So in this video I would like to present you with the core identity coaching model though this is a
model that was born in Starbucks whilst I was drinking coffee with a young man that was mentioned in
coaching at the time.
Around about eight or nine years ago.
No.
Have you ever been sitting down with a friend having a conversation and then come out with it's really
random abstract questions such as.
You know I just don't know who I am.
And then the job that little time timebomb on you and with the best will in the world.
All right.
How do we start helping someone to decide or understand or get clear upon or know who they are.
This is one of these big questions in life isn't it.
And this is to be honest with you where many people get stuck sort of give you a little bit of context
for this model to share with you a quick story.
This story actually takes me back to I think it was 2008 when I was still living in the South Island
off New Zealand.
No I'd ended up being asked to go deep sea fishing one day with a few friends.
No I joined the Army for a reason.
I joined the Army because I didn't want to join the Navy.
I didn't join the Navy because me plus the sea don't work out too well.
So this day in question I ended up going deep sea fishing.
But within minutes I've been out of water.
I was absolutely green with seasickness to the point I could barely stand.
You know I was my legs were shaking I was sweating profusely.
Breakfast or what was left from breakfast of like three weeks earlier.
Everything was I was I couldn't hold down water.
I was an absolute mess.
No further would go to sea and the captain of the little tugboat that we were on ended up turning off
the engine and that was it.
The guys just started start fishing and I was hanging over the side of this boat just desperately trying
to breathe and didn't want to eat or drink anything because I knew it would just come back up and the
sea captain said to me right young man we need to get you a unique reference point.
No I disagreed with him.
I didn't have any energy to argue but to be honest I didn't have a clue what he meant and I'm as he
kind of and pretty much helped me to my feet and dragged me to the back of the boat.
I said to him What is unique reference point.
And he said you need a reference point is are points up in the future or in the horizon that we will
transfixed.
So our focus upon and we do this it brings the rest of our lives into balance.
It's the ultimate cure for sea sickness and within around about 45 minutes I ended up identifying the
Sea trawler that was kind of just going right across the horizon obviously because it was so far away
as seemed like it was stationary.
So I end up transfixed and my focus on this on this big sea trawler and kind of like like magic my life
just came in the balance in the seasickness went away you know within a few minutes I kind of grew in
confidence and I turned around and said My goodness I'm cured.
And as soon as I took my focus off the Nick reference point the sea sickness and the turbulence in my
stomach came back again.
So I learned a massively massively valuable life lesson that day and this is that when it comes to defining
ourselves i.e. who we are we've got to define ourselves in Constance.
All right when we define ourselves by anything less than a constant then we're building our life's upon
some very very shaky groans.
I want to unpack this and really help you understand what I'm talking about here because many people
will go through life and define themselves by what they do.
And this core identity coaching model allows us as life coaches to help our clients separate what they
do from how well they do what they do from who they actually are at the core.
All right.
So the thing is I've filled these circles here with a couple of words and an additional material section
once this video is over.
I'm going to encourage you to go and download and print off a copy of this work.
You can fill it in for yourself in the next clip.
I'm going to just ask you a few ask you a few questions that's going to hopefully help you to become
a little bit clearer if not completely grounded in who you are if you aren't already completely grounded
in you are in and who you are.
So many people in life would define themselves by the roles that they felt.
Give me an example here.
I could say my name is Ken Rumsey I am a husband.
No I'm going to have some idea of what being a husband means but then so is every other husband on the
face of the planet.
So what being a husband might mean for me might mean some very very different for someone else but also
my understanding of what being a husband means is probably going to grow and change for the rest of
my life.
So I cannot build and base my identity upon something that is not transfixed something that is realistically
going to change.
Give you another example.
I used to define myself as being a soldier.
Now I shared this earlier on in the course.
Though this was a role that I was fulfilling at the time and I had a certain rank right.
I was a corporal.
I could have been a sergeant and while still serving in the military I was full of confidence because
I was a very very good soldier.
All right.
And though I just didn't know this wasn't just an assumption I was making of myself here but my my officers
they would say Kate Ramsey you're a very very good soldier.
We're gonna give you another promotion.
We would like you to take responsibility for this and as I was given more responsibility I was able
to gauge and see that my peers respected me as being a good soldier.
So I felt great whilst I was in the army operating within this rule.
I would define myself as being a soldier.
Anyone would say to me back then so keen who are you.
I would say I'm a soldier.
I am a corporal in the British Army and I was proud of this.
The problem came when I no longer or the day stopped filling this role.
The day that I left the military was the day that this rule disappeared.
I was no being a civilian.
Right.
Instead and I don't know if you've got any experience with anyone who's ever been through the military
before but I'm here in the UK especially if you're if you're in the military.
It's kind of trained until the apart of this superior human race.
No that's obviously not true but it's what I believed was true back then and even the training corporals
would make suggestions along the lines of you know civilians are kind of like you know a lesser breed
of people.
So the second I stop being and stop being a soldier and started being a civilian.
That was me stepping into new territory.
But to be honest with you I always looked down upon civilians as being lesser than I.
So the second I became one of those civilians.
Guess what happened with my confidence and self-esteem.
That's right.
It took a nosedive that I've explained earlier on in the course.
So what I'm saying here we kind of define ourselves by the roles that we fulfill or by our ranks or
by our status or social status our Facebook status we can't define ourselves.
Why.
Because of our status and our roles in our ranks.
Change over time.
Sometimes these things will change in response to decisions that we make.
But sometimes these things will change due to the decisions other people make that we have no control
or influence over.
So what I'm saying here is we cannot build and base the foundations of our identity upon our role or
upon things that we do for a living.
You with me or how well we do these things.
Right.
Give me another example here.
And I think I mentioned a man I was coaching many years ago.
He defined himself as being a Premier League footballer.
No that was fine when he was in his heyday and he was out there scoring goals and you know winning cups
and all that kind of thing.
But as he got a little bit older and as his ability to play football you know decreased he got a little
bit slower he was prone to a few more injuries.
All right.
Well he used to define himself has been a very very good footballer but then he was in his mid 30s and
he says oh I'm not as strong as what I used to be.
I'm becoming a bad footballer.
And because he defined himself as a footballer when he said right I'm no longer as good as what he used
to be in fact I'm no getting bad.
This impacted his confidence and his self-esteem just pretty much fell apart and this was one of the
main reasons why he ended up coming to me.
Some people define themselves by their beliefs.
You know you've got to really do today's turn on turn on the news.
I think recently there was a there was a terror attack in Christchurch in New Zealand and it was an
Aussie guy and a few others ended up going into a local mosque and you know shooting and killing a whole
lot of Islamic people.
Now I know around about 12 months earlier I can remember there was another terror attack in the UK and
this was a couple of Islamic people or people who were claiming to be Islamic.
There were new ended up going into this music concert and killing a whole bunch of young people in the
name of Allah.
All right.
No this isn't for the purpose of sparking some sort of religious debate here but what I'm saying is
some people will do some crazy things because of the ban which they believe.
All right.
What I'm going to say here is that our beliefs are not strong enough to build and base our lives on.
It doesn't matter what you believe right now doesn't matter what your opinion is right now.
The process of growth is about growing up and I put off the limiting beliefs that we developed by ourselves
about how life should be lived at an earlier stage of our development and life.
So what I'm saying is we're all in the process of growing out of our beliefs therefore we cannot define
ourselves by our beliefs.
The second we define ourselves by our title or by our belief or by a religious precept preferences we're
putting ourselves in a box.
Why.
Because we all have the capacity and the ability to be so much more.
All right pretty much the heart of this message that we can really share with our clients when more
guided them through this core identity coaching model.
We do not need to place labels on our four heads and we certainly don't need to box ourselves Sen..
Some people define themselves by what they like.
Some people find themselves by what they don't like.
Some people simply define themselves by what they don't believe.
All right so we've talked about people of various religious beliefs.
How about atheists right.
I remember having a conversation with a guy who goes around doing talks and events turned the country
on a theism and I just asked him a question I said so just to just to just to get clear.
You travel around the country delivering talks and presentations about a God that you don't believe
in.
That's kind of like me and Gardner are walking around and doing presentations on aliens that I don't
believe in.
All right all right.
But what I'm saying is when people define themselves by what they believe are what by the war by what
they don't believe this can sometimes lead to some quite extreme patterns of behavior.
All right so we've got to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.
We've got to get clearer on how we're actually defining ourselves.
Some people will define themselves by their wins by their failures.
And remember this idea in the past doesn't equal the future.
Well this is kind of where and this idea fits into Plano because if a person has hard what they have
perceived to be a failure after a failure after another failure after another failure in the past then
what they do is they look forward to the future and they say I am not going to take any risks or chances
are I'm certainly not going to pursue my passions and dreams and goals in life.
Why.
Because I've failed all these times in the past and the future is bound to just be more of that which
I've already experienced.
I am a failure because I've failed some times or I am a winner because I've won sometimes and winning
and failing can kind of be what spawns the inferiority complex that I think I mentioned earlier on but
also the Superman com complex.
I think I had a conversation inside of one of the platforms.
Last year I had a conversation with with with a great American coach called called Mr. Donny Hall and
we were having a conversation around this no beer being in Scotland.
I'd been you know how I'd been raised or what I'd gone on to believe about myself and my great nation
are pretty much always felt like the underdog right.
When I was young growing up I would never step outside the comfort zone take risks.
Why.
Because I always expected to fail because failing was just something that seemed to follow me around
everywhere.
Everywhere that I went.
Where is Where's Donny.
And he he tackled life from a completely different perspective from the opposite end of the scale.
He would literally step outside the comfort zone in fact spend most of his life of say the comfort zone
not having a problem taking risks or you embrace and challenge because he would expect to win.
So he's operating over the Superman complex whereas I for most of my teens and 20s operate though to
this inferiority complex.
All right I believed to be inferior whereas Donnie believed to be superior.
What I'm saying is the sweet spot is kind of finding somewhere in between we don't want to be bold enough.
Life's upon a foundation of pride and arrogance where I can accomplish everything or set ourselves up
for a nasty fall.
But likewise we don't want to be defining ourselves as being a failure just because some things haven't
gone our way at some point in the past.
Again we're boxing ourselves in and seriously limiting ourselves.
All right which is what many people do so and preferences are about conversations with people in the
past.
A young man I was coaching a couple of years back and he was kind of going through this phase of life
he was exploring his sexual preferences he wasn't quite decided whether he was gay or whether he was
straight or whether he wanted to be a man or whether he wanted to be a woman and he is.
I'm just not sure who William.
All right.
No I'm not gonna go there.
I could kind of talk about this in a bit more depth but I said to him.
Very very practically.
He was he was he was talking to one of the things he said to me that kind of caught me off guard a little
Beth says right.
I'm not sure if I'm a man or a woman.
I think I might be a gender binary.
All right.
And I said okay that's fantastic.
Do you know what tests you can do just to establish whether you're male or female.
It's really practical right to work out whether you're a man or whether you're a woman.
Look TANYA That's right.
And that was earth.
Okay granted though to be honest with you our preferences does not equal who we are.
All right we like what we like.
We prefer what we prefer but we are not our preferences.
We can't afford to be because of our tastes preferences change over time.
Light of coached I coached a lady once and she had to find herself has been a lesbian for a run about
25 years and when she came to me she was in this real state of crisis.
Why.
Because she defined herself as a lesbian bitch she'd fallen in love with a guy right.
She'd really entered into this place of identity crisis.
She didn't know what to do because of how to find herself.
She'd box herself in and left herself no option for anything else other than the label that she'd signed
onto herself.
No I tell these things now I tell you all of these things not to challenge or not to confront not to
undermine or not to belittle or anything like this but simply to encourage you not to box yourself in
in life.
All right.
It might be the case you define yourself by what you believe.
You can define yourself as Christian as Muslim as Islam is as Hindu as Buddhist.
You can define yourself as of as a devil worship party you can define yourself as atheist.
You can define yourself as gay as straight as transgendered as whatever you want it doesn't make any
difference all right.
But here's the thing.
Your preferences may change at some point in the future.
So best off today not to book yourself in this way right.
You don't need to.
We all have the capacity and the ability to grow far beyond that which we each believe we are capable
of.
All right so some people might have found this just a little bit challenging but be challenged by this
right be challenged in your thinking look to identify any labels that you have placed upon yourself
because guess what you do not need them my friend.
And when it comes to your future life coaching clients All right a guarantee some of the major issues
that they are going to have in their life are just simply the labels that they've placed upon themselves.
Most of us don't like labels we don't like being boxed in but yet we do this most days.
So let's look at how.
All right.
Many people define themselves by by how they feel.
Don't they go to the doctors today in many parts of the world especially here in Scotland.
You can go along feeling a little bit apprehensive and you can walk out with a condition.
The doctors are very very good.
Signing labels onto people just for simply having feelings and emotions.
You know I feel a little bit stressed Dr. Drew.
Stump you are stressed.
That's who you are.
Doctor Doctor I feel a little bit anxious.
Boom you have the.
Zaatari illness you are anxious that is who you are.
And then some people go through the rest of the lifes.
You know I said I can't do this because I'm anxious I can't do this I can't go to work for six months
because I'm stressed because of who I am and people will know have this tendency of severely limiting
themselves in life not because they are limited but just because they think and believe they are limited.
All right look at the disservice that our beliefs do us some sometimes some people define themselves
have been rich or poor compared to who.
All right you may define yourself as being rich.
That's absolutely fantastic.
Who are you comparing yourself up against.
And if you are defining yourself as as being rich then that must mean that some people are poor.
Right.
Who are you to decide who's poor who used to decide who's rich.
How do you decide whether you're rich or whether you're poor and who is your Putin down or Putin up
as you're assigning these labels onto onto you.
What are they like the right there's one there's one word here that I really really like when people
ask me to define myself.
All right.
What I'll very very rarely do is go into a discussion and tell people all about who I knew I actually
am at the core reason being is because unless I know that I can trust the person innately from the inside
out I will not share with another person who I am I will not tell them because I wouldn't trust them
to handle me Well all right.
So instead when people say so tell me about yourself Cain said well you know some of the things that
I do Mama when my husband's working towards being a father I'm a teacher I'm a trainer my coach.
I'm an entrepreneur.
These are some of the things that I do and I do all of it so darned imperfectly it's unbelievable.
Other things so darned imperfectly I am growing and I'm changing every single day.
And that's how I find myself so straightforward and you know what.
When I say things like this all right.
What I'm not doing a lot building myself up I'm not making myself out to be some sort of superhero but
I'm also not make himself up to be some sort of failure and in life in life either general generally
when I define myself in this way I believe in myself space and opportunity and scope to grow and change.
All right what I'm hoping you can identify here is when we define ourselves by any of these things we
define ourselves by a set of religious beliefs or by a sexual preference or a sexual orientation or
we define ourselves by our winds or by our status will lose things have already happened so fast.
How we define ourselves we're locking ourselves in.
All right we're defining ourselves by how we've been or what we believe that what we've heard or what
we've done at some point in the past.
All right.
If we define ourselves by by how we feel.
Well you know again human beings have a tendency of behaving out of accordance with who they believe
themselves to be.
Think of the story of Mr. cruel Mr. tarantula.
I am a teacher Angela.
And that's what tarantulas do we eat crows I've always behave this way.
Therefore this is how I'm always going to behave because this is who I am.
I am my behaviors and no we are not our behaviors we are not our thoughts.
We are not our feelings we are not our opinions we are not our beliefs.
We are who we are the core and so our core.
This must become our unique reference point.
If it was to open up and divulge and share with Yahoo.
Who I am really honestly if you hadn't already encountered and experienced me in being this way then
you wouldn't really be listening or taking anything that I'm about to say No see this but if I was to
say that I'm creative hobos.
If I was to say that I am I'm authentic I'm I'm genuine I'm sincere I was if I was to say that I am
I'm integral if I say I'm going to do something I would do it to the best of my imperfect ability how
about if I was to say that I'm growing I'm developing I am resilient I am I'm loving I am I'm fun I
am compassionate
these things what I'm what I'm doing is what I find myself in this way I am the feeling I'm defining
myself by my characteristics by current or traits right which is very very different from feelings and
beliefs and opinions and thoughts and feelings and so on.
If I say that I'm creative.
Well that means I can go on to be as creative as I want to be.
If I say that I am caring well my perfectly caring will know because how I am is imperfect which means
that I've still got room for improvement.
So what I'm saying here is that when we start coaching our clients on an identity level we want to make
sure that our clients are not assigning any labels onto themselves that are limiting them or that are
containing them in any way whatsoever.
And the reason for this being is because none of us want to be contained.
None of us enjoy being contained.
None of us need to be contained and that's pretty much about.
So this is the core identity coaching model.
All right.
This is where we all are in life.
Anyone who says that they are anyone who says that they are 100 percent grounded and secure in who they
are 100 percent of the time is a liar because this is the journey of self discovery which is incidentally
the the life process.
All of our.
All of us find ourselves in.
So this is the core identity coach and model.
I hope you found this one insightful and you may even have found it a little bit provocative or challenging
but in the next video we're gonna know turn our focus upon you.
All right I'm going to ask you some questions and hopefully by then you'll have downloaded and printed
off the worksheet that I'm going to take you through a core identity coaching session all you've gotta
do is respond and be completely honest if in fact that is who you choose to be.
After all will be found this interesting and I'll see you again in the next clip.