WORKING WITH A BOOK AS YOUR COACH

If you are reading this because you have purchased our book Your Life Your Way: The Essential Guide for Women and want to know how best to work with it – we suggest you imagine that the book is your coach and design how you want to work with it and how you are going to show up when you are ‘with’ the book. This means that you have to energetically be both client and coach to yourself.  The ‘script’ is provided in the book itself, including all the words to encourage, guide and challenge you.  However it is difficult for the book to hold the ‘energy’ that a live coach would hold for you.  So it is up to you to read the words with the energy of a coach and receive them with the willingness of a client.

Most of what we have said in “The Art of Being a Good Client”, posted here on October 29, 2008, applies even when your coach is to be found within the pages of a book.  You certainly can’t get more out of it than you are prepared to put in.  If you approach the exercises in a half-hearted way, you’ll get half-hearted results.  Doing this only keeps diluting the impact.

So the best place to start is by asking yourself if you are truly up for having change in your life.  It is OK if you feel butterflies in your stomach, or dryness in the mouth as you contemplate change.  That’s a perfectly normal reaction and it means that the change you are thinking about has substance and will make a big difference to your life.  Even if you are not sure what that change might be, knowing that something needs to happen is a great place to start.

Once you have established that you are ready to play an active part in the unfolding of this book’s story, then you must be absolutely ready to be present with the book, what it says and what it presents for you to do and/or think about.  It is critical that you do deep introspection to weed out beliefs and patterns that are not in alignment with the change you desire.  As you do this and complete the exercises, you will discover the  behaviors and attitudes necessary to achieve your desired change.  You will get so much more out of the book when you engage yourself thoroughly with it.

In the introduction to the book titled ‘Getting Started’, we give you various ways of working with it – we’ve listed them below.  This is the design part of the relationship with the book—you are the one who knows how you learn best. 

·        You may choose to read the book straight through and then return to the beginning to complete the reflections and exercises.

·        For those who are somewhat new to personal growth, it is best to read and answer the questions and setting aside time to do the exercises as they appear in the book.

·        If you have done a good amount of personal growth work already, you may want to go directly to the exercises to work on the change you want to make.

But this is only the start.  What happens when you get an exercise you “don’t like” – i.e., there’s something about it that makes you feel uncomfortable and it would therefore be easy for you to put the book down?  Or what about when you are asked to take time to reflect and you short-shrift yourself?  What about the ‘homework’ – when the exercise suggests that you practice something during the next week or so? How do you make yourself accountable to the book?

What are you going to do when life gets in the way and you forget all you have learned or started to learn in the book?  Who or what are you going to have in place to help you get back on schedule?   What is going to encourage you to look for the part in the book that will help you?  There will certainly be something there to help you.

It truly is up to you to decide how you work at this.  We do ask you though to remember that

YOU ONLY GET OUT AS MUCH AS YOU PUT IN

And remember you owe it to yourself to come to each session as big as you know you can be.