you’re ready to take back the controls. You’re ready to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation of your inner critic and discover how it can work for you and not against you. And you know you could use a hand.
Let’s talk about it.
Art Dickinson, CPC
www.artdickinsoncoaching.com