Here is your self-coaching cheat sheet

Three powerful exercises you can easily do to analyse and coach yourself in less than an hour

One of the best investments you can make in your life is investing in yourself.

One of the best ways to invest in yourself is to coach yourself.

The best person to guide yourself is you. After all, you are the person who knows, observes, and experiences your own life.

No one knows you better than yourself — you are the expert, designer, entrepreneur, and CEO of your own life.

So, it is your responsibility to make sure that you live a high quality life that is exciting, resourceful, impactful, and creative.

Coaching yourself is a lifetime skill. It is an effective, fast, and free method that you can use every time you are confused, lost, or stuck.

Coaching yourself is particularly important if you are experiencing a career transition, an unexpected challenge, a debilitating failure, or a period of flux.

However, it remains a challenge to go out of your comfort zone, and get rid of your biases and negative assumptions.

Through self-coaching, you can increase your self-awareness. You can take control of your thoughts and actions.

You can change the way you think and feel. Your happiness does not depend on any external factors — it is completely internal. Once you realise this, you can effectively shape your thoughts and emotions. You can reprogram your brain. You can change your internal conversations with yourself.

Your thoughts and mental models determine the quality of life you are living. Once you realise how your negative thoughts and biases prevent you from reaching your goals, you can change your mental models. You can reflect on your thinking processes, analyse them, reverse engineer them, and question your assumptions.

You can separate yourself from the problems in your life. Once you learn to look at your life from a distance, you will be able to analyse and evaluate your situation from multiple angles. You will be able to use fresh perspectives to develop new insights into the biggest problems of your life.

You can effectively coach yourself through some very easy steps and exercises.

In this piece, I will provide you some very quick and practical exercises that will help you coach yourself.

Exercise 1: Draw a poster to inspire yourself towards positive action.

Drawing or doodling is a very powerful tool that you can use to develop new insights and to formulate your goals.

Use several sheets of paper, a pencil, and 30–40 minutes for this exercise.

First, take a lot of notes on the short term future that you desire. What are some of your goals, wishes, and projects you want to tackle?

Second, articulate your dreams and desires in writing, drawing, or doodling. The more details, the better. Whatever you think of, put them on the paper.

Third, come up with an inspirational poster that you will hang on your wall or fridge (somewhere visible). For example, I have included one of my sample posters below.

Exercise 2: Use brain dumping to think about all the problems and solutions in your life.

In this second exercise, you will coach yourself through a very simple method.

This will take about 30 minutes to one hour, depending on how deep you will dive.

Let us start.

First, you will think and write about all the significant problems in your life and in your career. Make a list of all these problems. Try to re-frame and interpret these problems.

Second, you will write down all your worries, anxieties, concerns, and fears. Whatever comes to your mind. Put all of them on paper. Dump your brain.

Third, think about what prevents you back from being great. Where do you fall short of your goals? What are your bad habits, mistakes or limiting beliefs? Where are the gaps? Please write them all.

Now that you have focused on all these problems, you will turn to solutions.

You will act as a career coach and consultant for yourself now.

Imagine that you are Gordon Ramsey and your life is like ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ (hopefully it is not that bad!:)

If you are not familiar with the format, you can watch a sample episode of Kitchen Nightmares below:

So, you will act as Gordon Ramsay here: What do you need to fix in your life? How will you solve your problems? Where will you start making changes?

For all the problems and issues you have identified before, you will now brainstorm and find lots of ideas and solutions.

Please write down all your ideas and strategies. Make a list of them.

Think of grand strategies, as well as small steps you need to take.

Think of at least 3 action points for each problem you have identified.

When you are designing your solutions, consider all the resources, networks, systems you have and you need.

Where are the low hanging fruits and quick wins?

How will you start with small actions to gain momentum?

Please write down all what comes to your mind.

Exercise 3: Complete the Check Up Checklist sheet below.

In the third and final exercise, you will go over each domain in your life.

This exercise will take about 40–50 minutes.

First, you will give yourself a score from 1 to 10 for each life domain.

1 = terrible

10 = excellent

(And you can use anything in between).

Second, you will write about what is going well in each domain. You can also write about your overall evaluation and comments about each domain in your life.

Third, you will write about how you can improve each domain of your life. What are your plans or actions for going forward? Think of and write down at least 1 small positive action.

As you see, this assessment covers a wide range of significant areas in your life, including career, family, health, relationships, money, learning, leisure, arts, travel, values, community, nature, intimacy etc.

There is a final step to this exercise. It is a more detailed reflection about your failures, setbacks, fears, or worries in each domain.

FAILURES, PROBLEMS, SETBACKS, FEARS:

Please go back to each domain in your Check-up + Checklist exercise.

Remember back your challenges.

Remember back the cases you failed or tried something else. What happened?

Create a small action point about each domain to go forward. Remember that failure is not your enemy. Procrastination is your enemy. Therefore, you need to implement and take action, however small this action is.

I hope that you have benefited from all these exercises.

If you do them all, I think you will learn a lot about yourself, your goals, and your life.

Changing your perspective is the key of all change in your life.

It all starts within you: You can achieve fascinating things in your life if you change and take control of your internal conversations, mental models, emotions, habits, and actions.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely;

Fahri

Fahri Karakas is the author of Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.