The Coaching Channel

There is something that is rarely brought up when talking about change.

We talk about habits.
We talk about accountability.
We talk about motivation and discipline
and finding your why.

However, we don't talk enough about what years of the same cycle
does to your story about who you are.

Here is what happens:

The first time you fail to keep a promise to yourself,
you draw a situational conclusion:
'That plan did not work.'

The fifth time, you draw a behavioural conclusion:
'I do not follow through on things like this.'

The fifteenth time, you draw an identity conclusion:
'I am someone who cannot do this.
This is just who I am.
Some people can, and I am not one of them.'

And identity conclusions are the most dangerous kind.
Because once you believe something is true about who you are,
you stop questioning it.
You stop testing it.
You start organising your behaviour around it.
You become what you have concluded yourself to be.

But here is what I know to be true:

The identity conclusion was drawn from the wrong data.

The data was real: real attempts, real patterns, real struggles.
But the conclusion from the data was wrong.

The correct conclusion from years of the same cycle is not:
'I am someone who cannot change.'

The correct conclusion is:
'I have been trying to change
with an incomplete set of tools.
My difficulty is not with change itself.
My difficulty is with the specific tools I have been given.
Let me get different ones.'

Different conclusion.
Different identity.
Completely different direction.

You are not someone who cannot change.
You are someone who was handed the wrong instruments
and told to perform surgery.

The instruments exist.
They can be learned.
And when you have them,
the story you have been telling about yourself
will not survive the evidence.

The next time a low mood or difficult emotion arrives,
try this one thing:

Instead of asking 'why do I feel this way?'
which often just sends you deeper into the spiral

try saying:
'This is a difficult emotion.
It is normal.
It is temporary.
It will pass.
I do not have to do anything about it right now
except let it be here.'

This is not suppression.
This is not toxic positivity.
This is not pretending.

It is the practice of not adding
the second layer of pain
on top of the first.

The feeling is allowed to be here.
You are not broken for having it.
You do not need to analyse it into submission.
You do not need to fight it.
You do not need to immediately fix it.

You just need to let it be a feeling.
Not a verdict.
Not a prophecy.
Just a feeling.

They always pass.
Let this one pass too.

There are two kinds of pain.
And a lot of people only understand how to deal with one of them.

THE FIRST KIND:
The original discomfort.
The sadness, the anxiety, the low mood,
the disappointment, the loneliness, the grief.
This pain is unavoidable.
It is part of being human.
It visits everyone.
Without exception.

THE SECOND KIND:
The pain about the pain.
The additional suffering created by the story
you tell yourself about the first kind of pain.

'I should not feel this way.'
'What is wrong with me?'
'Other people cope better.'
'I have so much to be grateful for why do I still feel bad?'
'If I were stronger, this would not affect me.'

This second kind of pain is not unavoidable.
It is created.
By a thought.
By a belief that having difficult emotions means something is wrong with you.

And here is what is important to understand:
the second kind of pain often causes more suffering
than the first.

The original feeling: sadness, anxiety, heaviness
if it were simply allowed to exist
without the added layer of shame and self-judgment,
would pass in its natural time.

But when you add the second layer
when you fight the feeling, shame the feeling,
treat it as evidence of your deficiency
you are adding fuel.
You are extending the pain.
You are turning something transient into something heavier.

What changes when you understand the 50/50 nature of life
that approximately half of human emotional experience is uncomfortable
and this is normal, not defective
is that you stop adding the second layer.

The original pain is still there.
But it is just pain now.
Not pain plus shame.
Not pain plus verdict.
Just pain.

And pain, without the compounding, passes.

Something we want you to try:

The next time a difficult emotion arrives
instead of immediately asking 'why do I feel this way'
or fighting it
or telling yourself you should not feel this way

just say:
'This is a difficult emotion. It is normal. It is temporary. It will pass.'

Not because that will make it disappear.
It will not. Not immediately.

But because the fight against the feeling
is often what makes it last longer
than it needed to.

We compound our pain
by treating every difficult emotion
as evidence that something is wrong with us.

When you stop doing that
when you let the mood just be a mood,
when you stop interrogating it
and arguing with it
and feeling ashamed of it

it passes more quickly.

Not because you ignored it.
Because you stopped feeding it.

Difficult and uncomfortable emotions are weather.
You do not have to enjoy the rain.
You just do not have to pretend
the rain means the sun will never come back.

It always comes back.