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I'm a pretty smart woman. I’m also an empath, clairsentient and Highly Sensitive Person. Believe me, I tried to deal with my sensitivities. But, after one miserable childhood, one tumultuous 18-year marriage, $75,000 worth of therapy, and more than $20,000 worth of books, tapes, classes and coaching I was still a victim of my sensitivities.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I did pick up a couple of things that helped me. But they were usually things that helped me regain my balance after I was overwhelmed or sick or distraught. Nothing really helped to prevent what was happening to me.
Once I discovered how to coach myself all that changed:
- Understanding my sensitivities as Guidance allowed me to easily change what I was doing so I was supported by my sensitivities to find the inner peace and acceptance I had always wanted.
- I switched from trying to figure out what was going on to allowing my sensitivities to guide me through my day. This saved me a lot of time and energy, which in turn, made my life easier.
- I discovered how to use my sensitivities to help myself and others in a career move I could have never imagined.
The bottom line is this: we grew up trying to be ‘normal’ because we thought there was something wrong with us.
Other people may have tried to be supportive, but they gave us the wrong information because they, too, thought there was something wrong with us. As a result, we learned some really self-destructive ways of thinking about ourselves, our bodies and our emotions.
So, what exactly are self-coaching skills?
Every time you pick up a self-help book, listen to an inspirational cd, join a class or talk to others about your problems, you’re attempting to learn how to coach your Self to improve your life.
Self-coaching is a form of energy awareness training. Self-coaching skills help you identify energy patterns of BEing that support you. These patterns move you beyond the information of your senses, incorporating your intuition and spirituality.
Self-coaching also helps you identify patterns of BEing that do not support you. For example, overwhelm is a pattern that does not support anyone. Any pattern that requires a lot of energy and leaves you exhausted is non-supportive.
The 3 Basic Skill-Sets of Self-Coaching
Self-coaching requires raising your awareness around your body, emotions and thoughts and how they depend upon each other.
1) Understand what your body is telling you in any given moment. This is the least understood skill-set among most Sensitives and one of the most important skills you’ll ever need.
For example, recent scientific studies have discovered that your body reacts to a situation 1-5 seconds before it occurs. This means your body knows what’s going on even before your brain has a chance to kick in. This explains why you often feel like you have no control in some situations. It’s as if your body has a mind of its own and it’s going to react the way it wants to, no matter what you would like.
So, as a Sensitive, you need to learn the skills to effectively communicate and partner with your body to change any patterns of reaction that do not support your goals.
2)  Discern the real guidance that your emotions are sending to you. The current take on emotions is that they fall into one of two categories: love-based or fear-based. In actuality, emotions are just energy (neither positive nor negative). They are hard-wired into your body (especially the amygdala area of your brain) as part of your ability to survive. They send you very real, clear messages. Their function is to interrupt you from what you’re doing to take some sort of action.
Emotions are meant to be short-term. They should last for seconds or minutes, just enough time to get your attention. However, as humans have evolved, these messages have become distorted and obscured so you may experience emotions for longer periods of time. Some messages become so distorted it’s not uncommon to experience emotions for hours, days, and yes, even years (just think about an injustice done to you as a child and notice that it feels just as unfair today as it did then).
Feeling emotions for more than a few minutes creates stress in your body and reduces your stamina to deal with energies. Emotions that last for more than a few moments affect every fiber of your BEing (i.e. psychological, physiological, perceptual, cognitive, etc.) and use a great deal of energy. So, as a Sensitive, you conserve energy when you find the real message that your emotions are trying to send you.
3) Give your self permission to experience new information, rather than just understanding it with your rational mind. We’ve all been taught that learning only takes place in your brain. Here’s a well-kept secret: learning takes place in your body first, then your emotions and finally, in your brain.
If you live in the U.S., you probably learned the “Alphabet Song” in kindergarten. I bet you can still sing it. That’s because you learned the alphabet
- in your body (with rhythm),
- in your emotions (singing automatically raises your emotional state)
- and, finally, your brain got it and held onto it forever.
Today, decades later, the alphabet song is automatic for you. You don’t have to think about, you just sing it. It’s easy and effortless. And, it doesn’t even matter if your brain consciously understands that the “Alphabet Song” is sung to the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Experiencing new information allows your new skill-sets to kick in automatically. This means you don’t have to think about what to do in an energetically chaotic situation. Your body-emotion-brain come together to support you in managing the energies swirling in and around you.
Reaching this level of automaticity empowers you as a Sensitive. You do not lose yourself in another’s energies. Instead, you stay in your own energy, authenticity and glory.
Why Sensitives Need Self-Coaching Skills
Self-coaching is more than problem-solving. It’s about following your body-emotion-thought energies to solutions you could have not imagined. It changes the focus from ‘how smart you are’ to ‘how you are smart.’
If you’re trying to problem-solve the distress your Sensitivities are causing you, you’re probably looking at the wrong things. The chart below compares some of the characteristics of problem-solving vs. self-coaching.
Characteristics of Problem-Solving around Sensitivities
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Characteristics of Self-Coaching around Sensitivities
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Asking ‘what’s wrong?’
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Asking ‘what’s working?’
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Pushing through fatique, pain, illness
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Following the energy of fatigue, pain, illness to the Guidance it's sending you
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Attempting different solutions to avoid becoming overwhelmed by emotions (yours or others)
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Partnering with your emotions to access the Guidance coming in
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Spending ever-increasing amounts of time alone to recharge your energies
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Using your body-emotion-thought connection to increase your stamina to be with others
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Defending against the emotional energies of others
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Staying in your own energies, even if it means disappointing others
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Judging your Sensitivities as a burden or hindrance
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Accepting your Sensitivities as Inner Guidance that leads to Inner Peace
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Analyzing what is going on with you or others
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Following the energies of your body-emotion-thought connection to co-create solutions that work for everyone
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Dissatisfied or unhappy when situations don’t turn out the way you expect them to
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Trusting that situations will change and improve even if you can’t yet see how that will happen or even what that will look like
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Expecting Guidance to show up in a big way (i.e burning bush; booming voice from heaven, etc.)
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Recognizing that Guidance is always coming to you, especially in subtle ways.
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Waiting for Inspiration to strike
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Activating your Inspiration when you want to
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Wanting proof that something will work before you exert any energy on it
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Knowing, at a cellular level, that trying something new is a learning process that can raise your awareness
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Once I stopped trying to solve the problem of my Sensitivities, my life changed dramatically. I had more energy. My health problems improved. My relationships improved. I was willing to step out into the world and say, “I am an empath.”
When I was problem-solving, I couldn’t figure out how to deal with my Sensitivities. Self-coaching taught me how to ‘follow the energy of my Sensitivities’ to solutions I would never have seen otherwise.
I had a vision of what my life should look like. Problem-solving never helped me move towards that vision. Instead, it kept me focused on what I didn’t yet have.
Do I have the life I envisioned then?
No.
It’s much, much better! I am at Peace with my Self and sharing the Gift that is Me with the World. Something I never thought I could do.
Learn to Coach Your Self today!
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