Ep #56: When Awareness Sucks

You are listening to episode 56 of The Confident Coaches Podcast, the one where we finally admit that awareness can suck. Alright, let’s go.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hey my confident coaches. How’s everybody doing out there? Friends, it’s December. December. We made it. Oh my gosh, welcome to the last year of this decade that is 2020. Has this been the longest 11 months of our life or what? Yes it has. But we’ve made it.

It’s December of 2020. It’s the holidays. It’s festive and festival and holiday and Christmas lights and warm fuzzies and holiday movies and time to think about what we are appreciate for and what we are thankful for. And I just wanted to let you guys know that I am so appreciative and thankful for all of you.

Oh my goodness, first of all, we’ve been doing this for over a year. Hello. A year together, you and us and me. I’m so excited. I thank you for everybody who comes in every single week and listens to the podcast and downloads and asks for the freebie at the end of the podcast and you sign up and you’re commenting on the posts every week.

That’s a gift. And it’s December of 2020 and I want to celebrate and highlight the gifts, the good stuff. So there’s just a little bit of me sending out some love to you. And I also want to send out a little bit of love to one of my clients, Rebecca.

So this is a shout-out to my September Confident Coaches Mastermind member. That’s a mouthful, right? Rebecca. Because Rebecca had a goal to hit six clients by December and she reached that goal the week before Thanksgiving.

Yes, here’s the crazy thing, here’s the part I really need you guys to understand and know and learn because you want to know what I want to coach her on? How uncomfortable hitting her goal was. Coaches, this is why I am the confidence coach for coaches.

This right here is why I run confident coaching masterminds, why I created The Confident Coaches Podcast, and the member site and the program. Because y’all be thinking that getting the results will make you feel the confidence that you want to feel. No. That’s not how it happens. That is totally not how this works.

Your confidence is independent of your results. There is never success that you can achieve to feel self-confident. Your brain will always set the bar higher. You signed six clients, well, now go sign 12. Oh, you signed 12 clients, but you’re not fully booked yet. Oh, you’re fully booked now, guess what, now you get to move to groups and you’ve never done that before.

Your brain will always be raising the bar for you. Meanwhile, you’re going to be thinking that you should be feeling confident because you’ve achieved these results and that’s not how it works. Here’s the thing; confidence is not a luxury in this entrepreneurial game. It is a necessity. And too many of you are thinking that it will eventually arrive, it will eventually show up, it will come later.

But that’s why I teach you how to create it now. And for Rebecca, she hit her goal two weeks early, may I add, but she still didn’t feel confident because for her, successful people who hit their goals are more organized, they calendar their time, they have it together more than she does. She felt frantic. She didn’t feel worthy of the success that she had achieved.

So we coached on why she was choosing to define success in the way that she was. Because she doesn’t have to. She can define success however it serves her and so can you. And when we define it the way that serves us, when we see how we think, then we get to feel more confident now and we don’t need the results in order to feel confident.

It is such good work. I love every second of it. Because here’s the bottom line. Confidence is just not optional. In fact, I want to offer you that it is your secret weapon. For those coaches who come by it naturally, fabulous. My cheers to you. But most of us, that’s not most of us. It certainly wasn’t me and that’s why I created Confident Coaches. That’s why you’re here listening to this podcast every single week.

There’s no way that I’m sitting here right now scaling my multiple six-figure business to multimillions in the next three years without having done this work myself. No way. No way. I’d have drowned from the self-doubt and the fear and the worry of not hitting goals month in and month out, of worrying what other people were going to think of me, of me defining success in a way, not unlike Rebecca.

I had a lot of the same thoughts at first too, that I was never going to be successful until I could get my shit straight on my calendar. I totally was defining success a certain way and I was struggling with my confidence too. And there’s no that I’m in this group of coaches that are doing these big bold amazing things if I hadn’t done this work first.

Listen, the next round of Confident Coaches Mastermind starts enrolling next week and you’re going to want to apply. You are going to want to do this work too because the confidence is not waiting for you out there. You can create it in here and I’m going to teach you how.

So make sure that you get emails from me. There’s a brand-new freebie by the way at the end of this episode. So make sure if you aren’t already getting emails from me, that you sign up for that freebie and then you’ll get an email, you’ll be one of the first people to know when applications open.

Let’s do this work together. Okay, so this podcast episode, I originally called it the enlightenment trap, and then I really realized that enlightenment doesn’t always jive with people, and then it just became – it’s kind of like when awareness sucks. Also known as the coach’s conundrum, or the enlightenment trap, or shame inception.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s like the awareness that we bring to our life that we then allow ourselves to beat ourselves up or we punch ourselves in the face. And in fact, here’s what I want to offer you. It shows up in two ways. When we use our awareness to beat ourselves up and when we use our awareness to separate ourselves from others.

Both of them suck and we are calling it out on this podcast today because both of these things are confidence killers in two entirely different ways, so let’s talk about it. This is what we do on this show, right? Let’s talk about the shit that we stuff into quiet corners.

I’m shining lights on the crap and I’m bringing it out and we’re talking about it because every single one of these topics are these little tiny microscopic confidence killers that are just little needles in your arm, just poking you, poking you, poking you, poking you, and you keep ignoring it, hoping it’s going to go away and it’s not.

That’s why I’m here for you. That’s why you need me in your life. So when awareness sucks because we beat ourselves up with it. Let’s talk about this one first. Essentially, this is the idea that we as coaches realize that our thoughts and our feelings come from us, that there’s the circumstances, the facts of our life, and then there’s what we think about them.

And that what we think about these things is what’s creating our reality. This idea that we understand that nothing out there can affect what’s in here unless we allow it, and we let it do that. We know that we create our own suffering by indulging in these thoughts that create more pain than the circumstance itself, we should know better, we shouldn’t allow it.

I mean, come on. We coach our clients on these things. We shouldn’t still be struggling with it too. We shouldn’t still be hating people. Shout-out to last week’s podcast episode. If you didn’t listen to that one, that’s a necessity for this holiday time. That’s a necessity for 2020.

We know our thoughts create our feelings so how can we let these sneaky thoughts by? How can we still be believing them? We shouldn’t be looking to the how when we know it’s our belief, why are we still doing that? Why are we still having manuals for our partners? Why are we still struggling with unconditional love? Why are we having so much trouble setting boundaries with our time?

All of this, we should be doing this and we shouldn’t still be doing that, again, this is a total should-ing all over ourselves. I want you to think about some of these thoughts that are very common. I should know better. I coach my clients on this. I shouldn’t have this problem too. When am I going to learn?

Do any of these sound familiar? Have you heard yourself talk about yourself this way? Do you have any more that you want to add? Are there any others that you indulge in? Here’s the number one thing; when you are thinking that way, coach who should know better, how does that feel? How does it feel to think you should know better? How does it feel to think that you shouldn’t still have this problem too? How does it feel to think I’ve already coached on this; this shouldn’t still be a problem?

How does it feel to think I’m never going to learn; I’m never going to get better, I’m never going to figure this out? It feels like shit, right? Shame, disappointment, judgment, embarrassment. There’s a whole quad of crap right there and it all feels terrible.

And you are beating yourself up with your own awareness when you are indulging in that line of thinking and you’re feeling that way. You know that you have these tools that help other people, so when you then turn around and use those tools against yourself, it’s like punching yourself in the face.

I really want you to visualize yourself when you’re indulging in this line of thinking of I should know better and I should have figured this out by now and I can’t believe I need coaching on this again, that you’re sitting there with two fists pointed at each side of your face and you’re just beating yourself up and you don’t have to.

Because what’s happening in your brain is this idea of like, I’m letting my Helga brain have her say and I’m believing her. But intellectually, I know that I’m not supposed to do that. So I’m going to spend time feeling bad because I shouldn’t be believing Helga, and then I’m going to beat myself up for beating myself up.

It’s a total shame inception kind of thing right there. It’s just this spiral. So I want to point out two things. First off, if you find yourself in this shame inception, in this enlightenment trap, you want to take a big guess what you’re not doing? You’re not coaching on the original problem. What a sneaky little bitch that Helga is, right?

As long as you’re spiraling in this inception trap, you’re not learning how not to believe Helga in the first place. You’re indulging in – you’re not addressing the thought that you’re believing in the first place. It’s such the ultimate Helga win, right?

You’re busy punching yourself in the face and guess what you’re not doing? You’re not putting yourself out there. You’re not trying new things. You’re not testing and evaluating. You’re not practicing feeling all the feels. You’re not going into your own mind to find your own answers. You’re not sitting in belief because you’re believing it’s not working anyway. Am I right?

Goodness, that Helga, she’s so good. She’s wrapped you up in a shame blanket, allowing yourself to beat yourself up with the awareness that you have and that the fact that you should know better and all of that should and I shouldn’t, in the meantime, you’re stuck. You’re not moving forward. She has done her job. Dang it.

She has done kept you in the cave. She’s done her job. She has kept you safe and you can just keep spiraling down and never address what she’s saying in the first place because you can keep beating yourself up and she’s just over there smoking a cigarette, having a cocktail, having a grand old time watching you freak out over there in the corner.

And you’re also not answering another big question. Why shouldn’t you still be believing your Helga brain sometimes? Because ultimately that’s what’s happening, right? Are you believing that because you’re a coach, because you have awareness, because you have coaching tools, that you’re not also still human?

Coaches, no level of coaching will ever erase your humanness. Helga’s voice was designed to be the loudest, to cast the most doubt, to prepare you for fight or flight or freeze. She’s doing her job. And a coaching certification doesn’t negate her existence.

Of course she’s still in there. Don’t let your awareness of the havoc that she can create punch you in the face when you let her run a little wild unintentionally. Because we all do it. Show me a human that doesn’t sometimes believe that crap voice from the back of her brain and I’ll show you a unicorn. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a real thing.

Because we are all human and no level of coaching will ever erase your humanness. And I want to ask you this; do you even want it to? Think about this. Would you rather work with a coach who has mastered her Helga brain because she’s fully aware and she never ever ever believes her Helga brain, in fact, her Helga brain is dead, it doesn’t even exist anymore, Helga never opens her mouth ever because she knows better, and this coach spends the rest of her life not relating at all to what her clients are going through?

Or alternately, would you rather work with a coach who has awareness but is also fully human, who has a Helga brain who likes to wake up early in the morning and get all caffeinated up and is loud and raring to go the moment you open your eyes, who has to use her own coaching tools to hear Helga and not believe her, who gets coaching herself on the crappy thoughts that she sometimes still indulges in, who then turns around and coaches her clients from a place of so much love and so much understanding and so much awareness because she is doing this work herself?

Your humanness makes you an excellent coach because you are applying your own coaching tools, you are getting your own coaching. It’s making you so much more understanding of the clients you are coaching day in and day out.

I want to work with a coach who knows what it’s like in my brain, who’s done the work, who is doing the work, because I know she gets me. I know she understands me. And she just doesn’t let her crazy Helga stop her anymore and she can help me do the same. That’s the kind of coach I want to work with and friends, coaches, that’s the kind of coach your clients want to work with.

They don’t want to work with a perfect human being who never gets stuck, who never stops, who has so much awareness and it’s always magical rainbow and daisies and unicorns flying in the air farting rainbows. No client wants to work with that coach because they can’t relate to that person.

I never not want to have Helga living in my brain because I am most helpful to my clients when I share how I lose sight of my awareness but only for a moment, and how I worked myself out of that moment. That is the best coaching that I can do, by sharing my experiences with my clients and show them how I got out of that.

There’s no perfection over here. Just humanness. And that’s what makes me a brilliant confidence coach because I done walked these walks, I have done this work myself. I understand. I just don’t let it stop me anymore and I can teach you how to do the same thing.

Okay, so now where I see the other time that awareness can really suck is when we have an awareness and those around us don’t. And then we make that mean something. We get that our thoughts create our results and that it is not the how that matters but our belief and that other people don’t cause our feelings, and that we are aware of our manuals for others.

And there are all of these other people around us, these silly little humans, and they don’t seem to have a clue. Like, I am enlightened with all of this awareness and they are not. Ugh, yeah, can you feel it? It’s a little hoity-toity. It’s a little elitist, it’s a little superior, and it’s all straight up icky.

So I will be the first one to admit right here that I was once guilty of this and here’s why it sucked. It alienated me from my people, from my family, from my friends, from other coaches, and from prospective clients. This thought that I just can’t relate to these people anymore, they just don’t understand me.

You wouldn’t understand, I have all this awareness and you just don’t get me anymore. Or they don’t even want to understand. If only they knew, their life would be so much better if they knew what I knew. I can even feel it right now, how crappy that feels. Just even recounting that memory of being in that place.

It’s such a bullshit manual that we’re carrying around, that for us to relate to someone, they need to know that their thoughts create their results too. It’s bullshit. It’s crap. And it’s hilarious because what did I just share in the first half of this podcast? How often that we forget and we supposedly know better, right?

And yet we’re going to judge them, they don’t even realize it. They’ve never even learned this and we’re going to judge them for not learning this, and then we’re also going to punch ourselves in the face for the fact that we have learned it and we still struggle sometimes too. It’s the coach’s conundrum. It is the enlightenment trap. Beware, it’s a trap.

Coaches, listen, I firmly believe that every single soul on this earth is here for a purpose. And guess what? Not everyone’s purpose is to become more aware and enlightened. That is not mine to judge. I have no say so on why another human being is here on this planet in this time and space right now.

And none of that makes them any less worthy of love or grace or compassion. Whatever they’re here for is what they’re here for and it ain’t none of my business, right? Listen, our awareness should create more love for humanity. Not less. And if we’re judging, we are not loving.

And if you’re judging others for their lack of awareness, that only creates shitty feelings for you. They’re fine. They’re not aware, remember? They’re totally okay. You’re the one feeling that superiority. You’re the one feeling that judgment. You’re the one feeling that lack of love. Not them.

And this isn’t just going to show up with the people in your life. This isn’t just going to show up with your mom and your sister and your spouse and your brother or whatever. Trust me, it’s going to really entangle those relationships absolutely.

I’ve seen friendships end over this kind of stuff. But it’s also going to show up in your business because it’s going to show up in how you market to your people. It’s going to show up in your Facebook Lives. It’s going to show up in your posts. It’s going to show up in your consult calls. It’s going to show up in your coaching calls.

And here is the ugly bitter truth pill that I did not want to swallow, thank you very much. When we feel superior and judgmental, it has nothing to do with them. That is a bullshit lie right there that your Helga brain is telling you because she wants you to avoid the really difficult work that’s there because it has everything to do with us.

What do we make it mean about us when others don’t have the thoughts create your life awareness, that there was a time when we didn’t have that awareness either, and that person, that past you was inferior to the person you are today? Ew, right? That there’s a version of you less deserving of love than who you are now.

And that likely means that you believe that there’s a future version of you who will have more awareness, that you believe is more deserving of love than the version that you are now. See, it’s just gross. And I know because I’ve been there, I’ve experienced this, and I have done this work.

I actually had my master mentor coach Brooke Castillo look me in the eye and call me an elitist. And if you want to see it, it’s out there, it’s in the world. It’s on video. If you are a certified life coach from The Life Coach School, find the 100K mentorship training and go to the video for the January meeting and watch it. There it is. It’s on tape, my friends.

You can see me; you can see my face. I felt so hot. I mean, I just have to take a moment. We’re sitting in this room, and there’s 12 people in this room, and there she is right there, I’m expressing all of these thoughts and feelings that I have about the women that are showing up on my consult calls and I’m expressing the frustration that I’m having that they’re totally not prepared for my program, they can’t possibly pay for it, and there she is telling me that I’m an elitist.

I felt mortified. I literally felt heat come up my cheeks while I’m sitting there. I have refused to watch that video because I lived it. No way I want to experience it again.

And ultimately, that elitist attitude, this like, these people aren’t okay for my program, these people aren’t okay for my time, these people aren’t okay, ultimately, we’re separating ourselves not just from them, but we’re also separating ourselves from us. From us in the past and from us in the future.

And that’s the opposite purpose of coaching. Coaching is supposed to be open and inclusive. So pay attention to when you are using coaching and when you are using awareness, when you are using enlightenment to close yourself off from others and from yourself.

Listen, awareness is a beautiful thing. It’s life-changing. My life has changed. It’s changed for the better, and of course I want everybody around me to have experienced it also, but that’s none of my business, right?

I don’t have to use it to beat myself up, and I don’t have to use it to separate myself from my pack and you don’t need to either. Use coaching, use awareness, use enlightenment, use it for love, not judgment. Use it for good, not evil.

Remind your Helga brain to simmer down. You got this. Everything’s completely okay. Alright confident coaches, I can’t wait to see what you create and remember, until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.

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Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.