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The basis of my work and much of my life is trust. How often do we find ourselves in situations where we have to trust other people? I trust that the electrician who wired up my house had been trained and knew how to complete the job so that I could use electrical items in my house without injuring myself, my family and friends. I trust that when I travel using the road systems, others know about the rules of this system and don’t cause a head on collision by driving on the wrong side of the road. I have no reason to trust these people, I have never met them and only base this trust on what I see around me and what I am told by others. But without this trust I would find it very difficult to live in this current social environment.

I trust people to make decisions based upon either moving away from something they don’t want or moving towards something they do want. When my life is full of the situations and opportunities I do want and has nothing in it I don’t want, I am not motivated to make any changes. But as life has a tendency to change without asking you first, I have to accept that dealing with change will become a regular skill I need to develop. Clinging onto old ideas and concepts that no longer fit the current reality are often at the core of our difficulties and discomforts.

When we trust each other it creates the opportunity for cooperation. We can only successfully engage in joint activities when we trust each other to do the right thing. I use this idea in my work and in my life. I feel that people inherently know what they want and where they will find true fulfillment and sustainable satisfaction. When I see someone in difficulty in any area of their life I believe that I am seeing someone who has lost trust in their own ability to deal with the difficulties in life. When we feel that there is no way out of a difficult or uncomfortable situation, we find it tends to colour everything in our lives.

In my work I attempt to support people in creating a space where we can review their current situation in an environment of trust and respect. This helps us stand back a little from the immediate situation and take a wider view, enabling us to identify the skills and resources needed to deal with any situation and helping us to move towards finding a way forwards. This doesn’t mean we can always avoid painful situations and live in a state of permanent bliss, but it does allow us to learn to deal with the inevitable changes that life involves with the minimum damage to ourselves and those around us. Once we develop this ability, we can then start to take more control over our actions and reactions and make decisions based around the values that we find important.

If we base our life and our decisions upon sets of values that have meaning to us, then we have tools that work in all areas of our lives. If we react to each change as if it were not connected to the greater whole, we run the risk of repeating negative and inappropriate behaviours and causing pain and distress for ourselves and those around us.

So, if you have some spare time over the next few minutes, hours, weeks, months………… sit back and try and pin down the values you base your life upon. Once you have these in place you can start to move from the life you feel you should be living (often based upon values you receive from family, friends and society), to the life you could be living based upon the values you chose for yourself.

If you feel you can’t trust anything or anyone and that you are not clear about what it is at the core your life that you can rely upon, give me a shout and we can talk this through. Take care, Mark.

If anything is to have value in my life it has to involve some honest truths. I can pretend that things have value to me, but this is not sustainable beyond the short term. When ever I make a decision that has any important impact upon my life and that of those around me, it has to based upon and be congruent with the values that mean most to me. People often describe things as their values, such as family or wealth. They may know  what that means to them but I find it useful to drill those down to their abstract meanings. What is it about  having your family with and behind you that is valuable to you? A feeling of acceptance? A feeling of belonging? And wealth, what does that give you or allow you to do? A sense of independence? A sense of security? So, using this approach I would change the values of family and health to; being accepted, belonging, independence and security.

This same exercise will work out differently for each person, but I want to establish what I mean when I use the term “your values”. Rather than the things in your life, they are the feelings you get from having those things.

In coaching, setting and moving towards desired and defined goals is the basic aim of the exercise. Sounds easy enough. Someone says my goal is to be rich and we just identify some actions required to achieve that. The most lucrative industries are the sex trade, the arms trade, the drugs trade and gambling. So pick your role, pimp, prostitute, gun runner, drug runner or bookie? Maybe that goal of getting rich needs to be qualified. Maybe the feelings you imagine you will get from having enormous wealth can be acheived through some other route? The point is that if your goals do not fit with your values you will either find that you struggle to achieve them or if you do achieve them then they do not provide the satisfaction you initially imagined. So getting your values lined up with your goal is an essential early task in any coaching exercise.

I am always happy to see someone pin down and align their values with their goals, even though that can sometimes be a long and convoluted process. Once it is set, it is amazing how quickly and easily people move forwards. The whole process of coaching relies upon an increase in self awareness and adopting sustainable changes to allow each individual to access and use their true and natural talents. However that sounds to you, it is great to see it happen and that is one of the drives that keeps me practicing and learning as a coach. Thanks for reading this, feel free to leave a comment, Mark.