The main ingredient in every successful client is...

WILLINGNESS

That's right. The main ingredient in every successful client of mine is willingness.

It's what I'm looking for from the word 'go,' before a client actually becomes a client. I'm gauging a person's willingness from our very first interaction, all the way through our initial coaching conversation, and oftentimes well into our coaching relationship.

Sometimes I even test a client's willingness by proposing an edgy challenge or giving an assignment that borders on the absurd.

I don't secretly enjoy anyone's discomfort! What I do enjoy, however, is helping a client see where there's room for them to grow. Where they might be unknowingly locked into a way of doing or being. Where they can become even more willing—and not just in deed, but in spirit.

Why willingness?

Well, without willingness, we don't have a coaching program—we have a tug-of-war. And tug-of-war isn't cute on anyone except a toddler. (Even then, 'cute' can be a bit of an overstatement. IYKYK.) But toddlers always get a pass when it comes to this; they're pretty much wired to resist any and all efforts to push or pull them along.

So, then: What do I mean by willingness, in the context of coaching?

I see it as a kind of flexibility. An openness to new thinking. Being receptive to suggestions and welcoming help when it's offered.

Willingness has movement. It tries one thing today, because that’s what the occasion calls for—and then it tries something else tomorrow, if that’s what’s needed.

It doesn't stay put; never digs its heels in (or if it does, it's willing to examine why that was the default reaction).

Willingness knows it doesn't know everything. Willingness is open to the fact that it might even know nothing!

It doesn’t need to prove itself or be right. No, it won't let ego get in the way like that (in fact, it pretty much drops ego altogether, knowing that ego can’t help but get in the way).

Willingness has an easy curiosity to it; it can show up playfully, with a light heart. Willingness embraces experimentation as a necessary part of the process.

Don’t get me wrong: Willingness can get frustrated. Willingness is no stranger to disappointment. Willingness is not always (or even often) easy to maintain.

But willingness stays in the game, no matter what.

My very best, most successful clients are willing, time and again, to become whomever they need to be to go after and get whatever it is they want.

Some questions for you to consider

Whether or not you're thinking of working with a coach, you can ask yourself all kinds of questions to get a sense of your own willingness. Call to mind a specific situation—a problem, a place of stuckness—and see what comes up when you work through this line of inquiry.

Are you willing…

• to think about it (whatever your "it" is) differently?

• to do it differently?

• to be wrong?

• to rewrite an old pattern?

• to not have all the answers?

• to ask more questions?

• to do it badly?

• to tell on yourself when you're not feeling particularly willing?

• to give it everything you've got?

• to see yourself in a new way?

• to change?

• to expect nothing?

• to be uncomfortable?

• to keep trying?

• to drop your stories about how life is, how you are, how "they" are?

What do you think?

Are you surprised to learn that willingness is the only truly essential trait in a coaching client? Drop me a comment below and let's discuss.

Ask Helen: a reader question about rest

Dear Helen,

I’m asking permission to take a nap during the day—is that okay? I find it very difficult to allow myself to do this, even when I feel it would be the best thing for me. It feels like “cheating” or “playing hooky,” especially if I’m really busy.

Thank you!
Sleepy

Dear Sleepy,

Not only do you have my permission (which you don't need, though I'm happy to give it), but you have my urging to take a nap whenever you're tired.

Naps are one of the great pleasures of life. They give us an opportunity for reset. A pause. A timely rest. A second wind.

And the gentle clarity and pervasive sense of well-being that can follow a good nap? Unparalleled, in my experience.

But you know all this. Your body knows all this. It's why you're craving a nap in the first place.

The problem, then, is that you're getting in your own way with your thinking. You're trying to talk yourself out of a nap because you have an idea of what you 'should' or 'shouldn't' be doing with your time when you're supremely busy. You have a story about what it would mean for you or about you if you allowed yourself to nap in the middle of the day, when your to-do list is long and urgent.

So, let me pose a few questions I might ask you if we were in a coaching session together:

• Why does it feel like cheating to take care of yourself?

• Do you see a way in which napping could actually set you up for success to tackle your work?

• Are there any true downsides to napping when you're really busy? If so, can you live with them? Alternately, can you trust yourself to deal with them, post-nap, if they're really troublesome?

I wonder if napping feels like a slippery slope to you—like, if you give in and rest, you might never want to get out of bed again. You might spend your days napping endlessly and shirking all your responsibilities. And what if, deep down, you're really just someone who wants to be horizontal 24/7, and succumbing to this temptation would mean descending into the depths of sloth, from which you can never return?!

I know this sounds hyperbolic and maybe even like I'm teasing you (I'm not, I promise), but I suspect there's an element of this concern behind your question.

My dear Sleepy, let me assure you: Napping doesn't work like that. Nothing does! We're self-correcting creatures.

We might create a habit that feels difficult to break, but once we wake up to the ways in which the habit is no longer serving us, we're free to change—and we often do change, just like that. Without too much fanfare or labor, we adjust. Recalibrate. Life rolls on.

If napping became truly problematic for you, you'd know. You'd see its effects on your life (I have a hard time imagining anything but positive effects, but I want to follow your concern all the way here, so stick with me), and you'd know it's time to reevaluate your habit. You wouldn't continue to stay in bed all day, every day, while your life crumbled around you. You'd take action. You'd find the balance once again. Life would roll on.

Listen to your body, Sleepy. Give yourself a nap when you need it, and get out of bed when you know it's time to resume your day.

You have infinite wisdom beyond all those chatty, concerned thoughts—and you don't have to do anything to access it other than let your mind settle.

I hope this helps!

Love,
Helen

What we might learn from a falling squirrel

A few weeks back, I saw a squirrel fall from a tree.

Have you ever seen such a thing?

There was the rustling of the leaves, then the snap of a branch, then the disconcerting thunk of a small soft thing hitting the sidewalk at the park.

My daughter was in her stroller and I was beside her, on a bench. We both looked away from the person practicing on a slackline in front of us, to follow the sound.

Stunned for a moment, the squirrel scrambled to get up onto its feet and then darted around, confused for a moment, before bounding off into the grass.

I was sort of shocked, but tried to play it cool for my child's sake. (She is hugely empathetic for all living creatures who "go boom.")

"Look, even squirrels fall sometimes!" I said, probably too cheerfully.

SQUIRRELS CAN FALL? I shout-thought.

In the weeks since the squirrel incident, I've tried to make sense of what we saw; I've tried to glean something from witnessing the surprising results of a misstep, the impersonality of gravity. But nothing much is bubbling to the surface.

Nothing is impossible?

Balance is never a foregone conclusion?

What doesn't kill you might not make you stronger, might just temporarily stun you?

Nah. The best I can come up with is this: the turntable plate breaking while microwaving popcorn.

No fault. No reason (besides basic physics, of course). No deeper meaning or proof of shortcoming.

In other words: a perfect fail.

There isn't anything that isn't supposed to happen.

There's just what happens.

And there's how we react to what happens.

What comes up for you when you consider this paradigm? Leave a comment below.

How to move past the I-don't-want-tos

We all have moments when we really and truly, desperately and absolutely don't want to do something—change a bad habit, initiate a big life change, perform some dull but essential task.

Not-wanting-to often takes on a life of its own, giving us the impression that the stakes are higher: There's something wrong with us, we're stuck, we have a defect or a capital-P problem that needs solving.

Really, though, there's just a lot of brain chatter happening. Not much else.

Not-wanting-to is a normal thought experience for a mind to create. It doesn't mean we lack discipline or willpower; it doesn't mean we're lazy; nothing is actually broken here.

If you find yourself not wanting to do something—and then feeling all kinds of feelings about the not-wanting-to—here are seven ideas for you. Some are actions, some are inactions, and still others are philosophies to try on for size.

1. Acquiesce to your “I-don’t-want-to” for a set amount of time—say, an afternoon. Then, tomorrow, do the thing you didn’t want to do today.

2. Don’t do the thing you don’t want to do. Ever. That’s it—simply don’t do it and see what happens. You might be surprised to learn that there's actually very little we have to do. Sure, there are consequences for not doing certain important things—some of them rather unpleasant. In terms of our survival, however, there's not a whole lot we must do. See what happens if you don't do the thing you don't want to do.

3. Decide to just do the thing right now. Decide that wanting to or not wanting to is beside the point. You don’t need to want to do something in order to do it. Feel your feelings of not-wanting-to, and then recognize that you don’t actually need to feel a certain way in order to do much of anything.

4. Figure out why you don’t want to do the thing. See if you can uncover the thought that’s at play there. No need to change it or challenge it. Just bring the ever-awesome practice of awareness into the picture. What insights emerge when you expand "I don't want to," into "I don't want to, because"?

5. Determine the smallest possible step you can take to make an inroad. For now, do that and nothing more.

6. Hold yourself and this experience lightly. Stop making your not-wanting-to mean anything. What if, like all the other thoughts that pass through your head, this one is just another momentary visitor? What if you could feel it, think it, but not hold on to it so tightly—so that, when it's ready, it can carry on and not be a whole Thing that you've adopted for your own?

7. Recognize that desire is not a fixed state. Leave the possibility open that what you don't want to do today, you may very well grow into wanting to do at some point in the future.

Let me know if any of these speak to you more than the others. And do you have a technique for navigating your own I-don't-want-tos? Add to the conversation in the comments section below.

Ask Helen: a reader question about procrastination

Dear Helen,

I have a recurring issue: I have tasks I want to complete—but, instead of jumping in, I procrastinate with mindless (though mostly enjoyable) things like social media/YouTube clips. Eventually I realize it’s late in the day and I scramble to do the tasks. This leads to accomplishing things late into the evening, leaving little or no wind-down time. Typically, I’ll have promised myself a fun TV show or movie once I’ve completed the task, so it’s a disappointment when I don’t have the time for it. I think I’m a self-fulfilling prophecy, though; I’ve done this so many times, or have tasks take longer than expected, so I delay the tasks because I know once I start, there’s no fun/relaxing time at the end. Been doing this for years. Any advice on how to break the cycle?

Thank you!
Unfulfilled Promise

Dear Unfulfilled Promise,

What a great question! It really speaks to a dynamic that I think a lot of us create with our time—and then struggle to understand when we decide it isn't working for us anymore (or when we realize it never was).

There are a handful of things I noticed in your question—and I'll point out all of them to see if there's some insight lurking there for you—but the main takeaway is this: You're not procrastinating.

What I see you doing is putting your wind-down time first and your task completion second.

Now, most people would call this procrastination—but the fact of the matter is, I'm not sure that label does anything for anyone except pathologize a perfectly normal and reasonable order of operations. It's like eating your dessert first! Who says you can't? (Diet culture, that's who! A terribly insidious and harmful thing, if you ask me. But that's another newsletter altogether.) It's valid to, as my husband says, "pay yourself first"—that is, do the activity that brings you joy and restores balance within you before doing the thing(s) that needs to get done, but might not be particularly enjoyable.

Something I noticed in your question, though, is that you do actually prefer a little wind-down time before turning in for the night. So, that's a clue. However you spend your time throughout the day, you're someone for whom a window of TV- or movie-watching is the ultimate nightcap.

But it sounds like you're making a trade-off here. I don't get the sense that the social media perusal/YouTube clip-watching is truly how you'd like to unwind. It's a default habit. A time-filler. Maybe even an avoidance tactic (though, again, I wouldn't call any of it procrastination because that just sounds deathly serious and nothing you're doing here merits such gravity). The problem* is that it's eating up the possibility of more pleasurable wind-down activity at the very end of the day.

You say yourself these are tasks you want to complete. You might not be looking forward to the specific work that's involved (if you were, you'd likely dive right into it, dessert-first style), but it sounds to me like you're definitely wanting to knock out these specific items.

Here's something to consider: You could try to change this habit (by deleting your social media apps, by putting a timer on your phone, by giving yourself some kind of reward each time you choose to complete your tasks first), but even if you do nothing, you can rely on a built-in guidance system. There's proof of it in what you wrote to me.

What am I referring to?

Well, at some point, seemingly without fail, you decide to put down your phone and deal with your tasks. Whether it takes 20 minutes or two hours of aimless scrolling, you reach an internal limit: Your brain determines enough is enough, and you move onto the next activity. You don't have to do anything to make it happen.

Now, sure, your built-in guidance system might not be operating on a particular timetable—it perks up when it perks up, and that's when you're prompted to move on from what you call the "mindless" activity of browsing social media—but it works without any interference from you.

The data shows that doing it this way means you're likely to run out of time for your favorite wind-down activities at the day's end, but still, it's good to note that the system does work without your having to muscle through making a change.

Which brings me to my last point: Try doing your task(s) first. Just try it once. We're not looking to revise how you live your life from here on out, we're just playing around with your schedule on this one occasion. An experiment to see what happens and to see if you like the outcome better than that of your current system. Do it in the name of data collection.

And, of course, let me know how it goes! I'd love to share your follow-up with my other readers.

Love,
Helen

*I say "problem" only because it's something that isn't working for you, not because anything's actually wrong here. We're so quick to think of problems as horrible things, when, in fact, they're really excellent prompts to fiddle around with a system to get the results we want.