This week you helped three clients see something they had missed for years. Then you sat down with your own notebook and wrote the sentence you wrote in January. You know the questions. You have asked them of yourself, out loud, in the car. I don't know how to help myself.
It is often easier to see someone else's situation than your own, and that alone may explain a good deal of this.
01
What you do with your own stuck place
You may treat it as a client you are failing.
You apply the tools. You set goals for yourself and review them. You take another training, partly for your clients and partly in case it holds the piece you are missing.
You don't mention it to other coaches. If you do, you present it as something you worked through.
In sessions you may be at your best. The gap between what you can do for them and what you can do for yourself gets wider, and you keep it to yourself.
People in your field say you have to do your own work. You have been doing it for years.
It can cost you ease in the work you are good at, if every session reminds you. And it can cost you help, because a coach who looks finished may not get asked how they are.
02
What the stuck place may be standing for
"If I'm not producing, I don't know who I am."
Your own change may have become a result you were supposed to deliver by now. Under Output, being stuck is a stretch with nothing produced, in the one area where you are the expert.
Read about Output →"Being wrong isn't a mistake. It feels like a verdict."
Being stuck may seem to say the method is wrong, or that you are wrong about how change works. Under Right, that question does not stay small.
Read about Right →Others are possible. Keeping it from colleagues can belong to Strong, where the fear is that if they see you struggle, you lose the only standing you have. And it may be no rule at all, only the ordinary difficulty of reading yourself.
03
What is under the rule
Under Output, the fear may be that without achievement you don't matter. What would answer it is worth that doesn't require performance.
Under Right, the fear may be that if you are wrong about this, what else are you wrong about. What would answer it is being able to remain yourself while someone thinks you are wrong.
A better technique answers neither one. You have plenty of techniques.
04
One question that separates them
Which is worse: finishing something flawed, or not finishing at all?
Flawed is the Right answer. Not finishing is the Output answer.
If it is neither, or the question does not seem to apply, there is not enough to tell. That is a result.
A lot of this is not a rule. It is often hard to read your own situation from inside it, for coaches as much as anyone, and many coaches work with a coach of their own. Effort alone is not the Output rule, and what tells you more is what happens when the producing stops. If what you are stuck on is heavy, licensed mental-health care is the right door.If tonight is an emergency, call or text 988 (US). This library is not that door.
This page is one step of subtraction: it offers two explanations and a question that can remove one.
05
One thing to try this week
Write down what you would say to a client who brought you exactly this.
Under it, write the reason it does not apply to you.
Read the second part the next day, as if a client had written it.
Why the inside view is so limited is on Why You Can't Read Yourself.