Your life is the Plate. You are the Stick.

Imagine a plate spinning on a stick.

The plate represents your life.

Everything you’ve got going on sits on it: work, family, relationships, ambitions, responsibilities, worries, expectations, and all the ordinary stuff that makes up being a human.

Then something unexpected lands on it.

The plate starts to wobble.

You have to decide what to do.

Do you try to compensate?

Do you try to drop something else onto the plate to balance the problem?

Do you move things around to try and restore some kind of balance albeit at the expense of huge disruption in other parts of your life?

Or, perhaps more commonly, do you take the thing causing the problem and push it towards the edge of the plate?

At the edge of the plate it feels less immediate, right?

Out of sight out of mind?

It may be out of sight but it won’t be out of mind for long.

Those challenges that we push away and put off are the ones that creep on us in the middle of the night.

The longer we leave them the worse they usually get.

In fact the closer they get to the edge of the plate the greater their potential to destabilise everything becomes.

The problem you’ve been avoidning can suddenly become the cause of a massive wobble somehwere completely unexpected.

Bring it to the centre.

My approach to coaching is simple.

Bring the issue to the centre of the plate.

Look at it properly.

Understand it.

Challenge it.

Decide what needs to change.

Then deal with it.

Sometimes that means changing something.

Sometimes it means accepting something.

Sometimes it means having a difficult conversation.

Soemtimes is means recognising that the story you’ve been telling yourlsef isn’t actually true.

Soemtimes it means letting soemthing go.

What about the Stick? 

The Stick is you.

You are the person who has to support everything on the plate.

If the plate becomes too heavy or too unstable you are the one who feels the strain.

That’s why coaching isn’t only about dealing with what’s on the plate.

It’s also about strenghtening the stick.

When life is relatively stable that’s an opportunity to build your capacity.

Read.

Learn.

Study.

Seek different perspectives.

Develop expertise.

Build confidence.

Become more reslient.

Strengthen your ability to deal with whatever lands on the plate next.

Balance. Control. Strength. Resilience.

That’s the original thinking behind the Spinning Plate.

it remains at the heart of everything I do.