CBT | Mindset coaching – learn how to overcome your limiting beliefs
Mindset coaching is a type of life coaching which focuses on coaching clients to overcome limiting beliefs and assumptions, and broaden their mindset to adopt a new way of thinking. Mindset coaches adopt a growth mindset philosophy, and coach you to build confidence, reach your goals and achieve success. So, whether you need to adopt a new mindset within business, relationships or personal development goals, or whether you’re interested in starting your own mindset coaching business, this article covers what to expect from your mindset coaching experience.
From life coaching to mindset coaching – what is a mindset coach?
A purist life coaching session will focus on using a combination of the coaching relationship, powerful questions, goals, and action plans to enable clients to move from one place in life to another. The traditional coaching mindset is one of using genuine enquiry to enable clients to understand what they truly want from life, recognise what is keeping them stuck, and then drawing on their strengths to get them to where they want to be. But what does a mindset coach do? A mindset coach is essentially a mindset life coach, who will use the basics of coaching, but build upon this with mindset techniques drawn from other psychological and motivational disciplines to teach clients new and more adaptive ways of thinking.
So, aside from the basics of coaching, what does a mindset coach do?
Ideally, your mindset coach will be trained and knowledgable in some form of evidence based approach to working with limiting thoughts and beliefs, and how to generate new ones. Things like neuro linguistic programming (NLP), emotional freedom technique and time line therapy are all examples of techniques which are bolted on to coaching, but these techniques, although commonplace within the coaching community, don’t have sufficient evidence to prove that they truly work. Sorry to break the hearts of it’s advocates, but NLP is now generally regarded as a pseudoscience due to it’s lack of scientific validity and reliance on out of date models of brain and mind functioning
As such, effective mindset coaches will use evidence based approaches to expanding mindset like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Positive Psychology. CBT actively teaches you to “catch” unhelpful ways of thinking, generate new ones and then test them out through active behavioural experiments. ACT treats thoughts slightly differently. In ACT, rather than teaching you to challenge negative thoughts, we teach you how to change your relationship to them (Defusion) and take action towards your values and goals, rather than wasting energy getting caught up in old narratives, beliefs, and assumptions. Lastly, Positive Psychology changes mindset through the development of character strengths and positive emotion regulation – positive emotion has been shown to lead to broader, more creative thinking (The broaden and Build theory of positive emotion).
So, the top mindset coaches will have additional training on top of standard coach training. Ideally they will have training in at least one of the above three approaches, or some other form of evidence-based mindset developing approach.
The benefits of mindset coaching
In addition to enabling you to achieve success in reaching your goals, a mindset coaching program would also be equipping you with the cognitive strategies and skills to keep your progress going way beyond the end of the coaching relationship. Rather than seeing problems as threats to success, mindset coaching based on CBT, ACT and positive psychology will enable you to re-evaluate them as challenges and opportunities, and broaden your perspective of just what you are able to accomplish in life. Imagine not just achieving your goals, but also understanding exactly how you got there, knowing how you overcame negative habits of thought on your journey.
The psychologist Carol Dweck is especially know for her work on developing mindset. In her research she has shown how certain types of praise, education and reward can lead people to develop what is called a “fixed mindset”. For example, if a child is told that they are good at Maths but poor at sport, they may start to internalise these as being fixed truths – that is, they believe that being good at maths and poor at sport are fixed properties of the personality and intelligence. The consequence of such fixed beliefs is that the child may disengage from sports entirely – what’s the point, right? But, more importantly, if they have a fixed belief that they are intrinsically good at Maths, what happens when they come up against a Maths challenge that they just can’t solve? The fixed belief of being good at Maths becomes a barrier to looking for new ways to solve the problem – they become stuck, despondent and at risk of disengagement.
A growth mindset, rather than focusing on good-bad, right-wrong absolutes, instead promotes a focus on learning as a process. So, a mindset coach would promote a growth mindset through encouraging their client to notice the efforts that they are making to learn and recognise how they have moved from point a to point b. A growth mindset adopts that perspective that anyone can improve upon anything with an attitude of non-judgement and preparedness to be open to new learning. This concept when combined with an evidence-based model of mindset change is invaluable in mindset coaching.
Mindset coaching exercises
Depending on the perspective you are coming from, there are countless ways to bring about a change in mindset, with some strategies targeting the content of mind and thought itself, and others being less direct. The relevance and usefulness of each exercise will depend on what your or your client’s goal is. There are of course the coaching staple of asking powerful questions. I’ll cover some examples of these powerful mindset coaching questions shortly, but first I’m going to present some examples from the CBT, ACT and Positive Psychology Coaching perspectives.
CBT Mindset coaching
1. Cognitive restructuring
In cognitive restructuring, we work through identifying our “negative automatic thoughts”, which are the thoughts that immediately precede our unwanted emotions and unhelpful behaviours. From this, we then use a variety of strategies including evaluating the evidence for and against the negative thought, or evaluating the costs and benefit of believing and acting upon the thought. Lastly, based on our analysis, we will consider whether there is a more realistic and helpful way of thinking that supports our goals. Cognitive restructuring in mindset coaching enables our client to really challenge their ways of thinking and develop more rational and supportive mindsets.
2. Thought labelling
Our minds are not perfect by any means and, as artifacts left over from evolutionary pressures, contain many unhelpful thinking biases and glitches. By understanding these basic biases and developing the ability to notice and name them, we are able to refocus our mindset towards our goals and successes. Examples of biases include “mind-reading” – the belief that we know what other people are thinking, “catastrophisation” – predicting that the absolute worse thing will happen, and “critical self thinking” – thoughts that are self-blaming, self-limiting and perhaps erroneously assuming responsibility for things are not our fault.
3. Behavioural experiments
When was the last time you experimented with your thoughts? Our minds like to think that they are very good at making predictions but this is often far from the truth. If you recognise that a negative prediction is getting in the way of your progress, what better way to overcome it, than to test it out? In practice, this means that your mindset coach will foster a spirit of “reality testing”, actively recognising negative predictions which are getting in the way of your life-goals and then developing graded experiments to test them out. Often we find that many of our negative predictions have no bearing on the reality of the situation and this can be supportive in maintaining goal momentum.
ACT Mindset coaching
1. Cognitive Defusion
ACT treats thoughts differently to traditional coaching and CBT, viewing them more as verbally constructed “behaviours”, and therefore subject to behaviourist principles like reinforcement, reward, habituation and extinction. Because of this, ACT seeks to understand the function of a thought or mindset process, rather than evaluate whether it is true or not. In fact, because ACT is based on the philosophy of functional contextualism, something is “true” if it serves the goals of the organism. So when we think about this in relation to mindset coaching, it is possible for us to evaluate the function of our limiting beliefs and consider whether the meaning we attribute to them is serving us. In ACT, we aim to develop the skill of “defusion.” Rather than me go further through this, take a look at the next videos which give you an idea of how we can defuse from thoughts.
2. ACTing on your Values
Values are sets of principles around which we choose to organise our behaviour. These are significantly important in mindset coaching because Values are superordinate to our goals. That is, we choose our goals based on the things that we value most in life. As an example, as a Therapist and Coach, my values are around being independent, being effective and enjoying what I do as my career. By identifying my values, I am then able to identify the goals that support them. Knowing how my goals relate to my values enables me to defuse from unsupportive patterns of thought and commit to the ACTion that really counts.
3. Learn to Unhook
We can often find ourselves getting “hooked in” to worries, rumination, old memories and narratives about ourselves, that get in the was of us achieving our successes. Just like with cognitive defusion, we can teach ourself to unhook from unhelpful narratives that keep us stuck. Combining an awareness of our worries, ruminations and narratives, evaluating their usefulness in relation to our goals and then making a decision to reconnect with the present moment keeps us focused on our goals, and cultivates a value-focused, active mindset. Here’s a short video which shows one way of unhooking.
Positive Psychology Mindset coaching
1. Understand the importance of positive emotion
The Broaden and build theory of positive emotion was one of the first psychological theories to suggest an evolutionary basis for positive emotion. Whereas negative emotions like fear and anger can be understood in an evolutionary context as being vital for dealing with danger towards us, up until the research of Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory, there was no real basis for us evolving positive emotion. Fredrickson however, through a series of sophisticated research studies, showed that positive emotions served the function of broadening our awareness beyond perceived threat and led to the generation of more expansive, creative and socially oriented thought. From this, we are then able to build better relationships, resources and orchestrate our lives in more adaptive, positive ways.
For the positive psychology mindset coach, we would develop mindset through the stimulation of positive emotion, promote wellbeing, which in turn leads to more generative, creative ways of thinking.
2. Identify your character strengths
The VIA Character strengths and virtues are a fundamental of Positive Psychology and are a classification system, supported by research, which defines the best of individual character. One the main current proponents of Character strengths, Ryan Niemiec, talks of character strength usage as being a type of mindset in that we become aware of our strengths and then look for new ways to use them and spot them in other people. The “using a character strength” in a new way intervention is one of the initial positive psychology interventions and has been shown to lead to uplifts in mood and hope. Developing a strengths-based mindset can be life-changing in any program of life coaching.
Mindset coaching questions
Asking powerful questions is at the core of effective coaching and mindset coaching is no different. By exploring goals, motivation, opportunities and values through effective, open questioning, coaching clients are able to reach their full potentials. Here are examples of some of the most powerful mindset coaching questions.
What thoughts or beliefs have got in the way of your goals until now?
What are 3 different ways to think about this challenge?
What would someone who has already achieved this goal think about themselves/the challenge/ the future?
What opportunities would arise if you thought about this differently?
How might (friend/mentor/inspirational individual) think about this challenge?
What can you expect to find out about yourself when you take this action?
There are of course many different powerful mindset conversations that can be had, provided that they are goal-focused, open and generative.
Conclusion
We’ve presented an overview of what to look for in your mindset coach and, if you’re interested in trying out our coaching approach first hand, then please contact us at [email protected] or call us on 0151 601 4445.
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