Article - 2 minute read
What are we looking for when we’re seeking help?
This is an important question to ask ourselves anytime we schedule our next appointment with a provider, read a friend’s recommended self-help book, or, indeed, apply for a program through a non-profit.
Sometimes the kind of help we need is the kind that we truly cannot give to ourselves, where we are reliant, for example, on a specific skill set of a surgeon to conduct open-heart surgery.
The kind of help where I need something or someone “out there” to fix what is going on “in here.”
What about when it comes to seeking psychological help?
Consider what your experience in this domain has been like. Have the helpers in your life approached the process like a surgeon, where the patient is fully dependent on outside help to fix a personal issue?
Or has it been the opposite, where what they offer are insights into your own intuition and ability to heal from the inside out? Not seeking to change you but to wake up more of who you already are through challenging, but caring, dialogues?
When we are carrying burdens of pain, whether physical or spiritual, it comes to pass that the care systems we sometimes go to lead us to believe that healing is to be found “out there” and if only you go to the right experts, get the right prescriptions, then finding personal wholeness can be attained.
This can lead some to hop from one charity or doctor or therapist to another seeking just the right kind of care, or, at worse, taking advantage of ultimately unhelpful free-bees from these organizations while never really receiving the life-long change and healing they are after.
But while certain types of care—like fixing broken bones or other specific physical conditions—are dependent on an expert to, if you will, do the healing to you, this is largely a mistaken paradigm of care when it comes to much of post-traumatic growth.
At Mission 22, our coaching model starts with only one assumption: lasting change and healing only occur when our program participants discover more of what they already have, not in discovering more of what outside care they need.
So, there are two parts to this. One is the way our coaches show up to the relationship—not as a fixer but as a guide by your side.
A coach is a lighthouse, not a tug boat.
Two is that the one being coached is open to this process, dropping the expectation that they are here to be “tugged.” This requires a certain level of humility, but our hope is that this process becomes freeing, as our aim is to help individuals find agency once again in how they approach the healing and growth process.
Do you believe that growth, based on tapping into who you are to begin with, is possible now? Are you open to exploring the possibility that you have much more control when it comes to your physical, emotional, and cognitive health that you may have thought before?
If so, we invite you to take that personal responsibility today and start this journey of coaching and growth with us.
And one last thing before you click “Next.”
This process, to work for you, will demand a lot. It will demand not just intentions, but commitment, because our coaches are not your fixers. You are your own healer and our coaches are here to facilitate what that looks like in your unique situation.
And if you want to see some real-life examples of what this can look like, watch this video.
If this is a commitment you believe you are ready for, then we’re ready to get that started with you when you are.
