There’s a word I avoid like the plague and it’s Don’t. Don’t is a word that sucks at its job: commanding someone to not do something. You’re an autonomous human being with free will. When you’re doing something, you are doing it because you have consciously and unconsciously decided that it is the best way to make use of your time at the moment.

When I just command you to not do it, there are two problems:

1. You don’t have an incentive to not do the undesired activity
2. You don’t have an incentive to do the desired alternative

When I’m working with a client on changing a pattern of behavior, I try to address the above two. Why shouldn’t you continue engaging in your pattern? And what should you do instead?

Though I don’t always do what the client wants. Sometimes the client brings a pattern that they think they need to change, but there aren’t any internal motivators to the desire. For example I wanted to take my music more seriously because of the investment I had made in my equipment and education.

Turns out, I only wanted it because I was following the social belief that everything invested needs to pay off to the maximum degree even at your suffering because getting money’s value is more important. So instead of taking music more seriously I gave up cleanly on becoming a better musician.

So from the above 2 point list, we need to add a third bullet point:

1. You don’t understand where your desire is leading towards

The goal of my coaching is to provide you with exactly that. Every action incurs a reaction. This can be as dry as “when I drop an egg on a hot pan I get a cooked egg”, or it can be metaphysical as “when I drop an egg on a hot pan a butterfly effect happens and on the opposite side of the world a chicken does a hiccup”.

When I do an action there are certain guaranteed outcomes and certain probabilistic outcomes. For example when I drop my pen it’s guaranteed to drop because of gravity, but it can probabilistic-ly annoy my wife since it makes an unpleasant sound. The more times I drop it, the more likely the annoyance will become.

Suppose we’re working on eating habits. My client always ends up with a heartburn at night because of over-eating. They don’t want a heartburn therefore they want to change the habit of over-eating.

I could tell them to stop over-eating, “don’t over-eat!”. But a kindergartener can come up with that logic. I am hopefully more helpful than a kindergartener, so I would approach it like this: “Suppose my coaching is ineffective or you haven’t met me. What do you think will happen as you continue over-eating and having heartburns?”.

The stomach is a delicate organ, when it can’t recover sustained damage it will develop ulcers or gastritis. Can I guarantee that? No, because there is individual variance, but it is likely that it will happen. Now, even though it’s up to probability, is that a direction in life they generally want to head towards?

When we ask our intention, “what do you want to purposefully do?”, they might say “I want to stop eating when I’m not quite full”. But what do we think will realistically happen when we do that? Of course, the immediate benefit is that there won’t be heartburns, but because the body’s karma is used to being full they’ll be aggressively hungry.

Karma is fairly complex and is rarely one-dimensional; so not only will it make them hungry, it will trigger a bunch of other neural pathways related to scarcity and forced restraint. They will want to exercise the freedom to eat, instead of being confined to the restriction of not being able to eat.

Which gives us an opportunity to revisit the original direction: when we continue over-eating and having heartburns, we will at least enjoy the hell out of the freedom to eat. We have to pay the price of relinquishing the freedom to stop eating when full, but the karma will have an easier time than trying to change dietary habits.

So now we’re met with a more detailed picture of our potential pathway:

1. When we continue over-eating and having heartburns, we’ll get negative health effects but we’ll be free to eat whatever we want.
2. When we introduce dietary habit change, we’ll get positive health effects but we’ll feel super bad about not being able to eat whatever we want.

We THINK we need to choose the health effects, obviously. But is that necessarily the case? What if you’re moving soon and want to enjoy your town’s favorite foods before you leave? What if you’re visiting your grandma while she’s able to cook for you and want to enjoy a good time of eating with her? What if we’re bulking up and need to eat that much food in order to foster muscle growth?

The best way is always guided by CONTEXT. There is no unilaterally good or bad pathway to take in life. If it is pain management we need to prioritize, then we need to willingly make the choice to be uncomfortable because at least we won’t be in physical pain. If it is emotional satisfaction we are trying to achieve because we’ve been depriving ourselves of that for the majority of our lifetime, then we need to willingly make the choice to be in heartburn.

All this to say, you won’t ever hear the word “don’t” from me when I give you coaching. I’m always going to lead you to think about where you want to be headed in life, and present to you your future options depending on how you want to live your life.

Then you will make a decision to follow a path. Some times it will be easy to follow that path because you feel like doing it. But you won’t always feel like doing it, and the more you follow the path the more you will feel an initial surge of resistance. I will help you understand that resistance so you can go about your path even though you don’t feel like it. Then before you know it, you will look back and be surprised at how much your life changed.

I am taking 1 month and 6 month clients. Email me at billy@julylifecoach.com to get started.

113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205
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