For over a decade, I have extensively researched how the human potential can be unleashed. I’ve ventured into the depths of applied psychology, philosophy and spirituality. There were some wonderful concepts in the form of techniques and tricks that I used to improve my own performance. There were several of these that I have come to practice over the years, including visioning exercises, mind programming, psycho-somatic conditioning and meditation. They were effortful, but I was a pro at them – I used them to get myself out of depression in my mid teens. 

Later on, I used them to face some of my biggest fears over the years and get myself to do things that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. They worked, and at some point, I started to incorporate them informally in my conversations with the people that I worked with. For several years, I was the under-cover coach who used clever techniques to make people do better. Nobody could decisively say exactly what I did, but they all felt and did much better after a conversation. Even when I did my very first certification program in life coaching, much of the curriculum was based on modalities from applied psychology such as NLP and CBT.

But over the past year, I’ve completely ventured out of these techniques. Not because they stopped working, but because I started to see something deeper behind why they worked the way they did. I started to have a glimpse into the true nature of mind, thought and consciousness, and the moment I did, everything that I have explored in the three realms of psychology, philosophy and spirituality converged at a single point. It all started making sense at a profoundly deeper level. I started seeing all the missing links in the three fields getting connected. The first time I had the insight, it hit me so hard that I spontaneously laughed for an hour before cancelling my entire schedule for three straight days. I had to pause. This was an epiphany. It was the enlightenment that I had been seeking for over a decade. This changed my world. 

I couldn’t stop myself from looking further in the direction of the intersection of these 3 principles. My experience of life was deeply impacted. I remember writing an email to a senior coach I worked with at that time and said something to the effect of ‘Nothing has changed externally, but everything looks different’. As I felt the shift inside solidify, gradually the impact of my coaching went to a whole new level. At the time, I was doing a specialization for coaching in organizations, and I was working with a few peer coaches for my ICF ACC credentialing and every one of them remarked that I should be applying for the PCC credential instead, which was the advanced one. They could sense the difference in the way I coached. While other coaches were sorting through their minds for which coaching technique to use, I wasn’t relying on the techniques. I was in the moment with the client. And the coaching took care of itself. At first, I couldn’t understand what was happening. It felt like I wasn’t doing anything but my performance at everything I did seemed dramatically different. Thankfully, through this whole journey, I could correspond with my mentor Michael Neill to make sense of and put words to what I was experiencing.

In the context of that back story, I’m gonna give you what I’ve promised in the title of this article. This is something I usually share with my 1-on-1 coaching clients. The game changer that can dramatically improve your impact and performance is the ability to distinguish between two different kinds of thoughts we have through the day. We have a lot going on in our heads, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. But these thoughts are a mix of what I call the noise and the signal. The noise is all the conditioning we picked up growing. It’s the beliefs and attitudes we learnt intentionally or unintentionally as a natural consequence of growing up in a culture, whatever your culture might be. 

The biggest difference – the game changer – is for you to separate the signal from the noise, to clearly identify which of the thoughts you’re having are a function of the noise and which are of the signal. 

There are several ways to describe the signal, one of which is usually the ‘quiet voice’ that ‘already knows’ what needs to be known. Helping people see this difference in the context of what they are going through and having them learn to distinguish them is an important aspect of the kind of work that I do (transformative coaching) with my clients.

Seeing how this works takes more than information. It takes insight. But when you do, your entire world changes. I’ve coached a civil servant who dealt with anxious thinking for over 5 years overcome it in a single transformative intensive. His anxiety affected his relationship with his spouse as well as his peace of mind and performance at work. By the end of our time together, he admitted that he had sought help from several people before, but was almost convinced that he just had to put up with it forever. He came alive with happiness as he started to see how free he was. I’ve checked-in with him over the following months to see how he was doing after our session, and the last I did, he said his challenge at the time now felt like a long forgotten dream.

Such is the nature of transformative coaching – the art and science of creating profound shifts of large magnitude in a short time that alter the course of someone’s future. 

And it all starts with you recognising and separating the two kinds of thoughts in your head. When you do, you just need to have the courage to follow the one that feels right. But that’s something for another day.