Listen to Diane and Coach Meg here:
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Segment 1 and
Segment 2
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Segment 2
At the beginning of the year I asked coaches in the Wellcoaches community to submit a list of 10 ways in which they want to thrive in 2009. Diane is dealing with some challenging health issues and asked me for a series of coaching sessions designed to improve her health and life satisfaction.
[Note that Diane's first session occurred in 2009.]
In response to our first coaching session, Diane wrote a powerful letter called an “A Letter.”
The idea for this exercise came from the extraordinary book,
The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund (Roz) and Ben Zander. The practice of writing an “A Letter” began when Ben was teaching at the New England Conservatory and noticed the high levels of pressure that students put themselves under to excel in his class. Concerned about the well-being of his students, Roz and Ben came up with the idea of announcing that he would give each student an “A” at the beginning of the class year.
Describing his passion for this process, Ben says, “I am especially interested in the person s/he will become by next year. I am interested in the attitude, feelings, and worldview of that person who will have done all s/he wished to do or become everything s/he wanted to be. I tell them to fall passionately in love with the person they are describing in their letter.”
This appreciative look into the future quiets the voices in our head that question our capabilities. Giving ourselves an “A” allows us to focus on what we would do to please ourselves, to meet our own expectations, rather than the expectations of others. And, of course, in the coaching relationship, it demonstrates that the dreams of the client, not the coach’s dreams for the client, are important.
Roz describes the reasoning behind the “A Letter” in this way, “Life evolves out of the story we tell. If you grew up believing you could reach your goals, you would be eager to set goals and you would eventually reach them no matter how difficult. If I grew up believing that I would inevitably fail, I would be reluctant to try new things and lose heart along the way. You and I would lead very different lives, not because of different circumstances, but because we were living in different stories. This means that the obstacles we encounter are seen as obstacles not challenges because of our beliefs about them. The way to overcome them is to change your story. The letter is an exercise in the power of story‐telling to enhance your life.”
What is the story you will write about yourself? Next week, I’ll provide the instructions for writing your own “A Letter”…
Margaret Moore, also known as “Coach Meg,” is CEO and founder of Wellcoaches Corp. in Wellesley, MA and can be reached by email at:
coachmeg[at]wellcoaches.com
http://www.coachmeg.com
http://www.wellcoaches.com
http://www.harvardcoaching.org