“How do you feel about Bob Newhart,” he asked.
It was an out of the blue (and seemingly out of context) question given the circumstances.

“Love him,” I said. “Who doesn’t?”

I was in my 40s and completing my first certification program in coaching. Gary (we’ll call him Gary) was assigned to be my coach and mentor.

I was knocking it out of the park as a new coach and felt super proud of myself. But Gary’s job was also to coach me on my own internal demons – all the gunk that might undermine me as I moved forward in my new profession.

Here’s where things were a bit trickier for me back then.

I felt that I was well aware of my baggage and was intentionally doing the work – chipping away, little by little at all of those old stories and limiting beliefs that had been holding me back for decades.

I felt aware because I WAS aware. I’m nothing if not a thinker – and naturally, making sense of it all mattered to me.

I believed that that all of my thoughts and feelings were valuable.

Evidently, Gary did not.

He told me to – right then and there – google “Bob Newhart, stop it” and watch the video.

OK, this is fun, I thought.

If you’ve never seen it, Bob Newhart plays a therapist who promises to solve any problem in 5 minutes. In the skit, a woman tells him about her crippling fears. “Stop it,” he says, and continues to simply say “just stop it” regardless of what she throws at him.

I hung up on Gary and asked to be assigned a new coach.

I was, as you can imagine, enraged, insulted, mortified, and honestly, indignant. “This is not the way to coach someone,” I told the program office. And in truth, it’s not. But I can’t help but wonder how much easier my life would have been – how much more quickly I would have moved on, if I had just…stopped.

Stopped telling myself why I couldn’t.
Stopped believing that I had to understand everything all the time.
Stopped chasing that elusive thing that would mean I was ‘ready.’

I wish I could tell you that ‘just stopping it’ is the remedy, it’s not. At least it hasn’t been for me or anyone I’ve ever met. But there’s magic in knowing that change rarely comes from thinking.

Chances are, whatever your broken-record story is, you’ve already thought about it enough.
Chances are, you’ve already spent a fair amount of time figuring it out, and crafting complex plans and solutions to fix it.
Chances are, you’ve done enough there.

What would happen if you asked yourself what you would be doing right now if you could stop it?
What would happen if you took the tiniest, easiest, action that felt a bit like that?
What would be possible if you did something like that every day for the rest of this year?

There’s no doubt that Gary was an —hole, but I think he just wanted me to do what I wanted to do, I think he wanted me to be what I was capable of being.

So, thanks Gary, I suppose you managed to help me after all. (You big jerk.)