What I’ve realised over the last couple of weeks

My partner and I had a great time away over the Christmas break – I didn’t think about work much at all and it was great to be free of any time constraints. We only just got back to work this week. This seemed to help one of my greatest lessons from last year sink in as well – that it’s ok to work on one thing at a time, to make things easier for myself and take my time. The sense of contentment in myself and how I work has continued to grow over the holiday period because I have come to trust my self-improvement process (how I engage in deliberate practice) and the support of those closest to me.

This isn’t to say that I no longer have my brain trying to convince me to work on more; to work harder and faster – but now I find it easier to respond by telling myself that while it’s ok to have the “work harder” impulse, I don’t have to buy into that impulse.

I have continued to work on the three steps that were decided upon in my last deliberate practice coaching session:

1. taking a long pause
2. take deep breathe
3. Use a ‘you feel x’ statement to reflect a client’s emotion

The good news is that I have been successfully using the ‘you feel x’ statement in most of my client sessions over the last couple of weeks that I worked. Though as I write this now I am noticing that in those same client sessions I have skipped the long pause and breathe about 95% of time time and gone straight to the ‘you feel x’ statement. I think this because skipping past the pause and breathe feels easy and safe (with some worry about how I look when doing this). While I respect myself for taking it one step at a time, I don’t want to get bogged down in my safe zone by only applying the step that I’m most comfortable with.

How do I keep on the learning zone tightrope without tipping to my comfort or panic zones – what do I do here?

Listening to avoidance

If I put a stethoscope to the beating heart of my avoidance, what I also hear is that I’m skipping ahead to the ‘you feel x’ statement because I don’t want to apply a blanket rule of using the long pause and breathe when responding to every kind of challenging emotion that a client experiences – that would feel like overkill and would probably look silly if I do it more than once in a session. So perhaps I can create a specific rule to when I include the long pause and deep breathe – that I do this whenever a client or myself is struggling with or avoiding a challenging emotion, like a form of psychological inflexibility. This is because I’m not convinced the long pause and deep breathe will help a client that is open to their challenging emotions.

I know what I need to do now. In order to keep growing here I need to find examples in my session audio recordings where a client or myself are holding back or struggling with a challenging emotion, then I need to use solitary deliberate practice to re-respond to the client recording using the long pause and deep breathe.

My lesson here is that frequent self-reflection is crucial to walk the tightrope between my comfort zone and panic zone – asking myself why I have made certain decisions and what could I be doing differently to help what I’m doing work better?

Go to previous or next post