What January has taught me...
A lesson in self-trust
Hello! As you mght already know, at the end of every month I journal about the highlights, the challenges and the lessons I’ve learnt - and share some of them here. This helps me to savour the good bits and learn from the not so good. Here’s some of my reflections on January….
A Lesson
Self trust is a muscle: My confidence seemed to take a bit of a knock in 2024, due to a combination of poorly timed situations together with the fact that I then allowed the self-doubt to snowball while I waited patiently for my belief in my self to automatically activate itself. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.
Like I’m often sharing with my clients, we wouldn’t expect to train for a 10k race but still expect ourselves to maintain our 10k fitness several months or years down the line without keeping up with some regular exercise - so why should maintaining our inner confidence be any different?
One of the benefits (or potentially a downside, depending on your perspective!) of practising ethically as a professional coach is that I have a responsibility to reflect on my personal (and professional) blind spots through my own supervision, coaching and therapy. Which meant that I couldn’t really hide this snowballing dip in trust in myself last year - and this gave me the impetus to reconnect to the tools that I know help me cultivate my inner confidence - and actually use them on a regular basis!
As I tell my clients - there isn’t a magic key that unlocks inner confidence - it’s about the day to day practices and action that adds up over time. And like exercise - we don’t always feel like doing these - but building this muscle again and again is what makes the difference.
So that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few months, little by little. And without sounding like one of those really smug influencers/self proclaimed but unqualified life coaches on instagram, I’m really seeing the difference pay off in how I approach things, how I feel about things and how much less I’m worrying about certain outcomes - building this muscle works.
No doubt there’ll be bumps in the road, as there always is with these things (that’s just how life is) - but I know that I get to choose to come back to aligning to this self trust muscle whenever I feel my inner confidence slipping.
Some highlights from January:
Facilitating my sold out Intentional Workshop for such a lovely group
A spa trip for my birthday with my mum and sister
My holiday to Northumberland
The snow!
Seeing some of my longer term coaching clients coming to the end of our sessions together on A Year of Intention and Shine Bright and feeling so proud of how they’ve shown up for themselves and the shifts (big and small) that they’ve made
What I’m looking forward to in Feb
Getting back to strength training at the gym: I’m surprising myself that I’m even writing this, but I’ve really missed the small group strength training sessions that I had to put on hold while I recovered from my appendicitis surgery. I’m also slightly dreading the first week back because I know that I’ll feel very sore afterwards!
A bit more routine and slightly longer days: January has been quite full on in a bit of a stop/start kind of way for me - whilst I love the flexibility that I have in my work right now, I’ve been working on creating a bit more routine and flow into my schedule, so hopefully this will start to pay off in terms of not constantly checking my google calendar to work out what I’m meant to be doing. And the lighter mornings will mean I’ve got more flexibility to get out for an earlier dog walk - which is always good news (for me and for Buddy!)
Over to you:
What are your January highlights?
What have been your lessons?
How are you growing?
How are you doing with the intentions you might have set yourself at the start of the year?
What are you looking forward to?
Have a brilliant week,
Rachael
I’m booking clients for a February and March start - you can check out all my 2025 coaching options here and book a call to chat further about this. If you’re looking for longer term coaching to support with courageous and compassionate and confident change then I highly recommend checking out my “Year of Intention” 12 month coaching option (starting from £155/month)
You can also book a one-off 90 minute ‘Deep Dive’ sessions, which you can book directly here. (Previous clients can book these sessions at a discounted rate - contact me directly)
How else I can support you:
Dive into the archives and read all the previous pieces here
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