Being Ready to use Therapy or Coaching

The amazing Eloise Ristad in her wonderful book A Soprano on Her Head (1982) says that when a person is ready for change extraordinary things happen.   She is right, but I also think that there is at least one stage missing from her statement. I believe that awareness is a perquisite to being ready and that amazing things, including change, can happen when both awareness and readiness are present.

But what does being ready mean?

From personal experience I know that we each have unique ways of being ready and that translating readiness into action is never the same between different people or even for the same person from moment-to- moment.  Despite our most earnest hopes, clear visioning and wholehearted affirmations no one can be ready on our behalf or automagicly transport us from this state to the next without effort on our part.

  • The good news: you are expert in your life about developing awareness of being ready.
  • The bad news is:  you are expert in your life about developing awareness of being ready.

Dan Brodsky-Chenfield, a philosophically minded skydiver,  asks himself two questions which I have personally  found helpful:

  1. Can it be done?
  2. Am I willing to do what is needed to achieve it?

For some of us, myself included, thinking we are ready has no connection to what we are actually willing to tolerate in order to take responsibility for trying out something different or new which may, or may not, make the change happen. For example, I am aware that needing a guarantee which ensures that being ready WILL result in X change or Y transformation gets in my way, but that’s another blog’¦

Using Dan’s questions and moving freely to music (in this instance it was Tango that helped) I’ve recently familiarised myself with my various states along my scale of readiness. This is what my scale currently looks like.

Willing To Be Ready

Readiness Scale

Being ‘sort-of’ ready’for therapy or coaching is not a bad place to be. It’s like Glastonbury despite the mud, cold showers and dodgy ablution blocks; it’s exciting, suprising and can be hugely rewarding .

I am very Ok with people not being sure they are ready especially  when they take the very courageous and scary step of seeking therapy or coaching.

Q: What does being ready this feel like as an awareness?

A: well, for me and just for today, the awareness of being ‘sort-of-ready’ feels like the dancing every atom that is me does when I hearFuga Y Miserio by Astor Piazolla.

The notion of a scale accommodates lots of movement and allows us to develop a sense of what’s different in this state compared to that other state.

The scale suggests fluidity around awareness and readiness.  It has helped me to understand that I flow through different states of readiness in any one situation.

 

 

Tip:  Being willing to be willing to be ready is a wonderfully rich and rewarding place from which to begin anything.