Coaches Corner~LGBR

When you are committed to looking good and being right others can have lots of fun watching you do it.  You can do so at your own peril most of the time though.  In its simplest form, however, LGBR does us more harm than good as a way of approaching life and the truth of it is that others know how we look all the time even if they are not paying attention.  Frustrations result when we employ this coping mechanism and frustrations are ours and ours alone.  Whenever we get frustrated, it results from our own thinking and in no small way is fear in one of its forms.  You fear that you will not get what you want or that something you want to happen will not happen and since you cannot see the future, you never know what is going to happen.  Many of us create a result and then act as if it is the truth and react to it.  As a coach, we fall victim to this malady and our clients are dealing with it all the time.  We do not have that outside objective opinion when we need it most and that is when we get a stimulus that is close to us emotionally.  This can be the most surprising thing and sneak up on us when we are least expecting it.  It recently happened to me when I misplaced my glasses at my own home.

I was sure that my wife had moved them and placed them somewhere because that happens often enough with other things.  I go a few places around my house and my glasses were not there.  I knew for sure that I had not taken them with me the night before when we attended a party and clearly remember using them to read the itinerary for today’s activities.  I traced my steps and went to my office where I read the document.  I went to the bathroom where I read something else and I looked all the places that I can commonly be found.  The couch in my living room or den was searched 5 times.  I was careful to go slower each time because they could be anywhere and when something is not where it was it is supposed to be, then it could be anywhere, right?  After nearly 20 minutes of this, I was damned sure that it was my wife up to her old tricks again so I asked her where they were and had she seen them.  Over 20 years of marriage has softened me so I was not angry or had not particular take on it that led me to go into overwhelm, I just knew it was about her.  I then asked Holy Spirit to tell me where they were because that has worked in every instance.  Even though I am committed to LGBR just like everyone else, I had developed a confidence in Holy Ghost to help me that baffled the imagination.  My wife has said some things to me in the past that has been annoying and I have grown to understand that she knows not of what she speaks.  Like most husbands, I take what my wife says with a grain of salt.  As an extraordinary coach, I have grown accustomed to not making her wrong for doing that so I had no feelings of her being right or wrong or good or bad….it just was.  And meantime, I still could not find my glasses. 

She asked the typical questions like where had I seen them last and I took it in stride because in reality I could remember where I saw them last.  I saw them when I read the itinerary.  I have always thought of that question as a stupid one to ask because if a person remembers the last place he saw what he was looking for, it would not be lost!  So I got past that question pretty well and continued looking in places where I had already looked.  Since my wife was of no help, I was stuck going around in a circle.  But finally out of her mouth came the thing I was sure was the most useless.  She said to me….she said to me, “Have you looked in the garage?”  “Of course I did not look in the garage, I didn’t go out there.”  That is what I thought silently but being accustomed to doing what I am told most of the time, I reluctantly went outside and there they were.  My eyeglasses sat atop a rolled up sleeping bag just outside the door.  How they got there came back to me and I remembered taking them out there and once again gave all the credit to the Holy Ghost who used my wife to get the information to me because never in my lifetime would I have gone there because I knew they were not there.

Had I been afflicted with the Looking Good Being Right mentality, I would have been arguing with m wife about why she always says the dumbest things which I sure you have done.  The conversation would have escalated right after I asked her had she seen them and I would have reacted defensively when she suggested that they could be outside in the garage because I am not so stupid to not know that.  I would have revisited the many times she has been wrong about how things really are and superimposed that over the fact that I was the one who lost my glasses or at the very least misplaced them.  These kinds of things go on all the time in the lives of your clients and if they fall prey to them, the results can devastating.  I am not exaggerating when I say these small foxes that spoil the vine may even be responsible for some murders as the anger builds  and builds.  They can be responsible for divorces and stories upon stories create a reality that forces us to take drastic actions.  LGBR is destructive and as a coach, you must be present to it and be the outside, objective, opinion for your clients.  At the end of the day, doing so will get you much closer to being that extraordinary coach if you can manage it your own life.  No matter how good I look writing this blog or how right I am in sharing this information, know that I am not committed to LGBR, it just happens that way.