Transcript from the Christian Life Coach Collective Podcast:
Episode #6
Let's talk about self-leadership and what it has to do with life coaching.
First of all, self-leadership is the ability and intention to influence yourself in spirit, soul, and body. It's nourishing and inviting the spirit within you to rise up and lead your soul and your body, which is what the Bible refers to as the flesh. It's choosing to navigate your paradigm of beliefs and thoughts, emotions and feelings, and then the actions and behaviors that stem from them.
Self-leadership comes from doing the inner work and that in turn affects the outer works. In Matthew 23, the Bible talks about cleaning the inside of the cup and when you do it, the outside is clean without you having to worry about it, because what's inside flows into the outside. What's happening in your spirit can inform your soul and your body. But if your spirit's not leading, then what's happening in your soul ends up leading you. So we can bless and nourish the spirit that lives inside of us to rise up and lead our flesh. There will be resistance there, but it is possible and it's what the Bible calls us to.
This is how it happens.
You have to consider what's going on in the inner realm of your life and how you're managing it, rather than Instagramming your outer life only. The Pharisees who persecuted Jesus had filtered lives because their belief systems were limited and deceptive. They were so comfortable and prideful about the outside of their cup that they couldn't see how dirty the inside was. Don't get stuck in this trap.
First of all, your enemy wants you to get stuck and die there because a focus on the outside will always lead you into every kind of snare and keep you from becoming a threat to his plans. So he wants you there. Second of all, how do you bring the kingdom of heaven to earth? How do you fulfill the Great Commission? How do you serve God and love others if you're stuck in a filtered life? Those belief systems, the comfort and the pride, and everything else therein have to be challenged.
You might want to know what this has to do with my coach calling. What's this got to do with business? Well, there are two major things about it, and that's why I'm making sure that this is one of the first 10 episodes I put out. One because I care about your soul as a coach and as a person, and your spirit. I want to lead you into truth, this is something I'm passionate about that God's giving me. He's given this to me to share. First and foremost, I use it with my clients. I use it in my family life, my house, my ministry, and in my personal life and walk.
If you only ever listen to one episode and never take another thing from anything I share, this is the one thing that I'd want you to be empowered by and aware of, because I believe it's part of what creates great freedom in our lives and in our clients. Your soul is like an ecosystem, the internal realm. It's made up of your paradigm of beliefs, imaginations, perspectives, and values, and they all culminate and inform your thought life, and then your emotions and feelings and your will. They're all affecting one another and they're interconnected in their operation. Then they lead us to take action to experience more of what we want, enjoy, and value, or action to avoid what we consider negative, uncomfortable, or painful.
I'm going to introduce you to an incredible practice that will transform your life, your relationships, goals, and future, not to mention your coaching. It's something the Lord gave me one day, built upon years of prayer process, coaching others, and my own personal growth. I knew of this concept before He gave me the name of it because I know other people teach it in varying degrees, but I'd never heard it taught in the context of Jesus and this kingdom life we’re called to.
I've been pursuing God about it for a long time and one day I heard God speak to me, the word Pearl, and it's this.
P is for paradigm this encompasses your narrative belief system that is formed in childhood and weaves its way through your life, regardless of how true it is. And then your beliefs inform your perspective, your values, and your thoughts and drive you more than you probably realize. So your paradigm and the thought life inside of it inform the next stage, which is
E for emotion Emotions are biochemical responses to your thoughts. Then your brain interprets that emotion and then we get feelings. Emotions and feelings are two sides of the same coin. One is an outer, more physical response, and the other is an inner, more mental response.
For example, think of a time when you felt anger in your body, or fear, depending on the circumstance. Your brain will take that anger, that biochemical response in your physical body, and interpret it, and then you experience a feeling of being violated or being betrayed, or maybe a desire for vengeance. You're having a physical response as an emotion, and then your brain is turning it into a feeling, and those are connected. They need permission to process through. So your paradigm informs the emotions and feelings. Those lead to
A, which is for action The emotions and feelings that you want to pursue or avoid cause you to make a choice, to take action of some sort, and that even includes any sort of inaction, because that's still a choice you're making, consciously or subconsciously. This ends up giving you the next step, which is
R for results Your actions always have results. Everything done has an outcome, positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy, Kingdom or not, Kingdom for you or against you. The culmination of your daily results over time leads to
L, which is for legacy That's the end of the chapter, and at one point it's going to be the end of your story. It'll be the collection of books that they read about your life when you're gone. That's your legacy. And now, if you're not intentional about how you want your story to end, you won't know what kind of results you need to achieve daily, often to create any legacy.
Without awareness of the results you need to create, you will not be intentional about what actions you choose. Without intentional action, you will let your soul have its way with your days in life and end up looking back through the lens of being a victim of circumstance, when in reality, you're the only one who can do anything about you.
Nobody else has control over you.
They're having trouble having control over themselves. Not even God, because He's given you the gift of free will because He wants us to freely choose Him. That's why it's a gift of free will. No event can cause your demise, no story can truly trap you and no limiting belief or lie can stand in the way of the truth that you belong to God and that His love and favor cascade over you. That's why self-leadership today and every day following is life-changing.
Becoming mindful of your inner life and renewing your mind, leaning on God's understanding rather than your own, and being a doer of the Word, not just a reader these are the things that bring true peace and abundant life.
Did you know that you do not have to choose to keep your beliefs and you don't have to believe every thought? You can decide to not believe what your childhood narrative formed to help you survive your little world. You can decide that you're good enough and that you matter and you're unique and special, that you are protected and provided for, that you're taken care of, that you won't be betrayed, that you are worth it, that your needs matter. You can believe all of those things. You can line up your belief system with the narrative of the Gospel of Jesus. You can choose to do that, regardless of how little you have been telling you to believe for decades now, and because what you believe informs your thoughts.
You need to do this inner work, and it's not just taking captive your thoughts, but it's the whole paradigm. To take captive your thoughts or your belief systems means to confine them and challenge them. Stop the belief system, stop the thought, confine it so it doesn't get to have any power. Until I decide to give it to you. Open it up, crack it open, slice it open, and look at it and say what's inside this? What is driving this belief and thought? Is it true? Does God say it's true? And if God doesn't say it's true, do I want to keep believing it because it's easier just to keep believing a lie? Or do I want to do the work of renewing my mind, putting on the helmet of salvation, taking my thoughts and beliefs and imaginations captive, and asking God to really infuse the mind of Christ that I've been given, make it reality and tangible to me, and do the hard work daily to live from that place.
You can choose that.
That's what your will's purpose is, and your will is free to make its choice on the daily, choosing to be for God or against Him, for yourself and the truth or against it. You go after this and you will find the peace and fulfillment and joy and freedom that you've been longing for. You will not need to buffer anymore by avoiding pain with external pleasures, because you'll be running on the river of God's pleasures and your soul will want to surrender to His goodness.
The Bible talks a lot about our beliefs and thoughts. Like in James, he talks about how they can lead us to sin and death if we don't manage them well and quickly cut them off when they need to be. The Word tells us how to take them captive and to set the eyes of our soul on things above, to meditate on what is true, praiseworthy and good being, self-aware, living intentionally managing your paradigm, operating in the superpower of self-care, developing confidence which comes from taking action, and learning to believe in yourself as the incredible person that God created are all parts of self-leadership and the healthy development of your soul's ecosystem.
From this place, you can have more impact on the world around you and affect your spheres of influence more profoundly. If your paradigm is out of alignment with God's Truth, it causes interpretations to be out of whack. Then you end up pursuing things that aren't good for you or avoiding things that you need to deal with. Then your actions and your behavior, which connect your interpretations to what you communicate to others, deeply impact your relationships personally and your ability to coach well professionally.
Again, self-leadership impacts all areas of life and emotional health, and it's a major part of a coach's life. The ability to have awareness of what's going on in your paradigm and govern yourself well is paramount to being a coach who's equipped to teach others to do the same.
As a coach, you're there to teach and guide your clients to take ownership of their life stories, no matter what niche you work with, bossing them around or telling them what to do will never have lasting results if they aren't part of the process, because no one takes ownership of what they don't invest in themselves.
Nobody sustains what they're not part of creating.
It's less than enjoyable, it's not attractive and, honestly, it's just not how we as humans work.
The Pearl Practice is a powerful way to live your own life and to have an incredible impact on the lives and success of your clients. If you're self-aware, if you're pursuing self-control and leading your life well, the right clients will see the fruit. They'll be drawn to the light coming from your life and to me, that's ultimately the goal as a Christian Life Coach, to bring hope and shine light in the darkness. So keep listening for more on the Pearl Practice. I'll be coaching some people live through it to help you understand better, and in the Greenhouse Training and Certification Course, we'll be going so much deeper into this and getting some real-time practice about how to cultivate the pearls in our lives.
For today I'll end by saying that you are a powerful story maker. You have every possible opportunity to turn to the Lord and ask Him to help you. Leave behind stories that tell you you're a victim of circumstance, a victim of the choices of other people, and a victim of events that have taken place in your life.
You have the power to put the pencil in your hand, to lead and govern your soul well, to nourish your spirit, to rise up and lead you, and to write a story in which you are the hero. Your coaching journey begins here, and the transformation you experience will lead you into a passion and a calling to be a guide to others, because how can you experience Jesus like that in your life and not go tell the world?
Make sure you go to sterlingandstonementoring.com to get more information about the Greenhouse Course. If you feel called by God to get trained as a life coach, it will be one of the most powerful things you can do, both for your story and your legacy, as well as the world around you.
***VIParts of this episode to refer to:
The PEARL practice
Paradigm, your beliefs, thoughts, perceptions, imaginations
Emotion, biochemical response (physical) and feelings (internal)
Action, driven by the desire to pursue or avoid emotions/ feelings
Results, all action and inaction cause results
Legacy, the culmination of your ongoing results
Matthew 23:26 "Blind Pharisee! First, clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean."
James 1:14,15 "but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death."
James 1:22 "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."
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