A Coaching Power Tool By Miho Kuroda, Transformational Coach, JAPAN
The Value of Feeling Challenged vs. Embracing Learning
Often when we are faced with a challenge, our immediate reaction is to feel fear, and pessimistic and calculate the risks involved. I’ve seen a lot of coworkers, managers, and friends having issues comprehending and accepting a challenging and stressful situation with a positive perspective and attitude seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth.
With the use of this power tool, a client is motivated to release the limiting and disempowering beliefs by replacing them with empowering beliefs. The tool can be applied not only in the work situation but daily life.
What Is the Difference Between Feeling Challenged vs. Embracing Learning
Feeling Challenged
Challenges can come in all different ways in our lives. Culture plays an important role in how we perceive challenging and difficult situations. In my culture, we are not really encouraged to make mistakes and fail in school or the work environment. Mistakes are not considered the key to success. Also, we are not supposed to be very open and transparent about negative events and feelings. Reflection on mistakes and setbacks seems to have taken priority over what you excel in doing or achieving.
Embracing Learning
Ru S. (2020) describes how we benefit by embracing learning. Learning creates confidence and motivates individuals through discussion and understanding of a variety of perspectives. New learning is believed to work effectively for stress reduction. With an open mindset, sharing ideas and talking about new learnings with others might inspire them to develop skills in certain areas they’ve never thought about.
Case Study
I had a major crisis with my professional and personal life twice in the past, once about 10 years ago when I lived in Australia and another four years ago when I worked as a project manager at a previous workplace, and both times I managed to move on with my life.
Each time a series of challenges emerged one after another. My experiences in Australia started with a health issue, a relationship problem, and job loss due to relocating back to Japan. Two years ago, I was confronted with another series of misfortunes. I was leading a brutal corporate life with work-related burnout and multiple unchangeable work stress factors. What added stress was family matters and feelings were showing up through my health. Also, a horrendous typhoon and rainstorm hit my parents’ place multiple times during the same year, damaging the house. It almost seemed like one event triggered another event.
When these events occurred, while I experienced feeling victimized, self-doubt, and anger, each time what immediately struck me was that I didn’t want to be defeated and stuck in the situation. Of course, these adverse events are painful and difficult, but they don’t have to determine the outcome of my life. What I believe is that there are many aspects of your life you can control, modify and grow with. I was very decisive that I find a path to live through the challenges. As a first step, I tried to accept the situation and stay focused on what I can do to improve the circumstances by making small incremental steps and recognizing small wins.
I focused less on stressors and paid more attention to engaging in something meaningful. Learning the principles of coaching gave me tools and frameworks to interpret and reframe some of the unfortunate incidents in the past and something meaningful for me to pursue. And it’s the coaching skills that’s been helping me to engage effectively with new people at a new workplace now.
All these actions helped to take my attention away from the failures and unfortunate events and created a new energy for me to move forward. Surviving through the 1st series of adverse events boosted my confidence. I felt that I can manage the situation and that a door to new opportunities will be open when encountering issues again. You can definitely turn sour and bitter rather than feeling positive when faced with adversity. It’s up to you to decide which path to choose. An option to choose resilience and live well is available. If you feel overwhelmed by a challenge, you can remind yourself that what happened to you isn’t an indicator of how your future will go, and that you’re not helpless. You may not be able to change a highly stressful event, but you can change how you interpret and respond to it. I believe a positive interpretation of any situation can be learned and developed.
Here are some lessons learned from my own experience when confronted with challenges.
- Accept new experiences and embrace challenges to live through adversity. Adversity is a part of the journey in our lives and you are not alone in the journey
- Ask for support from friends, family members, and people in the community when faced with adversity, and be willing to proactively help others too
Important Steps to Shift Perspectives
- accept the change and challenge as a part of the journey in our lives and understand what’s under control
- reframe the issues as a learning opportunity and move forward in a positive direction
- don’t be too self-critical when life issues hit you hard and take small steps to re-orient yourself
- stay connected with people with positive energy and vibes
- seek advice and support from the people around you and be willing to help others
By embracing learning, we can accept new experiences to live through challenges and achieve victory. Adversity is a part of the journey in our lives, and you are not alone in the journey.
Feeling Challenged vs. Embracing Learning Techniques
Techniques for Managing Feeling Challenged and Negative
The goal is so that the clients feel empowered to look at the situation as a learning experience and move on with their lives rather than being stuck feeling sour and in despair. This is not always easy. It might take some time for the clients to accept the problem and challenge they are facing and focus on their strengths and the positive side of what happened to them. It is important that the clients continue using their self-compassion throughout the journey.
Address Fears and Failure
Fears are often tied to the emotions triggered by past events that resulted in lingering trauma or sour feelings. Failure is not permanent and it’s a temporary setback. Single or even multiple failures in the past do not have to dictate your future success. As psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth describes, high achievers are not necessarily someone with high IQs or talents but rather they are patient and perseverant.
Address Underlying Beliefs
A coach needs to support clients in bringing their underlying beliefs to the surface and explore alternative beliefs if they are stoppers and blockers to achieving their goals. Underlying beliefs are known to be tied to our experiences from childhood. Some beliefs are deeply ingrained in us. I remember in school that we were told to be self-disciplined and diligent. In Japanese culture, we make relatively critical appraisals of ourselves. Continuous improvement is very much integral to our corporate culture. We are often trapped in thinking that I’m not good enough.
Facilitate Shifting Perspectives
Coaches help clients shift the way they see what’s happening to them at the moment. What if they look at the situation with a positive and solution-oriented attitude rather than exaggerating why certain things happen to them? The focus here is to broaden the thinking of clients by looking at the events from different perspectives. During the process, the clients will explore and rediscover their strengths, and what’s under their control and build a vision aligned to their goals.
Some of the coaching questions that a coach can ask to support the clients are:
- What makes me perceive this situation as a problem/challenge?
- What worse could have happened?
- How would this situation be seen by someone else in your environment?
- What can you use this situation for?
- How can you use the experience to your advantage?
- what can this experience teach me? How can I grow from this?
Techniques for Embracing Learning
Taking Small Steps
Encourage the client to start with quick steps first during the process instead of trying to take a big leap. Smaller goals are supposed to help us eliminate procrastination, clear our road to achievement, and boost motivation and productivity.
Celebrate Small Wins and Achievements
As coaches, celebrating the achievements of clients is as important as setting their goals. It’s uplifting and boosts their confidence and healthy pride. We tend to dwell on the negative rather than the positive. This is referred to as negativity bias. Coaches can make a difference by taking the time to celebrate our clients’ successes with them. (Cherry, 2022)
Focus On Positive, Self-Compassionate Rather Than Self-Critical
Coaches help clients to focus on the brighter side and shift the way they see what’s happening to them at the moment. The focus here is to broaden the thinking of clients by looking at the events from different perspectives. It’s important that the clients are using self-compassion to boost their confidence and motivation throughout the process.
References
Grit: the power of passion and perseverance –YouTube Angela Lee Duckworth
Culture of Learning 2021
7 reasons why you should embrace learning Ru S. 2020
Importance Of Small Actions
Negativity bias
What Is the Negativity Bias? By Kendra Cherry Updated on November 14, 2022