Reframing Perspectives: Truth, Reality and Commitments

The essence of coaching, I think, is in helping clients reframe perspectives that no longer serve your highest purpose or greatest need. Often that will call into question ways of thinking and feeling that you have held as true or real. For some, re-ordering these beliefs can be temporarily unsettling.

Truth and reality have many levels and colors. As children, many of us were taught that there is only one Truth, and one Reality. As we grow into adults we learn that what was presented to us as the one Truth or Reality was our parents’ or society’s explanation, but that what was unknown when they formed their truth and reality has since been replaced or augmented by new knowledge.

If we’re lucky to be well educated or if we are naturally open to the process of critically thinking for ourselves, we easily reframe the perspectives about truth and reality we’ve been taught in our early years.

But if we’re committed to sustaining a certain explanation, it’s much harder to reframe old, outmoded, dysfunctional views into new, more growthful, more healthy perspectives.

In coaching, we ask: what belief or assumption are you committed that might no longer be the version of truth you want to invest in? What reality have you been committed to that you now see has to change?

Change itself necessarily implies that there is an old version of reality and a potentially new one, an old truth and a new one. If this were not so, there could never be any change at all.

Growth by it’s very nature is change.

What is the central truth you are committed to right now? How does that commitment shape your choices, your current reality? How might you need to change that explanation of truth in order to have the choices and reality you really want?