[Guest post] Visitor or immigrant

*this a guest post by Erich Jordan on “fixing your life” versus “changing your life.” This is about trying to live in a new space and handle things differently. It is about living on purpose. Avoid the quick fix and see disturbances as opportunities to challenge the way you live and make a cognitive shift. This is what coaching is about.

10 years ago, Erich went from being a Christian minister to becoming a life coach. He’s now a happy successful man, doing what he loves most, owning his own business and attracting clients. He’s passionate about helping people to reach an abundant, meaningful and productive life.

Erich is also a faraway friend living on the eastern coast of South Africa and an ex-student of mine at International Coach Academy (ICA) in 2012, writing with a strong voice on TheCoachman.co.za.

During the late nineties and the early years of the new millennium, my family and I spend many winter holidays in the land of my ancestors. I was fascinated by the connection I felt with my European family and was enjoying discovering more about where I’d come from. With the political and economic winds of change blowing through South Africa at the time, on more than one occasion my wife and I had spoken of possibly relocating to Austria. Given the age of our children they would quite easily have learnt German and been assimilated into the culture. We quickly discovered however that visiting a foreign country is quite different to making it your home.

Visitors are often people on holiday, trying to ‘fix’ something in their lives. We go on holiday to the mountains, the forests, camp next to a river or book into a luxury hotel in some romantic city to get away from the stress and responsibility of how we’ve chosen to live. We know it’s a temporary solution, a coping mechanism designed to help us endure for a little longer until once again we can take a break to recover from life. How often have we not contemplated living differently when on holiday? How attractive a simpler life in beach thongs and a straw hat becomes and yet time after time we return to our consumer driven lives that systematically continue to choke the very life out of us.Immigrants on the other hand are committed to changing the way they live, not for a week or two, but permanently. For the first time, as Ingrid and I contemplated a life in Austria, I began to notice that the same snow I so enjoyed skiing on had to be shoveled from driveways most mornings. This was furthermore not the responsibility of the local municipality, but was being manually performed by the residents themselves. We learnt about the need for separate sets of summer & winter tyres, chains for extreme conditions and how in icy conditions playing bumper cars was the name of an oft costly game.

By no means did our discoveries end in the garage as we learnt about the cost of internal heating and the price of property and faced the realization that by no means could we ever hope to match the quality of life we then enjoyed in Africa. There were obviously many advantages to be had from making the move, but no matter how we tried to spin it, we kept coming back to the same realization. Immigrating is not easy without being prepared to embrace a whole new way of living.

During a recent session with a long standing client, whom I see no more than once a month, I was reminded of how important it is to approach life in the same way. The realization I gladly reached was that after months of working with this client, she was living in a new space and handling things differently. She had been no visitor, but had employed me to help her immigrate. Not only could I see the serenity that settles on us when we are in life where we’re supposed to be, but I could see that she was living with a greater sense of awareness and clarity. She was living on purpose, making choices with reference to her values and realizing new goals with intention, commitment and action. All she needed from me was to celebrate her new citizenship. She wanted to talk about the adventure she was having shoveling snow and how well she was managing to drive on the other side of the road.

It makes all the difference in the world when we approach life this way, when rather than looking for a quick fix, we view disturbances in the force as opportunities to challenge the way we live. It’s only when the equilibrium of our belief sets is disturbed that cognitive shifts occur. Changing our praxis however requires that we first change our minds. The inner world of maps, circuitry and pathways needs to be upgraded when the referential meaning they generate is no longer valid.

This is what coaching is about; it’s not about fixing problems or applying a Band-Aid to get you through a situation. It’s about challenging personal paradigms, about asking why something is perceived as a problem in the first place and when necessary it’s about creating shifts. Through conversational questions coaches challenge the validity of the maps that form our mental models and explore what happens when the dots are connected differently. In so doing, we help clients achieve insight and that ever so satisfying ‘aha’ moment when they see things with new eyes for the first time.

Not only are the sixties remembered for the social changes they inspired, but more importantly it was during this decade that the Newtonian world view was first seriously challenged by quantum theory. Whether we like it or not, we’re all living through a social paradigm shift. Finding meaning in the modern world is often a daunting task to those still working with the old linear, mechanical view of reality? Gone are the days when outcomes were expected to be certain and predictable and limited resources were the only obstacle to science giving us complete control of everything. The alluring black or white picture of objective truth or a single correct answer to any question has fallen and lies shattered on the floor.

Without being consciously aware of it we’ve all been changed by social paradigm shifts and it’s precisely this lack of awareness that often causes us to feel like strangers in our own land. When what we’ve been taught and believe to be true no longer delivers the results it once did, it’s up to us to consciously examine the inner model of our reality, to check the accuracy of those maps and circuits that reference meaning and explore updating them in order to make better sense of the new world. Those who refuse are the visitors who will increasingly feel the need for more and more holidays to fix their problems. Those on the other hand who embrace change are the immigrants who delight in learning to shovel snow, master a foreign language and eat strange food. The question is which of these are you?