How deep do you go when you’re thinking?

How deep do you go when you're thinking? How deep do you go in your thoughts about your fears, your fascinations, your fabulousness, your success, your dreams, your goals, ambitions? How deep do you go? 

It's a question I ask myself quite often, how much deeper can I go with understanding myself? How much deeper can I go with my clients to help them understand themselves, and for me to understand them so that I can guide them and help them and mentor them and coach them. 

The thing is, if we don't lead a deep life, we don't feel deeply satisfied or fulfilled. Everything is surface-based. Everything is just mundane, day to day ‘Groundhog Day’ getting through, getting by, trying to find some joy in things that give us dopamine hits (especially if you have some neuro-spicy tendencies, a bit like me). I'm always dopa-mining, it's something I've done all my life! I finally started to realise in the last few years what I'm doing and how to get it. Finding the depth in the conversation, finding the depth in the problem, finding the depth in the solution, is why I called my coaching certification, Deep Structure NLP Coaching because the deep structure stuff is the base of where it all happens. 

Deep down in your unconscious mind is where you have your values, your beliefs, your intrinsic ways of doing things, your values; everything that you need is in your unconscious mind. 

Being able to access that and make the unconscious conscious, is very powerful. You start to really align with who you are and what you want, rather than becoming a version of somebody else that you thought looked like a good idea. If you've done that, I really resonate because I did it a few times until I realised I was just being what I thought I wanted to be, because it looked like a good life for someone else. I created a laptop lifestyle, where I could literally be anywhere in the world running my business, and ended up sitting in a hotel room in Lanzarote for a week, where I didn't even go to the beach. This is a true story. So I just moved my work life to a different country and in fact, it was more inconvenient because I didn't have a lovely desk, I didn't have a printer, I didn't have the lovely screen that protected me from the light, and I didn't have a proper chair. So I was sitting cross legged on the bed trying to work thinking, what on earth are you doing Vivienne? You must be nuts. This isn't the laptop lifestyle that you dreamed of. This isn't what it's about. And if you've ever tried to work on a laptop on the beach, it does not work. It gets sandy, it's too sunny, you lose power, you lose interest, you can't concentrate because of course, you want to be doing other stuff at the beach. 

So, I'm wondering if you're creating a life that isn't yours. I'm wondering what depth of questions you need somebody like me to ask you to help you understand what's really going on for you. Because if you've had coaching, or you've asked yourself and it hasn't worked, then the questions haven't been deep enough. They haven't hit hard enough. They haven't been provocative enough to really help you guide yourself out of your own way; or to find the way, because sometimes we're not stuck… but we are stuck! We just don't think we're stuck. 

We’re just safe. 

We're just okay. 

We're just having a nice life. 

I spoke to a guy recently who wanted me to coach him and his main problem is he's hit 50 and is wondering if this is all there is to life. He should be grateful. He's got a great girlfriend, he's got a great family from a previous relationship, he's got a lovely house, he's got a job he's been doing that he's really good at, he’s got plenty of money, goes on nice holidays, blardy blardy, bla. He’s got all of this great stuff and he thinks, is this what life's about what's next. He's got what I call a next-level limiter. You've probably heard me talk about it before. And so we need some depth of questioning to help him with that because he doesn't know. Because if he knew he would grow. When we know we grow and when we know we GO! And if we don't, we stop. We just stop and stay where we are because it's nice and safe and there's nothing wrong with it, and we compare ourselves to everybody around us who's doing probably as well as, or not quite as well as, and we think we should be satisfied really. We get told, “you should be satisfied with your lot, don't be greedy”. 

It's quite a common thing for us to be told as children, but you can be greedy, you can have more, whatever that more is. It could be money, it could be gratitude, it could be love, it could be connection, it could be time, it could be freedom. And I don't mean I can make you live longer, but actually the life you have got, what are you doing with those minutes, hours, days, weeks, months? What deep questions do you want me to ask you to help you find your next level? Let me know.