A Coaching Power Tool By Sarah Lupton, Transformational Leadership Coach, UNITED STATES
Trapped vs. Free: How Radical Responsibility Empowers Ultimate Freedom
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley, 1888
In my career, first as a documentary film producer and now as a life coach, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some extraordinary individuals, particularly activists. One thing that I have been struck by in my work with activists is the enormous tolerance for adversity and obstacles. Take Victor Zambrano, for example. He has spent the past thirty years defending the Amazon Rainforest from illegal gold mining gangs by organizing grassroots activists. His enemies have a price on his head. His friends and partners have been unceremoniously murdered for their work to protect the rainforest. And yet, Victor remains undeterred in his work. Or take my friend, Frankie Gist. He is a 26-year-old activist working to eliminate gun violence in my deeply segregated hometown of Winston-Salem, NC. Over the years, he has lost more than a dozen family members and friends to gun violence. And yet he remains joyful in his activist work, even when it means risking his own safety by brokering peace among rivaling gangs.
We often hear dramatic stories of people who have been dealt an objectively difficult hand in life: chronic illness, childhood abuse, cancer, random acts of violence, poverty, etc. People respond differently to these circumstances. Some people allow their circumstances to define them while others seem to defy all odds and lead incredible lives free from what happened in the past, such as Oprah, Malala, or Michelle Obama. What’s the difference? Why do some people stay trapped and others break through their obstacles powerfully? I am reminded of the resilience and grace of Nelson Mandela as his 27-year imprisonment came to an end: “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”[1]Mandela is pointing to the distinction between physical imprisonment and being imprisoned in one’s mind.
In my work as a coach, I facilitate my clients in creating new awareness around what’s possible for them. Clients come in with a problem and in our sessions, they begin to shift into solution. One powerful case study is with my client, Alex.[2] Alex is a talented film producer from Los Angeles in his late 20s. He believes in empowering others through storytelling and I was coaching him toward his goal of pitching his TV series to a popular international streaming platform. He was enthusiastically making progress on this goal until something unplanned happened. His chronic illness flared up, he went to the emergency room, and the doctors told him that surgery was inevitable.
Alex was crushed when he came to our session. The timing of the surgery would significantly delay his progress on his goal, not to mention all the other parts of his life he would be putting on hold to recover. He felt completely trapped by his disease and powerless around the inevitability of the surgery. When I asked him what he would like to create in our session, through his tears, he said, “I want freedom.” I looked at Alex. He was hooked to an IV and lying in a hospital bed. Was freedom really possible for Alex at this moment? Of course!
Shifting from Victimhood to Responsibility
As Mandela alluded to, when creating a shift from feeling “trapped” to feeling “free,” it’s important to first distinguish fixed reality from interpreted reality. Another way of saying this is that it’s important to distinguish facts from feelings. The feeling of being trapped in an interpretation (a feeling about the circumstance) of a circumstance, situation, or event. It also implies a feeling of lack of control or power to change what is. Often when a client feels trapped, they are assigning power to an external circumstance over their own experience of the world. As long as the client is in this space, facilitating a shift from feeling trapped to feeling free is not possible. The client has relinquished their power to something outside of their control. This relinquishing of power creates a state of victimhood in the client because they are experiencing the world as happening “to” them instead of being an active participant, co-creator, or even more powerfully, the sole and uncontested author of their experience.
Acceptance and Surrender
The first step to facilitating a shift within the client is to invite them into acceptance of what is, or the fixed reality. Some questions to facilitate acceptance of what is within a client who is feeling trapped are:
- What are the facts?
- What about this situation is fixed?
- What are you unwilling to negotiate around this right now?
Once the client accepts what is and is clear on what cannot be changed (such as what happened in the past) or what they are unwilling to negotiate (for example, Alex was unwilling to go against his doctor’s recommendations to do the surgery), they surrender their illusion of control over them. The goal of the coach, then, is to evoke awareness of what the client does and have power and control over their own thoughts and feelings about what’s happening. Two fundamental thoughts that a client can choose in order to generate a shift out of victimhood are the following:
- Events and circumstances are always neutral.
- I am the sole, uncontested author of my experience.
When the client is willing to embrace these two thoughts, they create an opportunity for themselves to reclaim their power in any situation by taking full responsibility for how they experience it. The moment the client steps into this full responsibility, they are empowered to create something new. They are empowered to experience the world around them differently. They generate a choice.
Meaning And Differences: Trapped vs. Free
If we define freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint,”[3] we see that combining radical acceptance with the ability to generate choice, regardless of circumstance, creates ultimate freedom. In cases in which the client has indicated they are unwilling to change something that is within their control (their own thoughts, feelings, and actions), they are still responsible for making that choice freely.
Radical Responsibility
Radical responsibility is one of the most powerful coaching tools available because it consistently invites the client back into their own power as the author of their experience. When a client embraces full authorship of what they are creating, they have endless opportunities to take action and generate results in their lives. They are no longer passive bystanders or victims of their circumstances. Instead, they break through any obstacles standing in the way of what they are committed to creating.
However, living life through the lens of radical responsibility is also challenging. It requires deep ownership of every result in one’s life, the good and the bad. Our minds have a lifetime of training to protect us from undesirable thoughts, feelings, and outcomes and are well-equipped to evade discomfort. Therefore, radical responsibility is also one of the most advanced tools to offer clients. The client must be willing to look, with full responsibility, at what is and what is not working to generate the results they desire. They must be willing to acknowledge that the same strategies they developed to be successful or keep themselves safe during one period of their life may be getting in the way of the results they want today and in the future.
For that reason, it is important that the client values the goal they are committed to creating above their own emotional comfort. This is where vision becomes essential.
Commitment to Vision
A vision is “a mental image of what the future will or could be like.”[4] For Mandela, his vision was the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Victor’s vision is to stop deforestation in the Amazon, and Frankie’s vision is to end gun violence. Clients almost always come to coaching with a vision for their future in mind. It could be to lose weight, make more money, find love, or simply feel better in some way. There is some desired state that has led them into the coaching session, even if they aren’t fully aware of it themselves yet. The role of the coach is to evoke this vision clearly for the client so that they have a clear picture of why they would be willing to experience the emotional discomfort inherent in personal transformation. The coach must evoke the client’s vision so strongly that the client will be committed to generating results, no matter what might stand in their way.
There are two standard times within the coaching structure to invite the client to clarify their vision:
- The Coaching Contract
- The Session Agreement
Since clients are coming into the coaching container because they have not been able to generate results on their own, it is inevitable that at some point in their journey, they will come across something that’s standing in their way. This is the moment that they will feel “trapped” by their circumstances. What will keep them choosing to be radically responsible in these moments, over and over again, even when it is uncomfortable, is their commitment to their vision.
In Alex’s case, he was committed to his vision of feeling free, and he was willing to be radically responsible for his feelings about the surgery. He created a shift within himself from feeling “trapped” to “free” the very moment he remembered that this choice was available to him. He fully accepted the circumstances of the surgery and what it meant for his TV series. He surrendered his illusion of control over the circumstances. Then, he looked at the options that were available to him. He was free to choose the thoughts, feelings, and actions that felt supportive and empowering given the circumstances, and in doing so, he fulfilled his session objective of creating freedom and ended the session feeling free—even from his hospital bed.
The Shift from Feeling Trapped vs. Free
The shift from feeling “trapped” to feeling “free” occurs at the moment we take radical responsibility as the sole, uncontested author of our experience. Until we are willing to embrace our power in creating how we experience our lives, someone or something else will always have the reins. Whenever I am feeling trapped by my circumstances, I remember the choice that is available to me through acceptance, surrender, and responsibility. I also look to my personal inspirations, Victor and Frankie. Their acceptance of the circumstances that exist in pursuit of their vision (risking their lives and the loss of people they love) allows them to consistently choose in on their activist work and not feel trapped by it. In each of their cases, it would be easy for each of them to give up and move on to a simpler life. Like Mandela imprisoned for almost three decades, it’s their vision that keeps them showing up over and over again, not as victims, but as powerful leaders and agents of change.
I was able to practice my power tool with my peer coach partner. In the session, she showed up feeling defensive and exhausted. Through the lens of my power tool, trapped versus free, I coached her from feeling trapped in the feelings she had chosen about the circumstances to being empowered to freely choose thoughts and feelings that supported her end goal of reclaiming her integrity. The awareness she generated in the session was so powerful that she sent me her heart rate data that afternoon and created 4 hours of restorative time!
I also practiced the power tool on myself when I realized that I was feeling trapped by another person’s opinion of me. I started to change my actions in a subconscious attempt to control what they thought about me. Once I surrendered to the fact that I cannot control what anyone thinks, I chose to be responsible for my own thoughts and feelings. I empowered myself to own who I am and release control of everything else.
References
[1] Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom, 1994.
[2] The name has been changed for confidentiality.
[3] “Freedom,” Oxford Languages, 2022.
[4] “Vision,” Oxford Languages, 2022