By Chris Morris

Chris Morris is the host of NLP Connections and a very successful coach. In this guest post, he writes a note to his younger self.

Dear Chris,

I know it sounds crazy but believe me, within a week you’re going to drop everything and become a life coach.

Don’t ask me what a life coach is – after all these years I’m still not really sure – but I can tell you it’s going to be a wonderful and bumpy ride. Buckle up and hold on tight, but not too tight.

You’re happy today, aged 23. Life is good. Enjoy these moments, because in a few days you’re going to start seeing yourself and the world in a very different way. The training you’ll start tomorrow will change the course of your life. Instead of being, you’ll start becoming. Instead of feeling comfortable with wherever you’re at, you’ll start believing you’re full of holes. It’s going to be unnecessarily difficult for a while. One day you’ll look back and describe this way of life as ‘the tyranny of self improvement’.

But relax. It’s going to work out ok.

What you’ll learn after a while is very simple: you are perfect as you are – you always were and you always will be. Everyone is exactly the way they’re meant to be. You can never earn happiness, or achieve it, or discover it. You can only be happy. You knew that once kiddo, but you let others persuade you otherwise. Someone on a raised stage told you to tell a better story about who you are, and you thought they knew best. You bought into their story about how the world works, not realising they were teaching you how to be as confused as them.

One day you’ll arrive back where you started and see the world again through clearer eyes. It will be like waking from a surreal dream.

You’ll get there my friend, and the only stage that matters is the stage you’re at right now.

Coaching turns out to be your passion, by the way. Who’d have thought? One day you’ll have a long page of testimonials and you’ll cry with joy when you read them because you’ll know how lovingly your path has mingled with others’. So although things don’t work out how you expect, and although you may never figure out how to describe what you do, what you’ll come to realise is beautiful in it’s simplicity: by being who you truly are, you can start to see the truth in others, and that will often help them to see it too.

I like the Sanskrit word Namaste. There are many translations, but this is one of my favourites:

“I see the light in you that is also in me. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.”

With love and much fondness,

Chris

About the Author and Further Resources

Chris Morris is a coach, psychotherapist and the creator of a process called Be Brighter. Later this month he will be hosting Creating The Impossible with ‘Supercoach’ Michael Neill.

To read a second guest post by Chris Morris click here