Change in 5 Easy Steps: The Integrative Life Path
Scott Mills, Ph.D.
People seem to think that life coaching is mysterious. Coaches can rarely explain with much clarity what exactly they are doing. So when I’m asked what I do, I let folks know that I work to integrate the conscious and unconscious mind in a five step process I call the Integrative Life Path. You can use it with just about any problem that you might encounter.
Step 1: Get Clarity
Do you know what you want? Many clients come to me knowing only what they don’t want. They don’t want to smoke, to be overweight, to be alone. There are lots of different alternatives to any of these. Which one do you prefer?
For example, you may know that you don’t want to be single. Okay, good start. But who do you want to be with? A nice arsonist perhaps or someone with very poor social skills and bad hygiene? Start identifying what you want so that you can head the right direction towards them.
Step 2: Build a New Image of Yourself
Deep and lasting change (and most often rapid) happens when you decide that it’s not just your behaviors that you want to change but your understanding of yourself. Most people start change efforts working on individual behaviors. To me, that’s like saying that you wish there were no mosquitos in the swamp. You can either try to kill all the mosquitos (shift in behavior) or you can choose to become a meadow where mosquitos don’t live (shift in identity).
And while engaging the unconscious mind is important in every step, it is crucial at this step. These images that we hold of ourselves are deep and often run in the background. We have become so used to them that we don’t even know they are there. The most rapid way to change this is through hypnosis or other processes that access the unconscious mind.
Step 3: Clear out the obstacles.
Change is easy when you are not weighed down. Think of how easy it is to change directions when you are running with nothing in your hands. And then imagine when you are late for your plane, running with three suitcases, wearing a suit that’s too tight for you and trying to type a text on your phone. When we can let go of the things that weigh us down – the old hurts, stories, experiences – we can begin to move with ease.
Lots of brave folks accomplish this in therapy or with some sort of intensely painful body work like rolfing that unlocks past hurts and resets you to neutral. Fortunately, we know more about the way that the brain organizes experience than ever before. We can now discharge emotions without having to relive them. I don’t know about you but I am satisfied with having felt the pain the first time through. I don’t need to do it again.
Step 4: Change Your Behavior
You might think this is what I told you not to worry about in step 2. Actually, I don’t work to change behaviors until all the other stuff is out of the way. In part because once we get here many of the behaviors have already shifted on their own. If I used to try not to eat chocolate and now I have an image of myself as a person who makes responsible eating choices, loves his body and enjoys feeling great, I won’t have to struggle with the chocolate as much. In fact, I’ll be able to eat enough to enjoy without pigging out on it.
There are behaviors that are useful to add in here. This is the point at which you decide what you could learn that would assist you in reaching your goal. For example, someone might decide that they want to have better relationships but aren’t yet very skilled at communicating. Learning new ways to talk as well as listen to others could be very valuable in moving them towards their goal. Sometimes this is hard to do on your own so feel free to get a coach’s perspective or ask some people who have already done what you want to accomplish.
Step 5: Measure Your Results and Adjust
The true test of any change effort is how well it works. Knowing that you are always receiving feedback about how your change efforts are going, it’s easy to adjust your direction until you have it just right. The best way to do this is to pick a few ways that you can track your accomplishment. More is fine but make sure you always have at least two so you don’t get hung up on one number.
When clients decide to get healthier, they often want to start with a weight goal as their number to reach. This is fine as one measurement but I help them pick some other metrics that they can also measure like how energetic they felt or how well they slept. Change can take time but there is almost always a way that we see improvement if we let ourselves.
So what about the unconscious?
This process is deceptively simple. People (not my clients, of course) will often want to do these five steps in their heads and then wonder why not much has changed. When you know that 90% of change happens at the unconscious level, you quickly realize that leaving out the unconscious components of change is just plain silly. Would you go to work wearing only 10% of your clothes or try to drive your car with only 10% of the steering wheel? We are designed in such a magnificent way so that we don’t have to expend conscious energy on most of what we do. We simply let the programs in our unconscious take care of our actions. In order to change our lives, we have to change our programs.
The easiest way to shift your unconscious patterns is with a trained hypnotherapist. However, there are also lots of great CDs available that can guide you through the unconscious change processes.
No matter how you structure your path to change, it’s always easier with a supportive friend or professional guide like a coach. Seek someone out from the very beginning who can help keep you on track and enjoying your journey towards an even greater you!
Love this post, and enjoyed hearing about this from you the other night. This really does help enhance my understanding of what coaching is and how it works!
Thanks Peter!
You mentioned that there are a lot of CD’s that can guide you through the unconscious change processes. Can you give any recommendations?
Hi Lynette,
Sure. Some of my favorites are Belleruth Naperstak’s work. You can find her at http://www.healthjourneys.com/
Richard Bandler, one of the founder’s of Neurolinguistic Programming has a series of CDs out that I think you can get an amazon. He’s an amazing guide to the unconscious mind.
Paul McKenna, one of England’s favorites, has done great work on everything from building motivation to losing weight.
Tad James, in the U.S., is great on clearing all the junk we let clog up in our past and moving forward.
And I like Chris Howard, an NLP leader, for work around money.
Hope this gets you started!
Thanks for reading.
Scott
Thanks so much! I will check them out!