Tickling the Bear

One of the things I love about the style of coaching I’ve been trained in is that we use metaphors and other tools to get clients out of their left logical brain and into their right intuitive brain. I was being coached the other day, and was talking about being stuck. My coach asked me what that feeling felt like, and to my surprise, what popped out of my mouth was “It feels like a bear is sitting on my chest”.

Now, this seemed like a friendly bear, but it had no intention of moving and was even contemplating settling in to hibernate. So my coach and I discussed ways in which I could approach the bear so it was no longer sitting on me. Rolling the bear seemed too difficult, but something smaller – tickling it – seemed just right.

And this is how I discovered the perfect way forward: doing something playful and small to get unstuck. I don’t need to move the whole darn bear NOW. I simply need to get the bear to shift around a bit so I have more breathing room. And indeed, after the coaching session, I made a few small FUN actions towards my goal. It turns out, I didn’t need to have it figured out all at once after all.