As a coach, I  NEVER thought that I would hear myself say these words, let alone write them! Yet, I am now very wary of 'positive thinking' at all cost, because positive thinking can indeed be costly.

When I started sliding down towards the pit of darkness I eventually ended in, I remember railing against coaching and all that positive thinking stuff. What good had it done me to think so positively? Wasn't it painfully ironic that I, a positive person and a coach to boot, could end up engulfed in severe depression? I remember feeling very angry about all that, and quite a bit embarrassed too. I also remember wanting to throttle my psychiatrist when he suggested one day that I was being negative. How could he say such a thing to ME!!!

As I got better, I was able to take a few steps back from my hellish pit and I started asking these simple questions: how could it be that a positive thinker could become very ill with depression? Could the doctor be right? How could I be negative in spite of my thinking that I was positive? I must admit that I 'held' those questions for a long time before anything useful came up to the surface of my understanding.

This is what I am learning on the subject. I say 'am learning' rather than 'have learnt' because I am aware that this is an on-going process rather than an ending post:

• A positive thought is not the first thing I need to reach for when I feel bad but the last. Positive thinking is as its most powerful when it comes last - not first.
• If I feel bad, the first thing I must do is feel - not think. This is hard because feeling bad is painful and pain is not pleasant BUT feeling what I feel, staying with it, giving it a name, becoming aware of where I am feeling it in my body, reacting to it (by crying or yelling or whatever) is the necessary first step to my moving forward.
• My natural (and professional) reaction to feeling negative was always to correct myself whereas I now know I need to comfort myself.
• If I jump too quickly from feeling negative to thinking positive, I by-pass a crucial process and I run the risk of sticking a proverbial plaster on my broken leg. By going straight for my brain, I am effectively by-passing the rest of me, thus depriving my brain from crucial 'data'. You know what they say in data processing: rubbish in, rubbish out.

The thing is, in all my years of coaching I have never come across a process that showed me HOW to move from feeling negative to thinking positive in a way that does not unwittingly suppress anything.

I found this process by accident in a book entitled 'Ask and it is Given' by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Chapter 22 of the book (which, interestingly, I had read with my eyes before without really absorbing its relevance to me) gives an excellent description of what it calls the Emotional Set Point Scale and how to move up it. The key is to move from whatever feeling we start from to a feeling that feels a little better. The way to do that is to ask the following question:

What would I need to think to feel a little better right now?

You must have noticed that thinking comes back into the picture but not as an all-negativity blasting grenade and more as a gradual negativity descaler. The first thoughts I come up with in this process can hardly be described as 'positive' in a traditional sense but each one is helpful to me, at the very moment I need it.

Coaching can occasionally suffer from its blinding love affair with light-bulb moments and ka-pow energy (not that there is anything wrong with either). Coaches can indeed help a client move forward spectacularly with one powerful question.  However, coaching need not limit itself to loud cheer-leading that encourages speedy action. It is well capable of gentle nudging that accompanies timeless healing.

PS:  I am well aware that 'healing' is a dodgy word in coaching. We are told repeatedly through our coach training that coaching is for healthy people. True: coaching can never be a replacement for necessary medical treatment. It can however be a superb companion in recovery.

What do YOU think?