Learn to Live Better

On the treadmill of life, we could all use a little training, writes Andrea Nagel.

It’s a new year and we’re buoyed along after the holiday excesses, indulgences and general dodgy behaviour by our week- old resolutions. Still in their infancy, they are unblemished and pure, bright with the promise of improving our lives.

We make New Year resolutions to do just that: improve ourselves. Some people want to be less selfish, others want to toughen up, some want to go in a totally new direction and some simply don’t know what they want.

Regardless of our motives, it gets more and more difficult, as the year progresses, to stick to our good intentions. It’s like starting a gym membership.

You begin by going at least four times a week. By the second month you’re down to three times, and six months later you’re buying designer tog bags that will never see the inside of the gym. The answer for some is to get a personal trainer; someone that you pay to make you train, and who helps you to establish your goals and keeps you working towards them.

Sure, if you have the discipline you can train yourself, but it’s so much easier if you have someone pushing you along.

Getting a life coach is like getting a personal trainer for your head.

Initially I was highly suspicious. Would I become one of those pathetic wingers on Dr Phil, openly weeping on live TV ? Would Oprah exploit my fears and weaknesses to push up her ratings? Could I face my friends and family in the knowledge that I had succumbed to the greatest indulgence of them all: paying someone to whine at them?

The self-help isle of any bookshop will attest, improving your life is a big concern for a lot of people. Self-help is also big business. Books with titles like, How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything and the classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, are bulging with promises of better relationships, better work opportunities, greater abundance and, in its most concentrated form, happiness.

But aren’t these qualities that we should discover in our lives on our own through trial and error or, alternatively, by watching Grey’s Anatomy?

Cynicism fully intact I ventured into the couch filled, tissue-laden world of therapy and took myself off to see Judy Klipin, a life coach. The first thing that struck me was Klipin’s enthusiasm for what she does.

After 12 years in crime prevention and policing, Klipin says that she has finally found her feet. “Writing my thoughts in a diary every day helped me realise that I wanted to change direction. I read Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming The Life You Were meant To Live by Martha Beck and felt inspired and amazed by this woman who is a very successful life coach. I went to Phoenix, Arizona, to do a course with her.”

Beck uses questions like: “Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?” and “Do you laugh more in some situations than in others?” to discover what she calls “the essential self”, the curious, playful, spontaneous, exploratory, fascinated beings we are as children.

Her theory is that we repress these elements of ourselves and, over the years, lose access to them, becoming reliant only on the social self — the part of us that drives us through life and makes us what we believe is socially acceptable.

Beck suggests that many people live in a state of internal conflict between their essential and social selves.

Klipin related to what Beck was saying, and so, I discovered, did I.

In our first session Klipin explained why she relates to Beck’s philosophies: “We know our destiny and what we want in life, but we neglect our essential selves in favour of concentrating on our social selves and on delivering what we think the world expects of us.”

She has learnt tools that she believes will help clients access their essential selves. Her coaching is holistic and relies on intuition. It’s not strictly goal oriented, it’s subtler than that.

“First we need to discover what your real goals are,” she says asking me to write down a few sentences describing my home.

This exercise, she elaborates, is a metaphor for our inner world. After that she asks me to describe my day up until that moment. This enables her to get a handle on what kind of person I am because, she says, unconsciously, we arrange our lives to make our issues apparent.

What she is able to deduce from my answers is that I, just like many other people, have “limiting beliefs” that have developed without my awareness and hold me back from achieving everything I’m capable of.

A central element of coaching for Klipin is to discover what these limiting beliefs are in her clients so that she can help them to overcome these factors. After only a few probing questions, she had uncovered a number of mine.

I was intrigued. I asked her what the difference is between going to a life coach and seeing a psychologist. “People usually go to a therapist when they have a specific problem. With life coaching the goal is to improve your life, whereas with therapy the goal is usually about healing an emotional wound.”

Since most people’s lives could use some improvement, life coaching is suitable for just about anybody.

I’ve had three sessions with Klipin, and she’s got my thoughts racing on a proverbial treadmill. Sometimes getting to know yourself can be really hard work, we are all so used to the roles we play in life.

Part of the coaching relies on “body work”. “Listen to your body”, says Judy. “It will let you know when you are deluding yourself.”

We do various exercises from thinking back to an upsetting situation to repeating negative and positive mantras to see how they affect the body. It seems your body knows when you’re being full of it.

Klipin is nothing at all like Dr Phil, to my great relief. For one thing she’s not on TV, and that’s a big plus in my book. For another she’s not condescending .

Beck says of Judy: “Judy Klipin is hands- down, one of the most gifted coaches I’ve ever trained. She’s world-class smart, funny, sensitive, determined, and intuitive. I’d recommend Judy to anyone who’s feeling stuck …”

It’s the new year of a post post-modern age and most of us no longer turn to a rabbi or priest for direction. We are living in a time when we’re encouraged to find the answers ourselves. We question, face our greatest fears and give up everything to start again in a new direction without judgment or eternal damnation.

It’s pretty clear that we could all use a little coaching.

Judy Klipin is a Master Coach, facilitator and trainer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

This article was originally featured in The Times Newspaper.

Tags: be happy | be yourself | Change | personal development