Anxious feelings coaching focuses on helping individuals change their relationship with their thoughts and feelings so these experiences have less control over their lives. Unlike approaches that aim to eliminate anxiety, coaching helps people to live a full and meaningful life despite feeling anxious. Coaching acknowledges that anxiety is a natural human emotion and seeks to empower people to take effective action in their lives regardless of these feelings.
Coaching: Changing the Relationship with Thoughts and Feelings
Coaching helps people understand that their thoughts and feelings are not facts and need not control their actions. This involves learning to:
- Observe thoughts and feelings without judgement, recognizing them as mental events rather than threats.
- Accept thoughts and feelings without needing to change or control them.
- Detach from thoughts and feelings, seeing them as transient experiences that do not define who a person is.
- Reframe thoughts and feelings in a way that reduces their power.
By changing how they relate to their thoughts and feelings, individuals can reduce the intensity and impact of their anxiety. This change helps people to see their thoughts and feelings as part of their experience, not the whole of their experience, allowing them to make choices that are not dictated by their anxiety.
Reclaiming Control Through Coaching, ACT and SFBT
Coaching, along with approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), offers ways for people to regain control in their lives without trying to get rid of anxiety. These approaches focus on:
- Identifying values: Coaching helps individuals identify what is truly important to them, clarifying their goals and the direction they want to move in. This focus on personal values helps to provide a sense of purpose, and helps individuals to move towards meaningful actions that are not dictated by anxiety.
- Accepting reality: These approaches emphasize acceptance of what is, rather than struggling against unwanted experiences. This helps to reduce the “anxiety about anxiety,” and to redirect energy from battling emotions to taking action.
- Taking Action: Coaching encourages individuals to focus on what they can control – their actions. This emphasis on action empowers them to make choices that are aligned with their values. Coaching works from the principle that a person’s behaviour has the most impact on how they feel.
- Finding Competence: SFBT focuses on a person’s strengths, resources and exceptions (times when the anxiety was less intense). This helps to build confidence and resilience.
- Solution-focused approach: SFBT does not focus on the problem but the preferred future and practical strategies for moving towards it, giving people agency and focusing on positive change, rather than the things they are worried about.
- Empowerment: Coaches do not tell clients what to do. They support clients to develop their own tools and strategies to manage their feelings for themselves, giving the client control over their own emotional life. This gives the client control over their own mind, which in turn improves their confidence.
- Focus on the present and future: Coaches help people to be mindful of the present moment and make choices about the future that they want. Coaches encourage people to take steps forward, rather than dwelling on the past.
- Experiential Learning: Coaching prioritizes action and direct experience over talking about the problem. This helps the client to gain confidence and to see that they do not have to be controlled by their feelings.
- Letting go of Control: By allowing anxious thoughts and feelings to exist without needing to change or get rid of them, individuals break the cycle of avoidance and control. They stop “feeding the anxiety monster” by struggling with it and instead redirect their energy to creating the life they want.
Summary
Anxious feelings coaching helps people to change their relationship with their thoughts and feelings so that these experiences have less power over their actions. Coaching emphasizes acceptance and encourages people to take actions that are guided by their values, rather than driven by their anxiety. By focusing on action, and empowering clients to make their own choices, coaching, ACT and SFBT enable people to reclaim control and live a full and meaningful life, even when feeling anxious.
If anxious feelings have been controlling your life for some time now, you’ve tried various approaches but seem to make little progress perhaps it’s time to think about working with a coach. If you’d like to explore how this could work for you please get in contact.