Self-Imposed Limits

I tend to be a creature of habit (shocking, no doubt, for those of you who know me personally). It works well for me in many ways. At the same time, I recognize the value in breaking out of my comfort zone to create personal growth. I like to believe I do that. So what arose from one altered choice this week has led to a remarkable exploration of how I show up in the world.

This week was my first jaunt into the realm of working from a cafe since I moved back to the United States. My work abroad has always been flexible, but with the onset of COVID, work from home became a very comfortable norm. So naturally, I was both nervous and excited to get out in public.

As I tend to do when I start something new, I set the bar really high for what I wanted to achieve with my first cafe "session." I even went so far as to set an assignment for myself. The task at hand was to take a break from the business of laying out a plan for social media posts to sit with a randomly chosen person in the cafe and ask deep and meaningful questions. Asking powerful questions is a foundational tenet in coaching, and like any skill, it never hurts to practice in a variety of ways.

A coach knows what they need to do to show up prepared to listen to a client without agenda in that familiar, co-created container of the session. This was different. I was thrilled to practice in a setting that offered less safety and far more variability.

I had in mind the questions I wanted to ask. They were deep and hard-hitting. The purpose? To encourage self-exploration of values in the person sitting in front of me. My job was merely to listen, deeply and intently without offering anything but a container to receive whatever information was given in response to the question.

I dug into my work, simultaneously noticing the clientele, mostly a string of sleepy looking college students who came for a caffeine jolt before class. After some time, a woman sat down at a small table, pulled out a planner and a tablet, a notebook and a pen, all neatly arranged in a particularly functional way and got to work. She had the look of someone deeply engrossed in the task at hand, a slight amount of tension held in her shoulders as she leaned into her work. I waited for her to lean out a bit before I walked over with a cup of coffee and my ask- 10 minutes of her time.

It was an invigorating experience. At the core of human nature, there is a deep desire for connection. Here was a semi-planned, spontaneous connection between two people who had never met but intentionally shared an almost immediate degree of intimacy in the least suspecting space. I am sure you can recognize the irony therein. And yet it worked in so many ways.

You might wonder what kinds of questions could create such intimacy in a mere moment's time amidst the chaos of a morning cafe? There were questions like, “Where do you feel your life is out of balance?” and “What do you value most in life?” But long after the conversation had ended, the question that stuck most in my mind was, “Where have you constructed self-imposed limits?”

She answered my questions thoughtfully and thanked me for the conversation. We parted ways, and while I cannot guess what she was feeling, I was energized. But no doubt, the experience shifted my whole day. I kept circling back to that questions, “where have I constructed self-imposed limits.”

I sat with that question for awhile. My answered pertained to a certain amount of discomfort around the idea of posting on social media everyday for my business. I am a private person, I told myself. That’s exhausting. Who will want to hear all of this? But as I sat with it a little longer, I realized that what it all really came down to was fear.

I was afraid of how my business might be perceived. I held onto discomfort around an essential task because I was afraid. And I told myself a narrative about why I was experiencing that discomfort as a way to remain safe. To remain unseen.

That realization was so impactful. Moments like this, we must honor the authenticity of how we feel. And yet, how we choose to act on those feelings makes all the difference. Though it was painful to recognize the fear in vulnerability that had surfaced, I sat in gratitude for that self-imposed limit that had simultaneously given me a clear path forward.

I like to think life is full of synchronicities. I don’t know if I’ll ever see that woman again, but in one beautiful exchange, it feels like she coached me.