A little excerpt for you today from Ankush Jain's love letter to the coaching profession, Awakening the Coach Within.
His entire practice, like mine, is built on the foundations of the 3 Principles understanding, and he makes no apologies for repeatedly coming back to its most fundamental premise in the book:
➤ 100% of our feelings come from (the Principle of) Thought
➤ 0% of our feelings come from our circumstances
The reason he (and I) get away with repeating this so often is because us humans are hard wired to see it the other way round.
Somewhere along the way, our internal software evolved to see our experience as happening to us (rather than through us) and hey presto, it still really looks that way!
And since you can't not see an illusion, we very innocently fall for it (I fall for it), every day:
Which is fine—it's the most human of traits—but when we're lost like that, for protracted periods, it does have consequences.
😬
And that's what Ankush puts his finger on so eloquently with this little paragraph I read today:
“If we associate our feelings with objects, people and circumstances, we often try to control or chase things in our lives which have no bearing on our well-being or our happiness.”
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 ouch it burns
I did this for many, many years, again, completely innocently (it's all innocent – give yourself a break)!
It led to me failing to fully commit to things like careers and relationships, because whenever the shine wore off, I would always place the responsibility for my disillusionment onto my circumstances, and of course then it was only natural that I would try to ‘fix them’ or just swap them out, by moving on to something (or somebody) new.
But in a way, I'm glad.
Because without all that experience—without all that observing of how not to find contentment in life—I'm not sure the 3 Principles would have had the impact they did, when I stumbled across them, nigh on 7 years ago.
🤷🏻♂️
That ‘stumbling’ is a journey that I've been documenting recently in a series of Daily Reminders entitled ‘17 Days’ that you can catch up on, using the link below, if you're curious.
The final part—which addresses what happens when we have a moment of ‘seeing through the veil’ of thought—is up next.
💟
Giles
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“They feel like a moment of stillness in a world of madness.” ~ Neil, UK
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Catch up on the full series to date.