By Sam Lambert
We all live in a meritocracy-like society that values high productivity and achievement. This doesn’t leave much margin for error. As such, we’ve trained our brains to find the right answer, to avoid getting distracted, and to employ willpower to remain focused on achieving success. Annabelle Sorensen, however, doesn’t agree with this paradigm. She asserts that we must teach ourselves to allow our brain’s impulses, including the distracting ones, to manage ourselves more efficiently. However, this seems to go against everything we’ve been taught about working hard and striving for specific goals. So how would this mentality help us to achieve the life we really want?
Annabelle Sorensen, a certified life coach and family studies major, has the answer. She learned everything she knows about life coaching from a life coach school, which she attended in 2019 while also attending BYU. And on September 6, 2020, she freely and happily offered her insights to the staff of the Measuring Success Right podcast, hoping to reach a wide array of listeners with her message. After all, it’s easy for people to misunderstand the nature of life coaching. It’s not therapy, she said, and it’s not “advice-giving.”
Separating Feelings from Beliefs
Actually, Sorensen’s real goal is to help her clients to understand how their minds work. She gives them “[a] roadmap for how they’re creating their own life,” demonstrating how thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which lead to results. “Everybody’s brain is different,” she explains, “but the same.” By making people aware of this mental roadmap, she teaches others how to recognize and accept negative feelings without letting them become negative beliefs. After all, feelings are only vibrations in the body, and accepting them is a big part of evaluating which feelings are most helpful or desirable.
Forming a Self-Confirming Path of Positivity
From there, Sorensen likes to remind people that the brain is an immensely powerful tool if one uses it right. Many people try to motivate themselves to do better by thinking about ways they have failed or fallen short, but this is a counterproductive strategy. People’s minds naturally seek evidence to support their beliefs, and if their beliefs tell them “I can’t do this,” that’s the result their mind will continually produce. To such people, Sorensen declares, “You get to decide when you are proud of yourself!” By believing in a positive self-standard for reality, the brain can create a positive feedback loop that encourages progress and helps people to avoid a downward spiral.
Seeking Not One Right Answer, But Progression in the Right Direction
With this knowledge, Sorensen said she hopes to improve the way schools test students. She points out that schools teach you to seek a right answer, which often is not what the real world demands from you. The real world is around 50% positive and 50% negative; thus, if people are always worried about avoiding failure, they’ll never be able to achieve what they want. For the sake of all such people, Sorensen desires to implement tests to be administered multiple times to measure progress and encourage a constructive mindset towards learning. This, she hopes, will help others learn about the roadmap to success (as defined by the brain) from a young age.
As she strives to practice what she preaches, Sorensen hopes to redefine the way in which people live their lives. Failure doesn’t “happen to you,” and neither does success. With the right level of self-awareness, both can “happen for you,” which can lead you down a helpful, successful roadmap. If you define yourself as a leader, she assured the Measuring Success Right listeners, your brain will support the definition by driving you onwards. Ultimately, as Sorensen asserts, “Success is not a place I arrive to; for me, ‘successful’ is a feeling I live in,” a sentiment which we would do well to repeat in our own lives.