When I started down the road of personal growth, I was fully expecting a Fairy Tale. You know, girl meets her fabulous self, falls in love with her brilliant qualities and lives happily ever after. Seriously, I had no idea! The first inkling things weren't going as planned was when I discovered shame, anger and plain laziness ruling the roost. Instead of loving myself, I was finding it awfully hard to even like myself. Of course the only solution was to grit my teeth and strive harder to get rid of all the bad bits or failing that, to deny, deny, deny they were there at all. Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, that didn’t go so well.

Ultimately, I discovered it is very hard to be yourself when most of the time you are trying to be someone else. When things aren't how we like them, we have a tendency to fly off in our heads and try to magic it away through sheer mental effort. When reality isn't moulding itself to our expectations, it's easy to unwittingly create a self-fulfilling prophecy of frustration and disappointment with ourself and our life. We blame and justify, pretend and deny and it's a difficult dynamic to break. The unhappier we are the more we try to change and the tighter and more tense we get. This tension makes it harder to make that call, lose that weight, and generally motivate ourselves to do what we know we need to do.

Sometimes when we mess up so badly, at that point when we can no longer pretend we are holding it together, we start seeing what we are really made of. Neither frog nor prince, we are simply a person doing their best in a world where things don’t always go as hoped. If you take a deep breath and show up in spite of everything, if you hold your seat as your emotions rage, you start getting to know who you are underneath the surface.

This is the work of coaching, it is it about learning who you are and that you are stronger than you think. Knowing this, achieving goals becomes not only possible, but likely. So when everything is falling apart, when our dreams and hopes collapse, we begin to see that all that is left to save us is the hero inside. Remember that hero is you.