I’ve come to really appreciate the value of coaching in my self improvement journey. I’ve found that if I’m going to invest in myself, spending a little bit of money to pay for a coach/advisor is an easy tradeoff. How can I be taking something seriously if I’m not working with a coach?
My coaching stack
Here’s the coaching that I currently have as of this writing (Oct 2023).
👫 Relationship/attachment coach
This has been extremely important to me after going through a break-up / end of a long-term relationship this year. I came to understand I have a dismissive avoidant attachment style and it plagues all of my relationships (romantic, familial, and social). The issues may have stemmed from childhood but now being in my 30s it is my responsibility to take ownership of them and fix them. This is probably the most important thing for me to continue to work on to set myself up for happiness going forward. I’ve been working with and highly recommend Sarah Cohan.
Some of the things we work on:
- Subconscious reprogramming
- It is incredible how malleable the brain is. This one thing has been the most effective and changing any limiting belief/core wound
- Somatic meditations
- One of the main characteristics of Dismissive Avoidants is a lack of emotional intelligence. These somatic meditations help me to tune in and understand what emotions I’m feeling
- Boundary Setting
- Extremely important for being secure in relationships is setting boundaries appropriately. I used to think I was heavily introverted — but it turns out I was just not setting any boundaries and people pleasing, and thus making social situations uncomfortable and energy draining for me. The real me is probably leans towards extroverted.
- Needs Tracking
- This helps to identify who I am as a person and what I need and how I can get my needs met in different situations
🥦 Nutritionist/Body coach
I’ve been using MyBodyTutor for a year now. Results have been pretty remarkable (I’ve dropped from appx. ~18% body fat to <10% body fat(!)). I’m the fittest I’ve ever been.
With MyBodyTutor (and my coach Drake Kirkwood), I report what I’ve eaten and what exercise/movement I’ve done daily.
At times this can be repetitive, but the real value I’ve found is when I’ve hit certain plateaus or have obstacles in the way, Drake can help me navigate them. An example is I’ve been mired with small injuries throughout the year I’ve been working with MyBodyTutor. Being resilient to those injuries and coming up with new game plans to work around them or change up a workout plan entirely if injuries are too prevalent has been super helpful.
🧬 Life Coach
My life coach and I just kind of figure things out together. It’s probably the least targeted coaching I’m doing. The conversations are full of nuggets of wisdom and help me stay motivated and disciplined towards whatever I’m working on.
Some of the things we work on:
- Goal Setting
- What does “success” look like across different areas of my life in 6 months? 1 year? 5 years?
- What are the current goals I’m working on, what progress am I making towards them
- Value Setting
- What are the values I want to live my life by?
- These are the current values I most resonate with and try to live life according to:
- Integrity
- Relentless Self Improvement
- Work hard / Do things the right way
- Playfulness
- Accountability
- My life coach helps me bias for action by assigning my “homework” we talked about during the call.
- Life Decisions
- We spend a good chunk of time going through different life decisions both small and big. Such as:
- Do I want kids?
- Where do I want to live?
- How do I want to spend my vacation days?
❤️🩹 IFS Therapy
“But Francis, therapy isn’t coaching!” you might say. Yes this is technically true, but from the purpose of the “job to be done”, I hire the therapist for a pretty similar reason and so I lump it in with coaching. I do therapy mostly in relation to the aforementioned core wounds from my childhood.
I’ve tried a lot of therapy to this point, to varying effectiveness. I hit a plateau with the traditional CBT talk therapy after a while. I had addressed some of the basic low hanging fruit stuff and it just didn’t feel like I was making much progress. Then I found IFS therapy.
IFS models the brain as having multiple parts. Whereas CBT treats the individual as the smallest entity, and thus all actions are derived from the same entity, IFS explains that there’s different parts to each of us. This resonated a lot with me. There’s a part of me that is a huge procrastinator, and separately there’s a part of me that is super driven. CBT has trouble reconciling the two, with IFS this is easily explainable. It’s a more flexible architecture/design of our brain, so it’s probably more accurate in my opinion.
With IFS comes “parts work” which means communicating with the various parts inside of me. If you are familiar with “multiple personality disorder”, IFS is essentially admitting that ALL of us have multiple parts or personalities, just the distinction between them isn’t as extreme as someone with multiple personality disorder.
I’d recommend No Bad Parts if you want to get started with IFS.
⚖️ Other
I have other more niche coaches that are not quite as interesting.
Golf
I both take lessons in person and do online swing evaluation via The Golf Room Everywhere.
Jumping
I have a goal of being able to dunk, I am currently improving my jump ability and form via the Athletic Truth Group (knees over toes guy).
🔮 Future
In the future I want to do more coaching in other areas. Anywhere I can get coaching to accelerate my growth of a key area of life, or for a targeted reason, I’d probably do it!
Career
I’m currently focused on core personal stuff as that is been the more pressing thing recently but at some point I want to be actively getting coaching for different ares of my career.
Writing
I want to make more content on the internet. I think being a decent writer is apart of that. The Rite of Passage course by David Perell has produced a lot of great writers.