Self-Coaching Model

The next time you feel stuck with a problem, I invite you to close your eyes and imagine a wise person.

In your thoughts, approach them and describe your problem to them. The presumption and coaching philosophy that we can solve our own problems better than we think has been supported by evidence from research studies for many years (Biswas-Diener & Dean, 2007).

This includes the effectiveness of micro-interventions such as an imagined conversation with a wise person (Glück & Baltes, 2006).

Learning and guiding yourself through cognitive solution-focused processes like these is an example of a practice called self-coaching – a skill worth cultivating.

What Is Self-Coaching?

“Self-coaching is the process of guiding our growth and development, particularly through periods of transition, in both the professional and personal realms” (Batista, 2013).

Perhaps best understood as the practice of guiding your own thinking in a structured way and changing your perspective toward a solution, self-coaching comprises several core components.

These core components are self-reflection and inner dialogue; constructive thinking; and the use of models, powerful coaching questions, exercises, and strategies.

While a self-coaching individual simultaneously assumes the role of both the coachee and the coach, it is important to recognize that self-coaching is not intended to replace a professional coaching intervention.

In fact, coaching from a professional coach is likely to be more effective than self-coaching (Losch, Traut-Mattausch, Mühlberger, & Jonas, 2016; Sue-Chan & Latham, 2004)

However, self-coaching can also lead to a reduction in procrastination (Losch et al., 2016). We may regard it as an additional resource that clients can draw on to navigate challenges, cultivate creative and constructive thinking, and develop a growth mindset.

Because of the absence of support, feedback, and perspective of the coach in a self-coaching context, some suggest that the effectiveness of self-coaching may be moderated by the degree of self-leadership skills inherent to the self-coachee (Losch et al., 2016).

Competent self-leaders may be more successful at self-coaching than individuals with low self-leadership skills.

This may be explained by the fact that self-coaching requires and cultivates high levels of self-regulation and self-motivation (Fukuda, Sakata, & Pope, 2019) – two integral parts of self-leadership (Neck & Houghton, 2006).

Self-coaching may be further related to self-leadership; they are both skills that most individuals apply unknowingly to some degree, similar to being unconsciously skilled in the four stages of competence (Adams, n.d.). Therefore, understanding what self-coaching is, our current knowledge, and our skill level is imperative to cultivate self-coaching competence.

2 Self-Coaching Models

Often, when we encounter a challenge, we get stuck by simply acknowledging that we have hit an obstacle.

Perhaps we try to come up with a solution but give up as soon as we determine we cannot think of one.

Coaching models help by providing a structure to the coaching ‘dialogue’ and ensuring that a problem is explored thoroughly and from different angles.

As with most psychological and coaching practices, there is no one specific, one-size-fits-all self-coaching model. It may therefore be most convenient to use an already familiar coaching model.

Two widely used coaching models are GROW and ABCDE.

The GROW model

GROW is an acronym that stands for goal, reality, options, and way forward (Whitmore, 2009):

• Goal explores the ultimate outcome the coachee is hoping for concerning their current challenge.
• Reality explores the current circumstances in relation to the desired outcome. This includes the problem, any progress toward the goal, strategies already tried, and problems encountered.
• Option explores the different courses of action the coachee could take in order to pursue their goal.
• Way forward prompts the coachee to determine specific action steps going forward.

The ABCDE model

The ABCDE model highlights the fact that our actions are not directly triggered by circumstances, but by our interpretations of those circumstances. It emphasizes the importance of challenging our beliefs (Ellis, 1957).

The letters ABCDE represent:

• Activating event or situation. This is understood as the trigger of our response, often entailing negative self-talk.
• Beliefs refer to our interpretation of the activating event.
• The consequence is the impact our beliefs have on us. These can be emotions (e.g., feeling upset or frustrated), thoughts (e.g., ‘They did this on purpose), or actions (e.g., yelling or isolating oneself).
• Disputing beliefs involve exploring potential alternative beliefs about the activating event that may be more helpful and constructive.
• The effective way forward explores new, constructive ways to respond to the activating event.

The elements of both the GROW and ABCDE models can be explored by asking a series of questions.

51 Questions to Ask Yourself

The sky is the limit when it comes to the number of questions you can use to explore each part of the models. Let creativity be your friend until you feel like you have thoroughly investigated each step.

Below are some examples.

27 Questions to explore the GROW model

Goal:

1. What would I like to achieve?
2. Best-case scenario, what outcome would I hope for?
3. Why is this outcome important to me?
4. What is the bigger picture behind wanting to solve this issue?
5. What impact will this outcome have on me?

Reality:

6. Where am I right now in relation to my hoped outcome/goal?
7. How are things going for me at the moment?
8. What is the biggest barrier I am facing at the moment?
9. What works well for me right now?
10. What have I tried already to reach this goal?
11. What has not worked well so far?
12. Who do I know who has achieved an outcome like this? What did they do?
13. What resources and support can I harness?

Options:

14. What options do I have to overcome my barriers?
15. What is one thing I could try?
16. If time and money were irrelevant, what would I do?
17. What strategies could I try?
18. What would be the wrong way to approach this?
19. What happens if I do not take any action?
20. Who can I ask for help?
21. What advice would I give my best friend about this?

Way forward:

22. Which is my favorite option so far?
23. What is the first step I can take?
24. When will I get started?
25. What else do I need to do or keep in mind?
26. How will I know if I have succeeded?
27. What am I missing?

24 Questions to explore the ABCDE model

Activating event:

1. What about my current situation is making me want to create change?
2. What is causing me to feel uneasy, stressed, or uncomfortable?
3. How did it all start?
4. Who were the key people involved in the event?
5. What else has been a trigger for me?

Beliefs:

6. What were my thoughts when it all happened?
7. What did I say to myself in the situation?
8. What was I feeling when it happened, and how do I feel right now?
9. Why did this trigger me?
10. Who was on my mind when it happened and to what extent?

Consequence:

11. What impact did those thoughts of mine have on me?
12. What did I do based on the way I felt?
13. What actions did my thoughts lead me to take?
14. What other thoughts were triggered by those thoughts?

Disputing:

15. What makes me believe my thoughts were accurate?
16. Do I have proof of that?
17. Have I previously been in a similar situation where I was wrong about the way I thought about it?
18. What else could have been true or the cause behind the event?
19. How are my thoughts serving me?
20. What alternative interpretation might be more helpful for me?

Effective way:

21. What would be the most logical way to interpret the situation?
22. What might be a wise way to react?
23. What would someone I trust recommend doing?
24. Logically, what would be the best thing for me to do?

5 Techniques & Strategies

Master Coach Brooke Castillo (2021) has developed a self-coaching technique called CTFAR.

It is like the ABCDE model and assesses circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

The CTFAR technique helps you analyze how your thoughts about a circumstance may affect your emotions, actions, and finally the results you are experiencing.

• If you don’t see the results you are hoping for, you may not be taking the right action.
• If you are currently not taking the right action, you may not be generating the right feelings to propel you to take the right action.
• If your feelings are not aligned with the action you are hoping to take, you may not be generating thoughts and beliefs that serve your goal attainment.

This technique provides a foundation upon which you can choose an alternative (causal) pathway that is more helpful and serves your desired outcomes.

Circumstances

The first step is about reflecting on the circumstances of the problem or your goal. It is a prompt to distinguish facts from beliefs and perceptions.

This step empowers you to understand what you can and cannot control. What happened in the past, including your beliefs and emotions about it at the time, is not something you can change. However, the way you think about it now and the action you decide to take from now on are your responsibility.

Write the circumstances around your problem or goal and ask yourself which of them are facts and which are beliefs.

Thoughts

Thoughts refer to the way we give meaning to circumstances. This step is aligned with the B in the ABCDE model and pertains to our interpretation of the circumstances. It serves as a prompt to reflect on the impact of your beliefs on your feelings and actions.

This step is also a reminder that we are not our thoughts, but instead, have a choice over the way we interpret situations and events.

Reflect on your beliefs about the circumstances, and ask yourself how they make you feel. What action do they propel or prevent you to take?

Feelings

The third step is a reminder that neither are we defined by our feelings. It is a prompt to perceive and reflect on the source of our emotions. How do you feel about the situation and your beliefs about it?

Action

The next step challenges you to identify how your feelings make you more inclined to act one way or another. Castillo (2021) also likes to emphasize the importance of taking action despite fear of failure; even a ‘wrong’ action is more likely to generate results than procrastinating.

Result

The last step is a reminder that your experiences are mostly a result of your actions. If you are not seeing the result you are hoping for, you may choose to work backward through the CTFAR model to identify opportunities to create change.

The presumption of the CTFAR model is that the results you see in your life are caused by the actions you take, which are driven by your emotions, and evoked by your beliefs. It should be noted that CTFAR is not strictly evidence-based.

Indeed, the causal pathways between our thoughts and feelings can go both ways. There is increasing evidence that our emotions influence our thinking, such as is described in the broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001).

Helpful Tools: 7 Worksheets & Workbooks

Besides using a (self-)coaching model to guide your thinking, exercises and micro-interventions can be fun ways to expand your thinking and help you change perspective.

The imagined coaching conversation with a wise person described earlier is one such example. Here are some other useful tools from our worksheet library:

• The Resilient Problem-Solving Skills exercise can help you explore possible solutions to problems faced.
• Replacing ‘What If’ Statements is a useful tool for evaluating irrational beliefs and swapping them with more rational ones.
• This Decision-Making Worksheet for Adults outlines 6 steps you can follow to identify a problem you’re dealing with and approach the decisions to be made.
• If you know exactly what steps to take next but would like to hold yourself accountable, this Goal Planning and Achievement Tracker is a great tool to help you monitor your progress.
• This Willingness, Goals, and Action Plan is a versatile exercise for identifying a valued life goal, anticipating potential psychological obstacles, and creating a practical plan for achieving it.
• Action Brainstorming is a helpful worksheet to use once you have set a goal and aim to transform potentially unhelpful habits into more helpful ones that support its achievement.
• If you have optimized your goal already but are looking for some additional motivation to overcome anticipated obstacles, Visualize Success is a great worksheet to play through it mentally.

5 Best Books on the Topic

Here are five books that shed further light on the topic of self-coaching:

1. The Power of Self-Coaching: The Five Essential Steps to Creating the Life You Want by Dr. Joseph Luciani (Amazon)
2. The Art of Self-Coaching by Ed Batista (Amazon)
3. Coaching Questions: A Coach’s Guide to Powerful Asking Skills by Tony Stoltzfus (Amazon)
4. Self-Coaching 101 by Brooke Castillo (Amazon)
5. The Self-Coaching Workbook: Make the Brilliant Life You’ve Always Wanted a Reality by Karen Castille (Amazon)

Before you start using the Self Coaching Model, let’s define each of its components.

Circumstances

• Circumstances are facts that everyone agrees on and that can be proven in a court of law.
  “I weigh 130 lbs” for example is a circumstance. The fact that I weigh 130 lbs is measurable, provable, and not debatable. Here are other examples: it’s raining today; the project Is due tomorrow; I haven’t received an email from my client.
• Circumstances are neutral. They’re neither good nor bad. Everything is a circumstance until you put a thought to it. Circumstances only become good or bad based on the thoughts we have about them.

Thoughts

• Thoughts are sentences in your head. Human beings have approximately 60,000 thoughts per day and most of our thoughts go unsupervised. Typically we don’t intentionally choose our thoughts and that’s often the cause of many of our problems.
• For example, thinking that your boss is over-demanding by asking you to stay late is a thought. It’s your opinion. Others could have different opinions about that same circumstance.
• A thought is not a circumstance or a fact if you’ve added descriptive words or opinions in the sentence. Even if most people agree with you, it’s still a thought because it can’t be proven as a fact. Any time you add a qualifier to a circumstance, you are choosing to think a thought.
• If you don’t practice thinking intentionally, you’ll continue to repeat your past and have the same thoughts you’ve always had. Your thoughts will recreate your past if you don’t train your brain to create new insights and therefore new results. You can use the Self Coaching Model to do this.

Feelings

• Feelings are vibrations in your body.
• When using the Model, feelings should be described in one word. Examples of feelings that can be expressed in one word are relaxed, anxious, resentful, angry, ashamed, frustrated, proud, fearful, and confident.
• Because of the way our brains have developed to avoid pain, we typically avoid, resist, and react to negative emotions. We need to learn how to notice, acknowledge, and name our feelings so we can experience them as vibrations in our body.
• Many people confuse thoughts and feelings. For example, if someone asks you how you felt about your boss asking you to stay late, you might say, “I am upset because my boss demands too much of my time.” In this example, the feeling you’re having is upset. The thought you’re having about the circumstance is that your boss is over-demanding. Your boss asking you to stay late is not, in and of itself, upsetting; it’s a neutral circumstance. Your thought that your boss is over-demanding is causing you to feel upset.
• Distinguishing between thoughts and feelings is critical to feeling better. Understanding that your thoughts cause your feelings is how you learn how to feel better without changing your circumstances.
• It’s great news that your thoughts create your feelings because it means you can choose how you want to think and, therefore, how you want to feel. No one can cause you to feel a certain way. Your thoughts about what someone did (or didn’t do) is what causes you to feel something.

Actions

• Actions are what you do, don’t do, or react to (e.g., actions, inactions, and reactions). In the Self Coaching Model, your feelings cause your actions, inactions, or reactions.
• For example, because you’re feeling upset about your boss asking you to stay late, you decide to complain about your boss all week with the other designers. The upset you feel drives the action of complaining to others.
• Your actions, inactions, and reactions will be based on the feelings that caused them. If you’re not taking action and wondering why not, ask yourself what feeling you have right before you want to take action. Then work backward to see what thought is driving the feeling.

A Take-Home Message

If you are a fan of taking responsibility for the things in life that you can change and being proactive about creating change to realize your dreams and flourish, you will love the practice of self-coaching.

When I guide myself through a coaching model or an exercise such as the imagined conversation, I am often surprised at how much it enables me to generate unique solutions and other new thought pathways. Self-coaching may not be as powerful as engaging a professional coach.

However, it has the advantage of being available at any time and place at no cost. It is a skill anyone can learn and tailor to their individual needs and preferences, and it can add to our resources in dealing with challenges in a constructive and creative way.