“All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.” – Swami Vivekananda

I was talking to a friend earlier and she was complaining about how terrible her diet was and how she hated it. Out of curiosity, I asked, “Well, who put you on such a terrible diet?” And the reply came, “Me”. What occurred for me to say in that moment was this: “So often, we suffer in prisons of our own creation”.

I don’t know how she heard it, but for me, it was profound. We create these regimens – about our diet, exercise, work, the list goes on. I am guilty of creating such a regime for a particular certification I was pursuing too! So I get why we do that. I’ve been there. And what’s interesting is how we create these regimens – these prisons – suffer in them and forget that we created them in the first place.

We ‘should’ ourselves into doing stuff we would not otherwise do. I should myself into pursuing a specialization in organizational leadership because I thought it would give me insights that would help me empathize with the leaders I coached. Over time, as my understanding of the experience of our reality – my grounding as a transformative coach – deepened more and more through the learnings I had from my mentor, Michael Neill, what I found was that my clients were just as human as anybody else, and in fact, they were tired of everyone looking at them as ‘leaders’ and not human beings with their own shortcomings.

Once I started seeing people for who they really were, beyond their titles, their stories and their masks, it was liberating – both for me as a coach, and for the clients I worked with. I found myself empathizing with them far more than what would have been possible for me otherwise, and my clients experienced a deeper connection and impact in our work together.

The point in this story for me is how common it is that we think we should do something because it makes sense to us in the moment, and how often we close ourselves up to possibilities of the picture being different than what we initially thought it was, and letting our actions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

It made sense for me to do a leadership specialization because I thought that was what I needed to do in order to empathize better. And then I found out that what was actually helpful was something entirely different. It made sense for my friend to put herself on a not so enjoyable diet because it made sense to her given the way she saw her situation – her reality.

Everyone gets that our experience is subjective. One person might be afraid of spiders, but might love dogs. Another might be terrified by dogs. Someone might enjoy sitcoms, while someone else finds them boring. It is quite obvious that how we behave in the world is a function of our subjective experience. What we often misunderstand in this is we think we are experiencing a ‘real world’ out there in a subjective fashion, tinted by our own identity, values, beliefs, likes, dislikes etc. 

We fail to notice that our identity, values, beliefs, likes, dislikes and so on actually create the so called ‘real world’ for us. Which means that we are not interpreting a world through our glasses. We are ‘creating’ it. But we do not realise that we are creating it – we think it is true in an objective sense.

Here’s the secret about the human experience:

We think we live in a subjective experience of an objective reality. However, we actually live in an objective experience of a subjective reality.

We create our reality with our identities, values and beliefs – all of which are thoughts that we buy into as real and objective – and then think that we are prisoners of that reality. Once we start noticing how we create it, we start to notice that it’s a blank slate at anytime we want it to be. It’s a fresh start towards something that gives us a better experience of our lives. 

The moment we start seeing that we are the prisoner and we are the guard, and that the prison we thought we were in actually didn’t exist outside of our thinking, we start getting out of our own way. The moment we see how and where our possibilities are leashed by our own selves, we start to unleash our true potential. We start performing effortlessly and achieving the success we want without the pressure and stress that we thought should come along with it. And that’s the breakthrough insight that we work towards in transformative high performance coaching.

P.S: If you are committed to your personal and professional growth, and you want to experience a significant positive shift in your life or your work, coaching might be the right step forward for you. There are currently 2 spots open for 1-on-1 Coaching with me. Find out if you qualify.