Artfully Coaching Myself

Getting Ready

Duration	60 minutes
Materials	Art supplies (sketching supplies) Safe and peaceful space Music (without lyrics)- Optional Journal or writing pad – Optional
Treatment Modality	Individual and Group
Frequency	We recommend practicing this activity at least 1 time per week.
Other helpful topics to use this activity for	Building Healthy Communication Skills Developing a Positive Attitude Evaluating Messages Overcoming Fear Social Media and Your Health Developing compassion Stress and Anxiety Release Calming and Destressing

The What

One of the best ways to develop the skills to overcome your challenges and hardships so that you can achieve happiness in life is, to become your own best coach! Honestly, if you practice and develop leadership skills, you are going to lead a very positive, joyful, adventurous, and successful life! Leadership skills give you the ability to easily and rapidly make informed decisions, build healthy relationships, resolve conflict, expand your thinking! Not to mention have clarity and focus on your goals, desires, and dreams! Becoming your own coach does not mean you know who you exactly are and what you want; it rather means that you have the willingness to do what is necessary to find your purpose, identity, and passion. It means that you have developed the skills to positively advise yourself to keep moving, growing, transforming, giving back, and contributing. Most importantly, becoming your own coach means that you are happily adding and improving your authentic self so that you can lead a happy life! So that is precisely what you will be doing in this activity! This activity gives you the lesson on how to become your own coach with the creative use of art and mindfulness.

The How

Generally speaking, coaching requires you to ask yourself (or others if you’re coaching another person) series of 5 questions to almost 80% of life’s challenges:

What am I experiencing?
Where am I experiencing it in my body?
Why am I experiencing it this way?
How can I move forward from this challenge and resolve it?
Why is it essential for me to move forward and resolve this challenge?

What makes the coaching questions powerful and effective is the “WHAT, WHERE, WHY, HOW” in the approach. Moreover, you can approach almost every decision in life in such a way.

In the following activity, you have the opportunity to experience and practice becoming your own coach using your artistic skills!

Let's Begin

Instructions

Get all your coloring pencils, markers, pen, pencils ready to go.
Sit comfortably on a chair and safe place. Uncross your legs and arms, making sure your feet are touching the floor. Close your eyes, keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth, and rest your arms with palms of your hands facing up. Begin to take three slow and long deep breaths: inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Sit still.

When you’re ready, with eyes closed, imagine yourself having the ability to travel back in time. You are traveling in time to give advice on life to your 7-year-old self: Where are you meeting your younger self? Is your younger self happy, alone, lonely, with friends, sad, smiling, confused? What are some reactions or thoughts that your younger self is having around this time? Does your younger self have friends or siblings, supportive parents, and happy parents? Do you have a safe or comfortable home and bed? Take a few minutes observing your younger self. What are some things that you notice about your behavior, look, thoughts, clothes, face, hands, feet? Simply observe your younger self. What are you feeling for your younger self – empathy, sadness, love, excitement, guilt, anger, happiness? When you find yourself feeling tense, take a deep breath.

When you’re ready, open your eyes and journal some of the thoughts, words, feelings, or any details you noticed and became aware of in yourself and younger self.

PART A:
When you’ve completed journaling, pick one of the pictures (cartoon) below as your choice of 7-year-old self. You can accessorize your younger self however way you’d like to! From the list of Positive Life Statements provided for you, pick your top ten (10) positive statements as a form of advice to your 7-year-old self. You can also add your own personal advice as well. Write down all of your statements and advice around your 7-year-old self. Imagine that you are standing in front of your 7-year-old self and giving words of encouragement, sound advice, lessons you’ve learned, anything helpful you would like to let your younger self understand or learn about the future. (Check out the example below).

PART B:
Once you have written down your advice around your younger self, do the following: draw out all the tools, skills, environment, friends, education, foods, sports, and maybe even steps that your younger self will need to accomplish all the advice she/he just received from you for the future. We have prepared an example for you in the following pages to give you an idea of how to do this art activity. Also, you may pick your ‘7-YEAR-OLD SELF’ and begin this activity after the demonstrated example.

PART C:
In your opinion, why is it important for your younger self to have such tools and resources? What have you learned from this exercise about your abilities to make decisions for yourself? Do you think you have the tools and resources to make things happen for yourself?

Here, Abbey is letting Abbey Jr. know that she will need: (starting top left) to practice mindfulness (for stress/anger/anxiety), practice patience, must be happy being her own person, not afraid to be loved, give herself love and compassion(do affirmations), learn and study how to gain skills to achieve her goals, surround herself with supportive friends, gain muscle (for emotional, mental, physical strength), never give up on her dreams and being herself, must have a healthy and mindful lifestyle, and use art to overcome challenges and to communicate. Continued next page….

Abbey continued giving Abbey Jr. technological devices for use to advance in her goals, tools to set goals, compassion gift to help the needy and give back, ways to keep her mind clear of negative beliefs and behaviors, music and sound to overcome challenges, courage to stand up for what is right, courage to ask for help when feeling stuck, willingness to ask appropriate questions when need direction, unconditional love for all living things, the ability and passion to reach for the stars, healthy communication skills, and positive mind and body to pursue healthy relationships.

Activity begins here!

Reminder for PART A:
When you’ve completed journaling, pick one of the pictures (cartoon) below as your choice of 7-year-old self (a boy or girl). You can accessorize your younger self however way you’d like to! From the list of Positive Life Statements provided for you, pick your top ten (10) positive statements as a form of advice to your 7-year-old self. You can also add your own personal advice as well. Write down all of your statements and advice around your 7-year-old self. Imagine that you are standing in front of your 7-year-old self and giving words of encouragement, healthy advice, lessons you’ve learned, anything helpful you would like to let your younger self to understand or learn about the future.

List of positive life statements

“Action conquers fear.” — Peter Nivio Zarlenga
“Action is the antidote to despair.” – Joan Baez (via Jeannie)
“All people who are happy have God within them.” – The Alchemist
“Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.” – Maya Angelou
“Don’t put a question mark where God has put a period.” – Joel Osteen
“Excellence does not require perfection.” – Henry James
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.” – Eat, Pray, Love
“I am enough.”
“I am not who I’m going to be. I am always becoming.”- Ruby Dee
“If you give your fear legs, it will run away with your dreams.”
“It’s time for you to move, realizing that the thing you are seeking is also seeking you.” – Iyanla Vanzant
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Never complain; never explain.” by Benjamin Disraeli (via Rob Prince)
“Nothing great was ever achieved by being realistic!” – Tom Venuto
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening…Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.” – Alice Walker
“The creator of the universe is lining up things in my favor.” – Joel Osteen
“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” – Robert Kiyosaki
“You were born with potential, you were born with goodness and trust, you were born with ideals and dreams, you were born with greatness, you were born with wings, you were not meant for crawling so don’t, you have wings, learn to use them and fly.” – Rumi
” Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action. Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them. Joyfulness keeps the heart and faces young. A good laugh makes us better friends with ourselves and everybody around us.” – Orison Swett Madden
A negative mind will never give you a positive life.
A woman is a full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture and transform.” – Diane Mariechild
Accept what is, let go of what was, have faith in what will be.
All progress takes place outside your comfort zone.
Anxiety is contagious. And so is calm.
Ask yourself if what you’re doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.
Be a warrior, not a worrier.
Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.
Be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody.
Be someone who makes you happy.
Be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help, and brave enough to ask for it.
Be with those who bring out the best in you, not the stress in you.
Before I left home, I cut my hair close to my scalp so I could be a free woman w/ free thoughts, open to all possibilities. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew I wanted to be the kind of woman who was bold, took chances and had adventures.
Breathe in, I send myself love. Breathing out, I send love to someone else who needs it.
By the laws of evolution, it is already in you to change, all you must do is be willing.
Change your thoughts, and you change your world.
Changing your life is hard. Changing your perception in which you see your world is easy.
Choose purpose over perfect.
Succeed.
Confidence is something you create within yourself by believing in who you are.
Create a life you can be proud of.
Die with memories not dreams.
Don’t be afraid to give up the good and go for the great.
Don’t give up what you want the most for what you want right now.
Don’t give up. Great things take time.
Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.
Don’t ruin a good today by thinking about a bad yesterday. Let it go.
Don’t say ‘maybe’ if you want to say ‘no.’
Don’t stress the could haves. If it had, it would have.
Every day is a second chance.
Everybody ends up somewhere, but few people end up somewhere on purpose.
Everything I need is within me.
Expect nothing and appreciate everything.
Fear nothing – especially not your talents and strengths. Be brave enough to show them off. Be grateful enough to use them.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Feelings are not facts. Feelings are experiences I choose.
Find a way or make one.
Find yourself and be really good at that.
How beautiful is it to stay silent when someone expects you to be enraged?
How you make others feel about themselves says a lot about you.
I allow and I trust.
I am enough. I am worthy of.
I am financially free, excited about life, joyful.
I am flexible and flowing, open to the new and changing, at peace, and I trust in the process of life. Every moment is a unique opportunity to become who I am. I move, with life.
I am free from anger. Anger doesn’t own or control me.
I am free from sadness.
I am present now because I have now.
I am present within myself. I can center myself with the ease of my breath. I feel grounded, confident, worthy, and whole.
I am righteous and truthful to myself and others and about myself and others, my soul is whole, my family, community, and environment are order and are stable, and I am in balance with the natural world.
I AM the beautiful creation GOD made me, and I LIVE like it.
I am the change in my life.
I am willing to forgive. Forgiveness of myself and others releases me from the past. Forgiveness is my gift to myself and for me. I forgive, and I am free.
I can and I will.
I choose to LIVE.
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
I follow the way of love.
I found God in me, and I loved her fiercely.
I give myself permission to slow down.
I love myself enough to not allow your hate into my life.
I love myself, I believe in myself, I support myself.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking a moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
I will not stress myself out about things I can’t control or change.
I write my destiny.
I’m going to make the rest of my life the best of my life.
I’m thankful for my struggle because without it I wouldn’t have stumbled across my strength.
If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.
If you don’t start somewhere…then I assure you, you’re going nowhere.
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
In me I trust.
Inhale the future, exhale the past.
It is ok to say ‘no’ to unnecessary crazy.
It’s up to you to find beauty in an ugly day.
Just ride this wave.
Learn to say no without explaining yourself.
Let go of the “what ifs.”
Life doesn’t get easier; you just get stronger.
Life is a gift. Wake up every single day and realize that.
Life is about moments: don’t wait for them, create them.
Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth.
Life is too short to spend it at war with yourself.
Live less out of habit and more out of intent.
May my heart be kind, my mind fierce, and my spirit brave.
May the space between where I am and where I want to be inspire me.
My life is special. I live my truth. I nurture my spirit. I celebrate me.
My life isn’t perfect, but I’m thankful for everything I have.
My time is limited, and I will not allow the noise of others’ opinions drown out my own inner voice. I will have the courage to follow my heart and intuition.
Never make permanent decisions on temporary feelings.
Never stop doing your best just because someone doesn’t give you credit.
Nobody will Love me, the way I love me. So, the way I treat myself sets the standards for others.
Positive mind, positive life.
Positive mind. Positive vibes. Positive life.
Pray more. Fear less. Live better.
Remember when you forgive, you heal. And when you let go, you grow.
Revive your light. Manifest your dreams. Realize your worth.
Sail away from the safe harbor.
Self-confidence is the best outfit, rock it and own it.
Sometimes on the way to a dream, you get lost and find a better one.
Sometimes putting yourself first isn’t selfish but necessary.
Sometimes we have to step out of the box, break it down, and shred it up.
Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.
Stay humble. Work hard. Be kind.
Stop looking without and start looking within.
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
Take the shoes off of your teeth and quit running your mouth about what you are going to do and put them on your feet and take some steps or run towards accomplishing your goals.
The best way to lead is to be myself, and who I am is enough.
The difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do.
The discontent and frustration that you feel is entirely your own creation.
The less you respond to negative people, the more peaceful your life will become
The most common way people give up their power is thinking they don’t have any.
The only person who is going to give you security and the life you want is you.
The only person you should try to be better than, is the person you were yesterday.
The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.
The sign of a beautiful person is that they always see beauty in others.
Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
To accomplish something you have never done before, you have to push beyond your comfort zone, trust your instincts, practice and believe in yourself.
Train your mind to see the good in everything.
Trust in the process of life.
Ultimately I can only control myself.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
What’s meant to be will always find a way.
When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark look for stars.
When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When experience is bitter, say thank you and grow.
When things don’t go your way when things go “wrong,” and especially if you do not seem to have enough money currently, do not attach a story or sense of self-worth to your circumstances.
Worrying won’t stop bad stuff from happening, it just prevents you from enjoying the good.
Yesterday is not today.
You can if you think you can.
You don’t get the same moment twice in life.
Your life does not get better by chance; it gets better by the change.

(Picture for use in PART A)

(Picture for use in PART B)

Reminder for PART B:
Once you have written down your advice around your younger self, do the following: draw out all the tools, skills, environment, friends, education, foods, sports, and maybe even steps that your younger self will need to accomplish all the advice she/he just received from you for the future.

Reminder for PART C:
In your opinion, why is it important for your younger self to have such tools and resources? What have you learned from this exercise about your abilities to make decisions for yourself? Do you think you have the tools and resources to make things happen for yourself?