I am asked almost daily: “What idea do you have to fix my problems?”
As a consultant, my daily job is to help clients solve problems through sustainability reports or environmental solutions. After five years of working in the consulting industry, I’ve realized one thing in common: clients hire consultants to fix their problems but never hire a coach to understand and acknowledge the real environmental problem faced by the company. Most problems I solved were primarily motivated by government regulatory control or because the environmental issue was too huge to ignore. Most clients want to meet the minimum standard and not go beyond it. I started coaching instead of only consulting after this realization.

Now, you might wonder what the relationship between consulting and coaching is. Does coaching help solve clients’ problems, most significantly, environmental issues? Is a coach the same as a consultant?

The focus of coaching is on the client’s inner abilities and helping them to identify and improve those abilities. On the other hand, consultants focus on the problem that needs attention immediately. Both have their strengths and weaknesses in solving a problem. More importantly, to solve a problem, you need a sustainable and long-term solution. I believe that “consciousness within oneself” is the sustainable solution for humanity and the environmental crisis. Through coaching, one will start acknowledging their problem and developing action plans to solve it.

So, how do you develop your consciousness?

Firstly, each individual has to delve inside himself and awaken his spirit to find the courage to improve himself. Dive inside out to seek the truth, which is the first step toward independence. There is only one individual, and each individual is responsible for their awakening.

Awakening means gaining the ability to think, think as an individual, think critically, accept what he alone thinks, seek and know the truth, and act on that personal knowledge. In contrast, by looking to others, looking outside, and searching for opinions from the group instead of believing in self, one becomes dependent on what is mostly the norm and exposes that he does not have any trust in himself.

The majority decided to choose the easy path by spending money on hiring a consultant to get the job done. However, this kind of behaviour is similar to addiction in that the more people who look away for answers instead of looking inward, the less likely they will ever change. They will usually become more and more dependent as time passes. The phenomenon is happening in the consulting world; most clients do not want to own the problem, and the problem is merely transferred but not owned. This mindset will not uplift or transform the consciousness from within, causing an ever-debate climate change crisis from CO2 350ppm to 420ppm.

The next time you find yourself asking others for a solution to your problems, stop, close your eyes, and seek your answers from within. When those answers come, trust them and escape from seeking a solution mindset, that is, the non-thinking collective horde. The path to the inner self remains invisible until we intend to enter it and subsequently commit to the journey.