In my previous blog I talked about the filtered version of ‘reality’ that we learn to believe about ourselves, which becomes our unique story about who we are and how we experience the world.

I posed the question, how do you know you’re filtering out the right information?  Are you hanging onto a story which is limiting you or expanding your sense of possibility?

Over the last year, I have been training with Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings of True Northe, to deepen my coaching practice, understand my whole self at a deeper level and train to be an Equine Facilitated Coach (more to follow on that topic).

Part of the training with any transformational coaching programme involves you going on the same journey you would be taking your clients on during their coaching. On our last module, we fully acknowledged and embraced the end of our journey.

Although, of course, the end of anything marks the start of something new, it is always really important to acknowledge and release any emotion associated with the ending.  As part of our ‘ending celebration’ we were invited to share and acknowledge the journey we had been on, celebrating the highs and lows that had brought us to that end point.

During the programme and with the help of the horses acting as wonderful mirrors for what we humans (operating 93% in our sub-conscious minds) are not necessarily able to see or recognise in ourselves, I continued to de-construct the story I have learnt to believe about myself throughout my life.  While reflecting on how I would present my journey to my coaching cohort, my sub-conscious told me I needed to write it as a story.

I’m a firm believer that we teach what we need to learn. As I invite my clients to make themselves vulnerable and take off their protective ‘masks’ – which they’ve potentially been using to protect their hearts – in order to create transformational change, I thought it was only fair that I did the same here…

And so, this is a very vulnerable and true story about a little girl who has always believed she is not a storyteller.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin…

Once upon a time there was a little girl who had grown up believing others were better communicators than her, were better at holding people’s attention and were more interesting and engaging speakers.

She grew up believing that she wasn’t quite good enough the way she was, so she built a life around hiding behind the better communicators and the better storytellers.  She became a very efficient ‘behind-the-scenes’ person and she became very good at making others shine.

One day (after about 40 years if you’d like to put a number to it) she discovered a passion for helping others follow their hearts in life by coaching them and helping them de-construct their own unhelpful stories which they’d learnt to believe about themselves.  She discovered how to help them show up as their true, authentic selves and be seen for who they really are and not just in a way they’d learnt they needed to be, to feel worthy of love, connection and belonging.  During this process she started to also learn how to show up and be seen herself.  It felt amazing.

During her interdependent journey of helping others and herself step into their innate power she discovered an amazing organisation called Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings at True Northe who combined transformational coaching with Equine Facilitated Coaching.  She discovered how horses can be used to demonstrate that our non-verbal communication (not the words we use) is a more authentic representation of our inner world.

Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings taught her that our body gives us important messages about what we should be paying attention to but often we disconnect from our bodies which creates ‘dis-ease’.  They taught her that it is important to think of her body as another child (otherwise it cannot thrive) and ask it what messages it’s trying to send her and what it needs.  She learnt she hadn’t been truly listening to herself and in order to be the best version of her and the best Coach she could be to others, she needed to be better at listening to her body and be better at nurturing herself.

Working with the horses, she started to understand that if she’s not looking after herself properly she can’t access her inner power and the horses do not connect with her, as she is more easily triggered into unhelpful thinking patterns and ‘survival’ responses.

She learnt she needed to have stronger boundaries and found that when she clearly communicated boundaries to the horses, she experienced many moments of feeling that inner strength and connection to the horses and to herself.  As she is very aware we are all a work in progress, she still sometimes contracts back into that default “behind-the-scenes” person, but she is practising holding onto that power and strength that she knows is there.

Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings helped her learn that emotion is energy in motion and that if you own it and allow it, rather than resisting it and suppressing it, it moves through you.  She has started pulling at the illusions and constructs of who she learnt to be in her early life and finding ways to connect with her inner child.  She has also become very aware of distractions she uses to suppress pain or fear or uncomfortable emotions and is asking herself  “How can I connect with myself NOW?” when she is triggered into wanting to suppress something.  She learnt that when we take in something external, like alcohol, we push down what needs to be released (what needs to come out)… although she still loves a glass of wine!

Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings have helped her start to integrate parts of herself that she’s been rejecting for years.  Her default behaviour was to cut herself off from her support network when she was sad or didn’t feel good enough.

She knows now that in her temptation to hide, she actually just wanted to be seen.  She is actively noticing this unhelpful pattern of behaviour and making sure she is feeling significant and seen in groups by communicating in a way that’s true to her and not in a way that other’s might expect her to.

She became aware of her unhelpful pattern of not speaking up and making herself heard when she felt she wasn’t being respected.  This unhelpful behaviour had been a contributing factor to her marriage breakdown and her training gave her opportunities to practice changing that behaviour and noticing opportunities to practice this in life so she can create new, helpful habitual ways of responding. She doesn’t want to keep repeating that unhelpful behaviour pattern and then running away because she’s not feeling heard or suppressing her feelings.

She is learning how to communicate a clear sense of her ‘self’ without trying to soften what she says because she’s worrying how it might land with others.  And she is practising giving people responsibility for dealing with what she needs them to hear and holding her space and her boundaries.

As a Coach this has meant she now has a better connection with herself and is enabling her clients to go much deeper into their inner worlds.  She is helping them explore what beliefs might be feeding their unhelpful, constructed stories and helping them explore the purpose of unhelpful behaviours so they can find ways to fully step into their responsibility and power.

Last year she decided she had to stop reading the story she had been reading as it didn’t have a happy ending.  She decided to start re-writing that story and re-defining her character in the story to a more truer version of who her heart was telling her she was and IS.  2018 was a bumpy chapter but Learning to Listen and Sarah Readings and the beautiful people on her course made it so much easier to read.  She is taking pen to paper and starting to write the next chapter of 2019.  She is trusting her heart and addressing her fears and she’s helping others to do the same.

Thank you for reading this chapter.  The rest of the story is still a work in progress 🙂

What’s in your next chapter?  Have you written it or are you reading someone else’s story?

With love

Sarah x