Intuitive Coaching with Natasha Charles guides students, professionals & pro athletes to shift limiting beliefs & create lives they love.
getty
There are people who are successful and highly accomplished, and yet they’re living life with pain, with wounds, with trauma inside. They’ve pushed it down and away, silenced it, ignored it, told themselves it’s okay, or it doesn’t matter, or it doesn’t exist, or they don’t recognize it, or it hasn’t caused enough of an issue in their lives for them to focus upon it. So it’s just there, traveling with them. These people are not typically the "toxic stars" described by Adam Grant; instead, they're usually some of the most effective people.
If that resonates with you at all, make a mental note of this idea: You can be brilliant, creative, successful, highly accomplished and living with trauma, pain, hurt, wounds and experiences that have left you feeling incomplete. They are there, somewhere between a whisper and deafening roar, sapping peace, power, beauty, love, light, life and joy, shaping who you are, who you are being.
I recently watched Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix. In the film, she tells the story of her life. One of the significant relationships Amy describes is the one between her and her mother.
Her mother lived a complex life, and her challenges spilled over into Amy’s childhood. Amy describes growing up with a mother who was very critical and at times threatened to commit suicide.
Key to this article is a moment in Amy’s life after her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Sometime after the diagnosis, her mother called Amy on the telephone. At the time that the call took place, Amy was much older, a married adult who had written several successful novels and expanded in so many ways in her life. Amy expressed that the disease had been impacting her mother for quite some time. It had been shaping her mother's personality and behaviors, even if no one knew that Alzheimer's was an underlying cause. Similarly, there are people who do not realize that there is an underlying issue for their own behaviors.
The day that she called, Amy's mother said that she recognized that something was wrong with her mind and that she realized she’d done some things that had hurt Amy—only she couldn’t remember what they were anymore. As her mother was endeavoring to have this conversation, Amy was telling her mother that it was okay, that she didn’t need to say what she was saying.
Part of what I’d like you to get here is that that's what we tell the piece of ourselves that is asking for healing. Without realizing it, we tell our trauma, our pain, No, no, it’s okay, I don’t need to heal, I don’t need to have a conversation, I don't need an apology. It comes right out of us—what we’ve been telling ourselves, the temporary bandage we put over the wound.
To complete the story, Amy’s mother told her over the telephone, I know I did some things to hurt you; I’ve forgotten what they are; I’m sorry, and I hope that one day you’ll forget, as well. Fighting through tears, Amy explained that hearing her mother say that was enough to undo everything; in that moment, everything was forgotten.
That was a beautiful moment between mother and daughter, a moment of power, healing, closure and completion. A moment that was both a beginning and an ending; a moment of transformation. In that moment, something in Amy was unblocked, healed, released.
I felt and I feel such gratitude to be able to recognize those moments and to be in a profession, as a coach, that experiences these moments with clients as they are on their journey of healing and transformation in their own lives.
Moments like that inspire me to do the work that I do, knowing the transformative power of healing through dialogue and associated techniques.
That moment inspired me to create this article and to ask you, the reader, what are those moments in your life, what are those experiences, those questions, those traumas, those fears, those limiting beliefs that lie dormant inside of you and you’ve been telling yourself it’s okay, that you don’t need an apology or that there’s nothing to be healed or examined? What would it mean to you to experience what Amy experienced with her mom? To experience relief, release, healing? Not from something that is necessarily limiting your success—remember, Amy Tan was an accomplished author and living a full life—but something that leaves you feeling less than whole, less than complete, successful yet empty.
Amy Tan's moment with her mother was about something deeper, about healing a relationship and traumatic experiences, about being able to settle the matter within in order to be complete. Difficult experiences like this can be a source of internal pain, dispassion, unhappiness, heaviness, sadness, anger, guilt and people-pleasing. They may be something that is creating an experience of success while still feeling empty inside, or having a space that feels empty. They are experiences where you do not feel complete, connected, authentic, or they may be patterns in your life that leave you asking, "Why?"
Love yourself. Treat yourself well.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
