Do you have a safe space to think?

Hint: We all need one

Sep 18, 2024

I liken the safe space of therapy to coaching to dog walking…. this is Mojo.

How often do you feel seen and heard? Especially as a woman?

We hold so much space for everyone around us, and yet can be pretty crap about holding space and love for ourselves. And that’s ok… we are complicated creatures, with complicated lives and a mind-fucking legacy from a patriarchal system to deal with.

I do enjoy a bit of soapbox pontification and so buckle up as I’m going to share one of my pontificating positions.

Several are very specific to being a woman obviously, and through the work that I do helping women understand the context of their lives in today’s world which promised them it all, but then left them to mostly to do it all, means I get to coach, speak and write on these topics, soapbox pontificating when I can.

But one is a broader topic; one that affects everyone really. Somewhere along the education evolution in this country and most other Western ones, someone decided that history and geography and biology where more important subjects to learn in school than psychology. Not that history and geography and biology aren’t important - they are. But leaving out how your mind works especially in relation to making sense of your own history, leaving out how to map the geography of your feelings, and leaving out how your brain actually works and how it is so connected to the biology of your body seems utterly insane (not that that’s a psychology term).

Understanding how your thoughts determine your emotions which determine your actions, is literally the most important knowledge a human can learn (how to actually run the mental machinery of being that human) and yet we educate children in all sorts of other subjects and then throw them into the world - a world that is a fully fake social construct that couldn’t be more designed to actually fuck with our thoughts - and then wonder why there is so much drama and depression and stress in the world.

I honestly believe if I had been taught in school the basics of how to manage being a human, as well as feeding and breeding as one, I would have been a much nicer person to myself for the decades I spent as a self-critical perfectionist, and managed some of the more challenging times that life threw at me better.

But I got there in the end. When life did get really tough I sought help, and it literally transformed my life. I’ve had therapy, I’ve had CBT counselling, I’ve had coaching and they all have played a hugely important part in helping me evolve as a human being, as much as help me become the person I want to become and live the life I want to live.

I think all people over the age of 12 should be given a neutral space to work on understanding themselves, their lives and their thoughts, and that will likely look like different things at different times.

There is a trajectory of this neutral space that runs from psychotherapy through all the many forms and formats of therapy through to CBT dealing with understanding yourself, over the line towards now improving your life with coaching and mentoring.

I became a coach because coaching changed my own life. The questions and analysis and exploring didn’t make me a new person; they revealed another layer of me, one less restricted by the self-limiting beliefs as I had about my ability and the expectations on me as a women, as a mother, as a partner.

I work with women to specifically help them see how unhelpful and downright damaging some of their beliefs are… and importantly, why some of them DO NOT and never have, belonged to them.

Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson puts it beautifully: Beliefs are theories. Actions are experiments. Emotions are feedback. Life is a science and its objective is growth.

Imagine learning that at as a teenager, and realising that what goes through your head is only an option… that you can be in charge of your thoughts, not be held hostage by them - and when I mean them, I mean that the hostage taker is often a hormone on a rampage.

As a speaker, and in my coaching, I talk a lot about helping women understand their thoughts and where they can come from, because women have been (and still are) socialised differently from men. The fact that as the generations of women navigating the seismic transition from a long and deeply embedded patriarchal structure towards one of greater equity, we are embracing all the fabulous opportunities and freedoms, AND still weighted down by paralysing-perfectionism, guilt-tripping people-pleasing, imposter syndrome-making misogyny and frankly, a still far too loud social narrative that beats us over the head telling us what Good Girl women should look and act like, that come from a system not built for, or by us, and which hasn’t yet fully restructured to accommodate our glorious, gutsy womanly ways.

This means, we cannot believe the first thought in our heads. That first thought telling us we have to be all things to all people first, telling us we’re not good enough, telling us we can’t ask for more, telling us we are bad / wrong / a bitch for making demands, the thought gaslighting us that we know deep inside the unfairness is wrong but then then being told we can’t complain.

Which is why we need to know this shit. We need to know that when we feel imposter syndrome, or perfectionism or people pleasing that we should bypass that thought for one that comes from within.

Psychology -and the practises of therapy, CBT, and coaching - simply helps people learn to listen more to, and trust, their within.

Often when I’m coaching I can tell my clients just want to be told what decision to make, or what action to take. And coaching, like therapy, isn’t about having someone else solve your problems; it’s about helping you reach within and understand the WHY behind your thoughts and the WHAT to change to have better thoughts, which lead to better feelings and then better actions.

A lot of people - because they weren’t taught this stuff in school - are ruled by their beliefs (which we know are really just assumptions, or interpretations or handed-down opinions.) Finding the space to process your beliefs, have a look at them in a detached way, wave at them and say hello as if it’s a cloud passing by in the sky and then decide if it’s true, if it needs updating, if it’s helpful, is something everyone needs.

Other people are ruled by their emotions (which if you’re paying attention to the psychology lesson above and WHY THIS SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS) are created by our thoughts about something.

Managing our human brain well means we get to be ruled by neither thoughts or emotions and to have a healthy relationship with both. And like all relationships, that takes work, commitment and constant reviews.

Which goes back to my theory that every single human needs support to stay human in a world with inhuman levels of pressures and expectations. A safe space to work through their thoughts and emotions and learn the tools to have more agency in how they have, listen and respond to them.

I’ve told this story before here but many moons ago, as I backpacked round SE Asia, I ended up playing chess with an elderly Vietnamese man. We were talking about life, and he smiled wryly at some no-doubt obnoxious thing my 25 year-old know-it-all self said, and he told me something I have never forgotten: “You in the West are brought up to believe you deserve happiness. If you work hard and do all the things you are told / expected to do, you’ll deserve happiness. We in the East are brought up to believe you do the best you can to live a good life. But bad times will come and so endure them as best you can because they will pass. And good times with come, so embrace them because they too will pass.”

The goal in life is not actually to be happy all the time. No-one deserves that, even if you burn yourself inside out pleasing everyone. That’s not how life works. The goal in life is to be able to go through a wide range of experiences and emotions and stay connected to yourself. And THAT’s what we all need help learning.

The idea that women can have it all and deserve happiness hurts us so much. And what I do as a coach, and what the safe space of any type of therapy, counselling or coaching does, is allow you to realise the bullshit world we live in and normalise uncomfortable feelings rather than normalise the pressure. Normalise challenging our thoughts rather than normalise the external expectations put upon us. Normalise the idea that you can challenge thoughts that don’t serve you, rather than normalise living on autopilot in STRESS mode.

How coaching changed my life.

I saw a coach before Oprah Winfrey had one so there. Well maybe not quite, but in Dublin in 2006 it wasn’t very common. I’m not sure she even called herself a coach when I was recommended I do some sessions with her when I’d had my first baby, and stepped away from the career that had defined me up until that point. No-one had ever, and I mean ever, listened to me the way she did. No-one had made me think about my life the way she did.

I still think back - almost 20 years later - to one of the exercises; I still think about the gifts and gaps I got from my childhood and where I needed to plug the gaps myself. Those sessions helped me make sense of my own gifts and how to use them better. As a direct result of that coaching, I became a writer. I started with a blog, and ended up with a best selling memoir and my current book which is helping women understand the thoughts in their heads and how to distinguish between the ones that belong to a system that doesn’t serve them, and the ones that are theirs.

I liken psychology - and with it the practises from therapy to coaching - as going on a dog walk, which I do every day of my life. I can’t control the weather, but I can decide what clothes to wear that helps protect me from or enjoy the weather. It’s not about not walking in the rain or the storms, but supporting yourself best with whatever the weather is.

We aren’t taught this stuff in school and so it is up to each of us to go seeking the safe spaces - in whatever form they take from psychotherapy through to coaching - to help us remember that being an ever evolving, growing human is our most important job.

I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you feel about therapy / coaching, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)

Do you have a safe space to think?

Hint: We all need one

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