Emotional Self-Care for Coaches

Coaches devote a great deal of time, energy, and resources to building their business and serving their clients’ needs. But investing so heavily in your business and the lives of your clients and neglecting emotional self-care can deplete your emotional reserves, leaving you frustrated, angry, and even depressed.
To understand and appreciate the importance of emotional self-care for coaches, consider what life is like when you neglect your emotional health. For example:

• You react rather than respond to a business partner or client
• You are easily annoyed and angered. Sometimes you find yourself getting angry at something a client says, and you are not even sure why.
• You procrastinate because you depend on your emotions for motivation, which means much remains undone. Your business suffers as a result.
• You don’t know how to express your emotions in ways that are healthy, so you keep them bottled up. Maybe your coaching business isn’t growing as quickly as you thought it would, or perhaps you lost two coaching clients in one week, and you’re feeling frustrated and fearful. So, you explode, and shrapnel from the fallout hits everyone near you, including your family members. On the flip side, perhaps you never express your emotions, so you become depressed and angry at life and everyone around you.

Suggestions for Emotional Self-Care

When you pay attention to your emotional self-care, you will be more in control of the choices you make and direction you take in your business and your life. Here are some suggestions for attending to your emotional self-care.

• Acknowledge and name your emotions. Emotions, regardless of which emotion it might be, are not the problem. Learning to express what you’re feeling is important for your health and the health of your business.
• Own your emotions. For example, don’t say you make me angry; instead say, “I am angry.” In this way, you are not giving up control of your emotions to someone else. Rather you are acknowledging and owning what you are feeling. Learn to express your feelings without disrespecting, putting down or embarrassing others.
• Forgive past hurts. When you hold on to past hurts, you remain a prisoner of the one who hurt you in the first place. You may or may not have been able to prevent the pain in the first place, but freedom comes only through forgiveness. Forgiving the past is not about the one who hurt you; it is about emotional self-care so that you can move forward and heal.
• Learn to identify what triggers certain emotions. For instance, what makes you angry? What makes you happy? What makes you feel peaceful and calm? When you can identify those triggers, you will be better able to control your emotions rather being controlled by them.
• Don’t be afraid to seek professional help if necessary.  Fear, anxiety, anger, resentment and depression can be so deep that you may need professional help to wade through them.

Emotional self-care is difficult for me personally and professionally. I find it a lot easier to give in to what I am feeling rather than to step back, acknowledge and assess what I am feeling, and choose an appropriate response instead of just reacting.
What about you?
Are you emotionally aware of how you respond or are you blaming others and circumstances for your emotional state? What steps are you taking for your emotional self-care?