I have added year-round group coaching in the Thinking Lab, specifically coaching to help you manage your mind. Your results depend upon your thoughts. Managing your thoughts is how you manage your emotions and your actions. It is managing your mind.
The benefits of managing your mind
Managing your mind is what you need to do in order to:
- Make decisions you are certain are in your best interest
- Solve your problems wholesale rather than retail
- Get the results you are longing for as soon as is practicable
As a result, coaching on managing your mind can help you meet any challenge. This includes everything from concrete, short-term, worldly challenges like keeping up to date on email as well as abstract, long-term, emotional challenges like raising your baseline happiness. Yours could be a challenge at work or home, with your relationships or your motivation, concerning your health or your financial situation.
How and why it works
I can help you on such a variety of topics because the essential process of managing your mind is the same regardless of the details. You are the expert on the details; I am the expert at the process. I understand how to manage a mind at a fundamental level, so I can guide you in the process to draw out the details only you know and to reach your own conclusions. My coaching takes one of three forms:
- Teaching psychological principles so that you understand the causal process that creates the challenge for you — making it possible for you to devise a different path toward your goal.
- Helping you get objectivity about the situation, either about what is in your control or what isn’t. The most frustrating moments in life occur when we are either inadvertently fighting reality or inadvertently selling ourselves short. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”
- Providing scaffolding as you work through the steps of thinking through your challenge, either by asking questions or walking you through a tactic.
As you see, the goal of my coaching you is not just that you find a way forward right now. The goal is that you grow your mental skills and thereby your ability to meet this and any challenge.
Volunteering to be coached
If you want to get this help from me, all you need is a goal, meaning a desired result in the world you are willing to put in some effort to achieve, and a vague or clear understanding of the challenge(s) involved.
I can help you with it if you are willing to discuss those challenges in front of the group.
That can feel vulnerable. In fact, I once got coached in a group on whether I would share a sensitive issue with everyone. As a result of the coaching, I chose not to share the issue. In the course of the coaching, I learned a tremendous amount about how to make rationally selfish decisions about sensitive issues. And so did everyone else.
Learning to process emotions is an essential part of managing your mind. I think that group coaching accelerates your growth in part because it requires you to step up emotionally.
That said, a large part of my job as a coach is to provide emotional support so that it is not so overwhelming and you can think on your feet in our conversation. I do that by making sure I am emotionally grounded so that I am a source of empathy and emotional grounding for you. I listen actively and check my understanding of what you say rather than jump to conclusions. And if I don’t, I welcome your pushback!
In addition, I normalize the challenges. They are normal even if they are unique to you. We are not taught how to manage our minds, nor is it something you can just learn from a book. It takes experience and practice. Coaching is the fastest way to get experience and to ensure you understand the process so you can practice it without creating bad habits such as suppressing your emotions or second-guessing your conclusions.
What I ask of listeners
And perhaps most importantly, I advise the listeners (both those attending the call live and those listening to the recording) to support you properly. This is the preamble to group coaching I make every time:
We’re about to start the group coaching session, and I want to remind everyone of the huge benefit the volunteers provide to the program. It takes some courage to discuss a personal challenge in front of a group, but it is hugely beneficial to everyone. Thanks to our volunteers, everyone in the Thinking Lab gets to hear how the principles apply to a wide variety of real situations. Canned examples are not helpful. Real examples are complex and idiosyncratic and extremely helpful. I can share mine, but the volunteers let you see a much wider range of examples.
Moreover, their coaching offers a chance for you to have profound learning with zero personal risk. If you listen with the intention of getting help with a current challenge you have, you will get deep insights.
Regardless, I ask you to remember that the volunteers deserve your appreciation and respect. That includes respecting the boundaries of coaching. First of all, keep all coaching confidential. Second, remember that they are asking for my help, not yours. They may not even know you. So please do not offer them unsolicited advice or commentary on their issue. That is a breach of Thinking Lab policies. Rather, please give them your full moral support as you listen. They are brave and ambitious to come get coaching, and that’s the context to hold. They will sense your moral support and that will bolster their courage.
The power of group coaching
There is more I could say about this. There is the story of the time I went to a group coaching session and didn’t get called — but got benefit from every discussion with the people who did get called. After it was finished, I wrote up my conclusions about how to proceed based on all I’d heard. There is the story of my literally shaking for 30 minutes after speaking up in a class — and that was an emotional breakthrough I continue to benefit from today. There is the story of Brooke Castillo telling me “that’s just a thought” in front of 400 people — in person — causing a major shift in my attitude toward investing in my own training.
And then there are all of the stories of how Launchers have benefitted tremendously from group coaching over the 17 Launches I’ve run since January 2021.
I’ve added year-round group coaching to the Thinking Lab because I believe it is crucial to every Thinking Lab member getting the most out of the program — whether they volunteer to be coached or not.
