Garfield on DYI Life Coaching

Life Coaching is for people who are mostly sane, normally neurotic people who want to move on with our lives in constructive ways. Life Coaches, on the other hand, are dominated by people who have opinions and don’t know what they want to do with those opinions. Mentors often fall into the category of life coaching, but the presumption there is that the mentor has your interests in mind and is not following an agenda that merely justifies their own poor life choices.

I think a lot of people can do this themselves, perhaps with the aid of a qualified therapist, but without the assistance of a life coach whose credentials, education and experience are very limited at best.

So here are my thoughts on a Saturday morning about life coaching yourself. The first step is taking a ruthless inventory of your life in which you identify all negative and positive outcomes.  If they were negative then contemplate what was it about them that you perceive is wrong. If they are positive, then contemplate what was it about them that you perceive is right. Now you have your basic standards of right and wrong. Use them as your guide posts.

This plan may or may not work for you. One way you can make sure it doesn’t work is by skimming, cheating on the answers etc. If you think you are unable to be ruthless enough in your self inventory, then go to someone who knows, loves and respects you and ask them for help. Simple example. When considering two failed marriages in 2001 and other failed relationships, it became obvious to me in my ruthless inventory that the outcomes were remarkably similar. Two possibilities arose: one that the world is filled with crazy people whom you can’t avoid and the other, recognizing the consistency with which these negative outcomes appeared, was that the common denominator was me — not them.

I realized I was attracted to people whose flaws were fundamentally unacceptable to me. The outcome was obvious but I ignored it out of laziness and stubbornness. I made a list of what I could have looked for in business and personal relationships and what I wanted now and realized that the people who would have been good for me were getting a knee-jerk reaction from me as “boring” whereas the people whose drama would make my life miserable and filled with betrayal were somehow exciting and attractive. So on my list I wrote I want to find an exciting path with a person with their own good ideas and their own thoughts and their own independence who possessed a modicum of sanity and a desire to avoid unnecessary drama. When I was done, I had a pretty long list and within weeks was dating a girl who became my wife in a wonderful marriage, may she rest in piece (I still miss her).

Next do a checklist of things you feel you should get accomplished in the next five years and take money out of the equation. Who do you want to be and how do you wish to see yourself? Today, to use and overused phrase, is the first day of the rest of your life.

Now use this checklist borrowed or paraphrased from a variety of courses including the late Johnny Carson, Stephen Covey etc. This is important because the decision to stand and fight must be a total commitment even if it is subject to change later on when you have more information — whether it is for your home, your spouse or otherwise.

1. Get educated on life’s options. Start reading fiction and non-fiction to widen your perceptions of opportunities of ways to be different (if you want to be different).
2. Start making small decisions and test your decisions in small increments, so you don’t repeat past errors with different wrapping paper or commit new errors that you could have avoided if you took it a piece at a time. As my former wife Joyce was fond of saying, look for what is there and if you don’t like it “nip it in the bud.” It’s less painful than the prolonged withdrawal from an uncomfortable relationship or path that  you’ve been following for years.
3. Correct your course of action based upon feedback whether you like what you are hearing or reading or not. Jack Canfield is fond of reminding us that neither a jet flight nor a cruising ship is ever “on course.” You don’t have to be exactly right. You need to be generally right and make course corrections zig zagging over the projected course you intended. You’ll get there just like any cruise-ship, jet or even space ship without ever having been exactly on course.
4. So if you’ve started out the door without a fight against the pretender lenders, think again and make sure you are doing what you want to do. There is no right answer. But part of the your information is that you literally giving a gift to the banks that should be given to your children or heirs. If you decide to fight and you or your lawyer have mucked up the case with too many admissions of things that turned out not to be true, and the judge is sticking you with your admissions, then you need to think about whether you want to continue the fight or to change venues and  file a complaint with the OCC review or other regulatory agencies, file a complaint with state agencies and a demand a hearing etc. But get advice from someone who really knows what they are talking about. Most lawyers are looking at the accounting provided by the subservicer and even there the subservicer is only telling half the story — not reporting that they are continuing to make payments along with others on your loan despite the fact that you have stopped — perhaps because the loan has already been paid off. Here is an example of new information: your loan might have already been paid down in principal and interest without a “principal reduction” or modification. Consider that when you consider what you are doing when you make the decision or stand and fight or move on and leave.
5. Ignore unsolicited advice: usually from people justifying their own screwed up decision making in their own life and trying to get you to agree that the world sucks and there is nothing you can do about it, or that you should play strictly by the rules (like the Banks did?) And by the way don’t give unsolicited advice or criticisms unless you are ready for a marathon to pick up the pieces (see books by Sidney Simon on negative criticism).
6. Johnny Carson the late night talk show host was asked the secret to personal financial success and his answer was simple: never feel trapped in a career. You can always move on and you can always clean up the debris from the last career while you are pursuing the new one.
7. Just Say No: If your gut tells you something is wrong do NOT proceed and don’t beat yourself up if you later decide that you “should have” taken some opportunity. You don’t know how that would have actually turned out if YOU had been there. If your brain doesn’t understand the “opportunity” you’ll never make it work, even if it is a personal relationship. If you don”t understand it well enough to explain it to someone else and answer some simple questions about it, this is not a path you should take.
8. Continue to research and educate yourself — it is the only path that will lead you to vital, promising and rewarding results. It is no less important than breathing. Like if you are buying bargain properties in the US without consulting KNOWLEDGEABLE professionals who can look after your interests — getting CLEAR title and right to possession without later challenge in 2-5 years, you are ignoring information that is all over the newspapers, magazines, radio and TV about the corruption of title in the U.S.
9. Say YES: Take a risk if the other components feel like they are in place. It is an abyss — a dark unknown — but those who follow it are glad they took that one more risk. Whether it is calling a relative you have not spoken with in years, following a new career path or starting a new business, this is the step that ends paralysis caused by the trauma and shock of financial stress and relationship stress that happens in households.
10. And the last thing is the the most important: get your own information without it being filtered by “someone you trust”, the media or any other news source. Dig deeper, give yourself time to think about what you are reading. process it ( it might take days or weeks). It is ONLY then that you can correctly use the the steps above. With the internet children are getting unfiltered information rather than just hearing from their parents and teachers. the world is changing (from my friend Don Streets).

Get help if you need it or want it. A good professional counselor, therapist etc can help you the process of grief, trauma and disappointment faster than you can do it yourself.  But in terms of making life choices, it is all up to you.

Neil F Garfield 7/28/12

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