Self-Coaching: How to Be Your Own Coach
Introduction
There's a much-repeated saying in personal development: "we overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in five or ten". It has to do with our short-term outlook and our search for quick results. Self-coaching proposes the opposite: becoming your own guide in order to transform your life, little by little. This article explains what it is and offers practical keys for starting today.
What self-coaching is
Coaching is a process of accompaniment in which, through questions and tools, a person reduces the distance between where they are and where they want to be, raising their awareness, their responsibility and their confidence. It rests on three pillars: becoming aware (what do I want and why), commitment and responsibility (I own my decisions) and action (moving to the facts).
Self-coaching is carrying out that process on your own, without a coach accompanying you: you apply the tools yourself. In fact, that's the ultimate goal of any coaching process: for the person to stop depending on their coach and become autonomous. In an era of uncertainty and constant change, learning to guide yourself is a very valuable skill.
Practical keys for improving your life
1. Ask yourself whether you really know yourself
"Know thyself", read the temple at Delphi. We aren't only a body: we're a collection of memories, values, desires and experiences. We usually answer "who am I?" with our profession or with what others say about us, heavily influenced by the need for approval. Knowing yourself lets you know what you want, what you need and what you value, and it's the basis of healthy self-esteem. A classic coaching tool for starting out is the wheel of life, which helps you see your starting point in each area (health, work, relationships, leisure…) and what you want to improve.
2. Balance your emotions with an emotion journal
Emotions are the body's response to stimuli; they move us, inform us and help us decide. They aren't good or bad: they give us a message to help us adapt. Denying the ones we consider "negative" doesn't improve the situation, quite the contrary. Allow yourself to feel them without judging yourself, observe them and breathe. An emotion journal — putting what you feel in writing — is one of the most effective tools for understanding and regulating them.
3. Learn to live with criticism
The need for approval arises from an ancestral fear of rejection, when being left out of the tribe endangered your life. Today we're far more self-sufficient, but we still experience criticism as a threat. A first step is to disidentify from it: often criticism says more about whoever gives it than about you. And observe which emotion it stirs: if something hurts excessively, it usually points to a belief of your own worth reviewing. A useful technique is to question those thoughts with questions like "is this really true? what evidence do I have?".
4. Start making decisions, however small
Our lives are made up of decisions, and even not deciding is a decision. We're often blocked by the fear of getting it wrong, but failure, as such, doesn't exist: only the meaning we give it exists, and getting things wrong is how we discover how to improve. When you decide, you take the best option possible with the information you have at that moment. And after important decisions an inner peace usually arrives that confirms you're on the right track.
5. Improve your relationships by starting with yourself
"If you change, everything changes." By improving your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your surroundings improves: you stop demanding that others meet your needs and start meeting them yourself. To do that, put your needs in order (pose dilemmas to yourself: what do you prioritize, security or love?) and honor your values by asking yourself each day what you can do to make them present. If freedom is a key value but your job doesn't give you it, perhaps you can connect with it through your hobbies or your travels while you prepare a bigger change.
6. Treat yourself well to strengthen your self-esteem and confidence
Confidence is the belief that you can face almost any challenge, and it goes hand in hand with self-esteem. With both, you believe in your abilities, manage problems better and face your fears by acting in spite of them. Becoming your own coach gives you the tools to cultivate them: recognizing your achievements, treating yourself with the kindness you'd offer a friend and accepting yourself without judgment.
7. Move toward self-realization
Once basic needs are covered, the need to realize yourself appears: knowing your talents and developing them to find your purpose, that thing you're passionate about and good at. It isn't only talk: a 2015 study on hobbies found that people who cultivated their passions felt significantly less stressed and less sad, both during the activity and afterward. Finding time for what genuinely matters to you improves well-being.
8. Choose your attitude
The same situation is experienced very differently depending on your attitude. Coaching describes three profiles: the victim, who complains and blames others without acting; the ostrich, who makes promises and appears optimistic but hides when it counts; and the warrior, who advances despite problems, sees opportunity in them and, if they fail, gets up and looks for new solutions. Which do you recognize yourself in?
9. Don't wait to feel motivated
We make excuses ("when I'm motivated, I'll start"), but motivation usually appears once you're already in action. Elite athletes don't always feel like training at dawn; what gets them up is being clear about their why. Sometimes initial motivation fades quickly because it was only a passing emotion; that's why the key lies in creating routines and starting even without the urge: if you know why you're doing it, motivation will surprise you already at work.
10. Become the leader of your own life
Being your own leader means creating and directing your life, taking responsibility for it and seeing opportunities where others see obstacles, without blaming your circumstances. We tend to believe leadership is innate — someone confident, unafraid of what people will say, who achieves what they set out to — but all those qualities can be trained through personal development. And a good leader practices gratitude every day for what they have and for the person they're becoming.
Conclusion
Self-coaching starts from a simple and powerful idea: everything begins with knowing yourself. From there, managing your emotions, deciding without fear of error, honoring your values, taking care of your self-esteem and acting without waiting to feel motivated make you the guide of your own life. It isn't an easy or immediate path, but it's within reach of anyone who sets their mind to it.
References
- Whitmore, J. (2009). Coaching for Performance. Nicholas Brealey.
- Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Zelenski, J. M., et al. (2015). Would you be happier if you spent more time in nature and doing hobbies? (research on hobbies, stress and well-being).