Hey, this is Mark Butler. And you are listening to a podcast for coaches coming to you seated today. Normally when I record these things, I angle the microphone up. I bend the microphone arm up so I can stand and I can. Wave my arms around and I can pace a little bit. And I imagine it would make for a funny video, but today I have to be seated. I don't have to be seated, but I have this foot injury and I have one of those boots on my foot right now that makes me walk funny.
And I probably have to have surgery and I'm annoyed by it. And I'm a little bit sulky and pouty about it. And that's actually relevant to today's call. But if the episode sounds very different. It might be because I'm seated instead of standing. And if it doesn't sound very different than maybe I'll sit forever because, because, Hey, if we can be seated and get the same result, let's just sit down and relax.
Okay. A few episodes ago, I talked about ethics and coaching through the eyes of the coach. I talked about how I want to approach my clients, and our interactions and our work together in a way that.
Builds trust and rapport builds connection respects the agency of the client and Just keeps the coaching relationship on good footing so that it's Got the best possible chance of being productive and positive for the client Today's episode is The other side of that conversation where I want clients, including myself as a client, I want all of us to take a kind and an ethical approach to ourselves as we engage with coaching.
In a little over half my coaching calls this week, which was a busy week, a busy coaching week in a little over half of those coaching calls. I really felt strongly that one of the things the client needed to shift was just. To be nicer to themselves, experiencing coaching or therapy as a client is not easy stuff. We end up in those rooms, physical or virtual,, because something's going on in her life and maybe has been for a long time.
That isn't feeling good and that we want to change and so coaching is this environment in which we do self confront and Hopefully that's done with the help of a of a caring compassionate strong practitioner Who's there to be with us and to guide us through that process?
But because of the nature of the work because of the nature of self confrontation if we have a habit or a tendency towards self criticism that has an angry edge to it, it's very likely that that's going to appear in coaching or therapy because it's habitual. And it's completely understandable, especially when you're dealing with people who hold themselves to a high standard in their lives. They're achievers. They get things done. They are helpers. They help other people. They start businesses.
They do great in their jobs. They care a lot about their families and they support the people around them and they do all of these good things and that feels good to them and they like to hold themselves to a high standard and when they feel like they are falling short of a high standard, they might have a loud inner critic and sometimes that loud inner critic is really a jerk. But it's not them. It's the inner critic.
There's a distinction between who I am and And that occasional or maybe frequent, really mean voice that starts to spout off in my head. And having worked with a bunch of clients over the years, that voice can be the voice of an unkind spouse. It can be the voice of an unkind parent can be the voice of somebody that we interacted a lot as a child.
And then the voice kind of gets twisted and it gets ingrained and then it gets amplified and it very often starts to yell into a megaphone in the moments where we feel uncertain or we feel we've fallen short. And the place we go is I'm going to say a bunch of horrible things to myself. Let me give you an example from my own life. It relates to this dumb plastic boot that's on my left foot.
In early February ish, that's about, I don't know, three months ago, I was not happy with how I'm doing food. I was eating too much. I was eating the things that were not contributing to feeling good to having my clothes fit the way I want my clothes to fit and et cetera. And so, I've got the tools and I've got some experience and I've got some knowledge. I know how to change those things. And so I started to change those things.
And for the next six or seven weeks, I really got things moving in a new direction and my clothes started to fit differently. And yes, the number on the scale did change and I felt better. And then this injury to my foot, which is longterm, I've been dealing with some version of it for a. About 25 years, it got a lot worse. It got worse in a way that some doctors recommended to me that I stop stressing it in any way until we decide whether, okay, let's have surgery or let's not have surgery.
Let's figure out what we're going to do. But in the meantime, put this boot on and wear it all the time. You don't have to sleep in it, but you need to be wearing it the rest of the time. Well, my thing is walking. I go for walks. I very often go for walks with Kate, my wife. I very often go for walks by myself. I'm a walker. Walking gives me this amazing internal regulation. I come home from a 15 or 20 or 45 minute walk, feeling amazing.
Whatever was bugging me has mostly worked itself out in those 15 to 45 minutes. There's a lot of nice internal chemical stuff going on. And then I got to put this boot on and the walking goes away for the moment, but I don't know how long it could be. Six weeks could be nine or 12 months. Not totally sure yet. So now I don't get my walks and I don't get the internal regulation that they give me.
I promise there's a point to all this and without the internal regulation that I'm getting from walks, I look for that regulation elsewhere. And what is my habit? My habit is to go to the fridge or worse, the pantry. So having been on this nice streak for six, seven, eight weeks, feeling good. Now I'm going to the fridge in the pantry and I'm not walking. So now there's a double, it's a compounding negative.
Not only am I not getting the goodness of the walks, but I'm eating an excess that doesn't feel good. And now everything that was feeling good. In the previous six or eight weeks is reversing. So here's my question to you. I've got tools. I'm a coach. I've had a lot of therapy. I've had a lot of coaching. I've read a lot of books. I've done a lot of trainings, knowing everything that I know, seeing everything that I've seen, experiencing everything that I've experienced. What is my next move?
You're probably a coach. You've probably got a long list of things for me. But let's start with what we know my next move is not, it is not to go to self hatred. It is not to say, Oh, this again, why can't I get this figured out? I'm I know better. I've got the experience. I've got the knowledge. I've got tools. I've got the software that makes this easy. I've had a lot of coaching on this. I know the pattern. I can see the pattern. The pattern is so obvious to me.
I shouldn't be dealing with this anymore. I shouldn't be like this anymore. I should have moved past this. Other people have figured this out. Why can't I figure it out? This is easy for everyone else. This is hilarious. Many of you are laboring under the idea that the thing with which you struggle Everyone else has resolved. It is the most absurd thing that human beings say to themselves. Well, everybody else has, has it figured out. She hasn't figured out. He hasn't figured out.
Tragically in coaching, there's this thing where we will say to ourselves, my coach hasn't figured out if my coach can figure it out. Why can't I, figure it out. I have access to this brilliant coach. I've got them right there in front of me. But I still can't figure it out. How much would any of that help me right now? How much would any of that help me as I finish recording this podcast?
And I guarantee you, I will have an almost immediate urge to limp myself out of my office, up the stairs to the pantry. How much would any of that internal shouting, how much would it help? You might say, Oh no, it might help. It might break the pattern. Yeah. For a minute, for a minute. The anger, the self criticism, turning these things toward ourselves, it doesn't help. It makes things worse.
And especially in a situation like mine, where I'm trying to self regulate, I'm trying to self medicate in a way with calories. If I amp up the anger, the internal anger, the internal self criticism, if I take that internal critic and hand it a megaphone, it's likely that I'll want to tamp those negative feelings down with even more calories. This is the pattern. What's the pattern for me? I can't speak for you. So what's the alternative?
The alternative is to not weaponize my knowledge and experience against myself. The alternative is to say, Oh yeah, I'm discouraged. I want to go for a walk. I want to go for a hike. I feel discouraged. As soon as you name it, you create the opportunity. To let it move through. Sometimes people are discouraged. It's part of the human experience, which I know is a very coachy thing to say, et cetera. It just happens to be true and useful.
Now if I want my physical experience to change, and if I want the emotional experience that accompanies that physical experience to change, the bottom line is I am going to come to a moment where I open that pantry and then I close it and say, ah, you know, maybe not right now, maybe later, but not right now. Maybe I'm going to do something else right now. Maybe there's some other way for me to move through space. That isn't my normal three mile walk, but maybe it's something else that.
Regulates me in a way that I'll end up being happier with than consuming calories. Well, now I'm working with myself instead of against myself. The inner critic might speak up. I mean, my inner critic does speak up. My inner critic will say, man, you're still this, this again. The question is, do I give it the megaphone or do I just say, yeah, actually this again, that's kind of interesting. Isn't it? Maybe I'll try something else today or maybe I'll try something else tomorrow. I don't know.
We'll see. Now I've gotten on the same side of the table as myself. Now I'm working with myself instead of against myself and whatever increase in negative emotion would have come from yelling at myself. I diffuse that and I'm closer to an emotional state that's going to produce a set of behaviors or even a single behavior in a moment that moves me off in a new direction. Okay. A direction I ended up being happier with.
So part of our job as human beings, but especially as practitioners is to tune ourselves to what the inner critic sounds like and what set of emotions tend to accompany our attention to the inner critic. If we're able to slow down a little bit to see those patterns and see how those things emerge, Then we're in a position to not only change the behaviors that the inner critic is yelling about in the first place, but to be ready for the inner critic.
The next time he arrives, now we're in better shape. Now we're in a better position to handle these things going forward. I love having a coach. I don't have a coach at the moment that I work with on this stuff around, you know, self soothing through calorie consumption. but I love having a coach that I can sit with and say, I'm feeling really frustrated. Uh, with Liz, with my, with the coach I do work with.
I'm able to say, Liz, I'm, I'm really frustrated about whatever, about the way I'm dividing my time. Why can't I focus? I just don't seem to be able to focus. Well, that's a lie. By the way. I'm capable of amazing focus, but the inner critic brings these lies to me. They've been practiced now for 30 years, 35 years. I love to process those things with Liz. Liz doesn't argue with me and she doesn't disagree with me. You know what?
Actually, let's talk about that for a second, because this is a thing I think coaches do sometimes, and I'm probably not qualified to blanket, call it terrible, but I don't like it. So let's say that I go to Liz, my coach, and I say, Liz, I should have figured this out by now, Something about working or content creation. Who knows what I'm, who knows what I'm whining about in the moment. I'm so frustrated. I should have, I should have figured this out by now.
And if Liz says, no, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have figured it out by now. This drives me crazy. Liz would never, by the way, Liz doesn't do that. This drives me crazy. If a person says, well, I shouldn't be mad, you should be mad. Ugh. Don't do that. Don't be in a rush to disagree with your client. And if your coach is in a rush to disagree with you, even when they're supposedly flipping your negative talk in your favor, there's still something off putting about it.
I'll speak for myself as a client,, if I say I should have figured this out by now, all I'm looking for my coach to say in that moment, Is maybe nothing, maybe just let there be a little bit of a pause, maybe a little bit of open space. Maybe I want my coach in that moment to say, Oh, okay. You think? And then I have the opportunity to say, well, I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I should or shouldn't have that's probably not helpful, but what I mean is I feel frustrated. Oh, okay.
We can work with frustrated. Or I feel discouraged. Okay. We can work with discouraged. I'm mad at myself. Ah, you're mad at yourself. Okay. What do we do with that? I don't like shoulds or shouldn'ts. I think shoulds and shouldn'ts are red flags. Even when a well meaning coach flips them in our favor. I think it perpetuates the habit of shoulding and shouldn't, and I don't think those are productive habits. A should or a shouldn't is really just a signal of an emotional state.
We don't have to engage with the shoulds and the shouldn'ts directly. We can acknowledge them as an emotion signal and say. I wonder what the emotion is. I don't know what's driving your shoulds and your shouldn'ts. I wonder what's driving my shoulds and shouldn'ts. What's going on with me internally. Let me work with that. So whether you're engaging with your coach or engaging with yourself, if you hear the shoulds coming, let them float by and say, Oh, I'm shooting myself.
What information does that have for me? What is it telling me about my internal state at the moment? Okay. I can work with that. I can talk to my coach about that Here's the last topic of the day. And then we'll conclude Every coach that I know deploys named tools. And in my experience, they are powerful. They are useful. They help clients have breakthroughs. They've helped me have breakthroughs.
I love a good named tool, unless the well meaning client who might be a coach or who might have a lot of experience with coaching takes that named tool and accidentally with nothing but the best intentions warps that tool into a weapon that they use against themselves. It can be so subtle and it can be so sneaky.
And this is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in working with a kind of compassionate, a strong, a safe practitioner, because a good practitioner will help you see how you might be warping and weaponizing your own tools against yourself. Here is an example. It's called the manual the manual for those of you who've never heard of it. Describes the idea that in our relationships, we tend to have a set of unspoken rules and expectations for the people that we love.
We want them to behave in a specific way. And all of our expectations and maybe even demands are in this imaginary manual. And when people don't comply with our manuals, we punish them. But the most insidious thing about our manual is that it's unspoken. We're very often expecting people to comply with rules and expectations that we have not made clear. I think this is an incredible insight. I think it is a brilliant, brilliant tool, and I think it can create shortcuts To progress.
It is also extremely easy to misuse and to weaponize where I've interacted with so many good people and many, maybe most of my clients have been women. So that's my bias is that I interact mostly with women. I've, I've worked with so many amazing women who take this idea of the manual and they say, well, you know, I've got this manual. I've got this manual for. My, my husband, I've got this manual for my kids and I just need to drop it. I should just drop it. Hold on.
What do you see how the well intentioned person just completely weaponized that tool against herself? Well, I should just drop it. I've just got to drop it. And then if it, if it persists, then what she says is I'm so mad at myself. I know about the manual. I've, I understand the concept, but I'm still being a jerk to my kids or I'm still being a jerk to my husband or whatever, however she might say it.
If I have the opportunity, if I happen to be there in the moment, if it's a coaching call, I say, hold on, this manual thing is really, really useful to you right up until you start smashing yourself in the face with it. Yes, you do have a set of unspoken rules, a set of unspoken expectations, maybe even a set of unspoken demands for the people in your life. So the next step after awareness is not punishment. It's not to try to rush past our way of being and pretend it never happened.
It's to consider the expectations and the rules and even the demands that are in our manuals and to decide which of them we want to let go of completely, maybe on our own, maybe with the help of a coach, which of them are actually important to us.
In which case, the job is to take the unspoken and make it spoken, which is an incredibly high intimacy and honest thing to do, to go To your person, to the person you love and say, you know what, it turns out I have this expectation that I've never told you about. And I know it's crazy, but when you don't meet this unspoken expectation, I feel really hurt. Now you've named it, you've spoken it. And now the person that loves you is able to say, I had no idea.
I would love to try to do that for you and be that for you. Or they say, I had no idea. And the truth is, I'm not sure I can meet that expectation. We got to talk about it. In either case, we're now moving closer to each other and not farther from each other. Whether this expectation that we've had, whether it is satisfied or not satisfied, met or unmet, by making it a spoken thing, instead of an unspoken thing, we move toward our partner instead of away.
So now we've taken this brilliant tool, the manual, and we've deployed it in service of ourselves and of our relationship instead of deploying it as a weapon against ourselves. So when you're deploying a named tool. In your own life, in the lives of your clients, in the lives of your family, asterisk, be very careful about trying to deploy name tools in the lives of other people, work on yourself.
And then if your family asks for help, by all means, anyway, when we're deploying these name tools, you can get a strong signal. About the way you might be weaponizing it. If it comes with shoulds, if it amps up the inner critic, instead of quieting down the inner critic, if it comes with an emotional state that you know, is not productive for you, maybe shame, maybe anger, maybe disappointment, maybe not disappointment.
I'm not going to tell you how to feel, but I trust you to have awareness of your emotional state as you deploy these tools. And then to act accordingly. Sometimes there has to be a meta conversation with yourself about the tool and your use of the tool. And maybe if you have a coach, then you go to your coach and say, here's what I realized. I realized that what I was doing is I was taking this idea of the manual, which I really believe in. And I was just smashing myself in the face with it.
It was making everything worse. Well, the answer is not to say that the manual is a bad tool. And the answer is not to say that you should abandon all your expectations of the people you love. Because, one of the things that defines a close relationship is that it's a relationship in which we are able to name our expectations and then have the person who loves us collaborate in meeting those expectations. That's what a relationship is.
It has to be collaborative because like I said earlier, there are things that we'll say this would mean a lot to me and our partner can say, I don't know if it's in me to do that. That doesn't mean the relationship's over. It doesn't mean they don't love us and we don't love them, but now we're collaborating on a solution. The idea is not to drop all of our expectations. If I have no expectations of my spouse, then why am I in a marriage in the first place?
My point is, let's deploy these tools with care. And if there's any signal that we're deploying these tools against ourselves, instead of for ourselves, let's pause. Let's check in. Let's maybe talk to our coach about it. And let's remember that above all, it's a good idea to be nice to ourselves. It doesn't mean we're letting ourselves off the hook. Oh, I didn't even talk about letting ourselves off the hook.
Well, let my tone of voice be all you need me to hear about this idea of quote unquote, letting yourself off the hook. Okay. Being nice to yourself is the foundation of growth and transformation. I'm a good guy. I'm here to tell you. I'm a good person who sometimes in a state of internal dysregulation goes into the pantry. Gets out a box of cereal and drains it. And I'm still a good guy. And I like myself. I want to be nice to myself. I want you to be nice to yourself.
I want you to be nice to your clients. I want you to be nice to your family members. It doesn't mean we're not holding each other and ourselves to a high standard. We want to achieve new and elevated ways of being. The path to that. starts with kindness. And I'll talk to you next time.