I remember the feeling of “coming out” to the world as a life coach. It was an announcement on Instagram saying, I’m certified as a life coach and I’m going to be practicing!. I was fortunate because I came from a lineage of a change worker and half of my family was already practicing, I just joined them.
But even with all of these blessings I do remember feeling vulnerable. Especially because people know of me a certain way. They know me from college as that guy who did computer science and really was into music. They know me from jiujitsu as that guy who just shows up a lot. They know me from work as the coworker who kinda keeps to himself.
Now I’m telling them, Hey I have this new identity and I’m doing this thing. And I’ll be honest, there was a part of me that felt embarrassed by “doing this thing”. It’s complex and I can’t really pinpoint it to one thing, but it’s like a mixture of
- feeling like I’m saying “I’m better than you and I know what to do with life”
- at the same time I’m practicing in an unregulated field instead of a more legit one like therapy
- being a bit of a performative impostor that yaps on about positivity and good things in life
- somebody in my circle will probably know I’m not a perfect human being or worse they’ll know my flaw, and they’ll think I’m a hypocrite
And so on.
For me, I just kept on moving forward because honestly: I really wanted to break even from my investment. I’ve gotten coaching, I’ve felt tons of internal shifts and I needed to prove to myself that I can. That motivation was enough for me to go on and practice with the help of a coach I hired for myself.
Fast forward a few years and I’ve met a lot of clients who have this experience a lot worse than me. They have very critical family members who actively put them down when they talk about their line of work. They have online trolls who keep harassing them by following them incessantly. They blew up with a viral content and since then they keep getting compared from what made them famous.
These factors make you feel unsafe to create content. It’s like your parents are taking you to a playground with broken glass and needles around, and they’re asking me why I’m not having the time of my life when they took me to a playground.
How do you create safety for yourself? One way is to just pick a completely different platform or go online with a different identity. VTubers are common these days and you can have a completely animated identity that’s not really actual 3D you. Another way is to block a bunch of people. But unfortunately none of these ways are actual solutions to the core problem of, hmm. What?
What is the actual problem here? That there are other people who may disapprove of me. That there are other people who want me to feel bad. That there are other people who think I’m fake. As long as those people exist, or worse: as long as there is a possibility of those people existing, I can never thrive and be myself.
I don’t like thinking like that.
Here’s where a mistake can happen. When we work on inner safety, we think of inner safety like a button. We learn how to access this treasured button so we can finally press it, and once we press it it’s on for good. We never have to deal with it again. Clients and students can think of changes in this binary on/off model, and because they don’t seem to have access to that switch something must not be working.
But the actual work on inner safety is a conscious exploration on why we came to think this way. The story of your inner safety is like a book with many chapters. Take one chapter out and a big chunk of the story doesn’t make sense. We have to approach inner safety work like working on chapters.
So I will ask you. If you create content the way you want to right now on the platform you ideally want to post on, what is the problem? Who will see? why is that a problem? After exploring those, instead of solving this issue by trying to remove the problem we take the route of UNDERSTANDING the problem.
For example, I want to create a video of me from the third person perspective. I feel a little vulnerable because I feel like third person videos are so fake, like I’m the one setting the camera up and I’m pretending someone else is shooting and I’m acting, pretending this is a genuine experience.
Normally I would just not create a video from the third person perspective and just continue to shoot in selfie mode. But for me to write the actual chapter of inner safety, I need to explore this problem a bit more. Why do I feel compelled to make a video of me from the third person perspective in the first place? Is it because I do want to be performative? Why don’t I want to act? But actually, if I shot a skit then I think it would feel more comfortable. Then what’s the difference between a skit and me acting like I’m having a genuine experience?
At every turn, I need to answer these questions and move on to the next step of actually shooting the video. By doing the video bit by bit, I get to understand myself and my inner safety a bit more. THIS is the inner work around inner safety. It’s contingent upon your action and self-inquiry.
The difficult part for you is, in a state of fear or activation it’s difficult for you to navigate yourself. And that’s where I come in with Michelle. We’re going to give you gentle next actions based on the questions that are just the right ones to reveal your unconscious thoughts around inner safety, so you can get to creating while learning more about yourself.
This is all part of our upcoming content creation workshop, The Middle Way. I think you’re going to LOVE it, and I would love to see you there. Check out this link to learn more and sign up.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
