When I first got into coaching in 2001, administering, defining and refining various assessments was the THING to do.  Being as how I seem to have popped out of my mother’s womb with the need to question authority at almost every turn, I was skeptical about most of them. You see, being an intuitive person I usually seemed to have a very good idea of who someone was, where they were coming from and what they were looking for in their lives so why give an assessment to tell me what I already knew? Well, one of my Coaches convinced me that assessments were for the client so they would know (or have their hunches confirmed) which made sense to me at the time.  Of course this meant that I had to take the assessment for myself so that I would understand how it works and see to its accuracy for myself.  One of the categories on the test was for trust, which gauged how trustworthy you are and/or how much you trust other people, situations, etc.  The range was from the low of 0 up to the high of 10. I scored a “2”.

I knew I had an issue with trust but now there it was in black and white (and now my Coach knew for sure too!!).

Fast forward seven years and I have long since put assessments to rest when working with clients (although I may tell them about one or two that I had worked with in the past if asked) and word out on the street is that more and more people are forgoing the assessment route. I hope it is because people are finding better ways to listen and to trust their guts (and hearts) without having to have some kind of ritualized form to confirm what they already know within themselves.

We often hear how hindsight is 20/20 so I’m sure you can understand how now when I look back on the years when I could have been focusing and building on my intuition and teaching others how to trust their own intuition, I can see where I hid behind the assessments because I didn’t trust myself, my abilities nor what other people were capable of as well.  Besides, the way I taught myself how to understand how the assessment worked when explaining it to a client was to think of the assessment as a kind of Tarot deck except with words and graphs instead of symbols. I was still doing what I knew how to do but I was doing it in a way that I thought was acceptable to the professional world.

Today, I am happy to say that I have learned to trust who I am and my intuition much better and I let people know about it rather than to catch them off guard by somehow “knowing” something about them and telling them about it unexpectedly.  There are some really fabulous coaches out there who use intuitive in their title and stand behind it (and themselves)—Sue Frederick being one (http://www.careerintuitive.org/).  Growing up in a flock of geese when you’re a roadrunner is never easy but learning to trust yourself and your ability to navigate towards other like-minded birds is so worth your efforts.

I will probably spend the remaining days that I am on this planet of ours learning better each day how to be aware and use all the gifts that the Divine has given to me.  Trusting myself is just the tip of the iceberg.

Who can you really trust if you don’t learn to trust yourself first?