I help people to stop procrastinating and do what matters to them.
About my clients
You have a goal or commitment that you care deeply about. You need to work on it. You want to work on it. You want to achieve your goal, but you don’t.
What’s going on?
You’re not alone – this is an age-old human problem, with age-old strategies for tackling it. Some of these strategies are terrible. Guilt, shame and recriminations are rarely helpful. Then there’s “Don’t be lazy” (ever been told that?) That’s not even a strategy! Neither is “This time I mean it!”
Other strategies are powerfully effective – those based on an understanding of your motivations, values and needs, underpinned by an understanding of from psychology research, applied with generous doses of curiosity and self-compassion.
My goal is to:
- Help you understand your own behaviour.
- Guide you to break through blockages.
- Help you identify and dissolve what stands between you and your goals.
- Create a path that will get you to your goals and give you every advantage we can on the journey.
I draw from many sources to help you find the shift you need and the resources to take you on your journey. My foundation is a methodical approach drawing on neuroscience. This is combined with ancient wisdom and experience as well as NLP, which I find to offer valuable perspectives. And in the end, creativity and persistence are crucial in testing and adapting solutions to your needs.
I coach, run workshops and speak. Contact me via the form below to find out more.
Who is Chris Waterguy?
I’m an imperfect coach working with imperfect clients, all of us works in progress.
I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people. – Ram Dass.
I study and explore how to live better and how to help others do the same. As the anti-procrastination coach, I am my own first client, troubleshooting, motivating, nurturing and developing discipline.
This blog is a way to share what I’ve learned, what I’m working on, and what I’ve found to work. It’s partly an exercise in transparency about my own humanity. (The life coach is also human! See him fall. See him get up again. See him analyse and troubleshoot and try a dozen ways before finding what works for him.)
Almost all of us have a far greater potential than we’ve realized so far, and I’m determined to continue to create change in the lives of others and myself. I’ve studied life coaching, and for years have been thinking and learning about the psychology of change. I have a skeptical outlook and believe in testing ideas – remaining open-minded, but being as rigorous as possible about finding what works. So I document what I learn about personal change – the science, the practice, the motivations, what works, the easy wins to start with, the trickery to avoid, and what doesn’t.
I struggle, fail, succeed, connect, fail to connect, reconcile, fall back into old ways, and through it all I make long term changes and improve my life. In recent years I’ve become more determined and systematic, made bigger changes, and have found paths that deserve much more attention.
This blog will be particularly relevant aimed at those who have been labeled as disorganised or lazy, who struggle to keep track, or who have been diagnosed with ADHD. What works for other people may not have worked for you, so I’ll be looking at different, workable approaches.
“Flow like water”
A brief note on the name: I go by the name Chris Waterguy to avoid confusion with all the other people who share my regular name (Chris Watkins). I love being near the ocean and in the water, and studied water management long ago. “Waterguy” It began as an online handle for a sustainability project, then became a festival nickname, and it turns out that Waterguy is easy to remember.
The name suits what I do. Water is a metaphor for fundamental truths about human experience:
Flowing water wears away the hardest rock – imitating this persistence carries us through many challenges and difficulties.
The flow state is in opposition to procrastination – being in the moment, absorbed in the activity, losing the sense of self.
Water can be peaceful or enormously powerful. A skilful sailor learns to recognise and harness the currents and a surfer learns to ride on the power of the wave. Likewise, we have a repertoire of states and emotions and can learn to work with them.
Background
I grew up loving science. My sister gave me the “How and Why Book of Chemistry” when I was 6 and insisted I read it, so that I would be better prepared for chemistry classes than she had been. This was wonderful forethought, and I only realised many years later how much good she did me with her thoughtfulness and encouragement.
I put my heart into the skills of analysis, logical thinking and understanding the world. I grew up, completed a master’s degree in engineering, traveled and lived in different cultures, helped to create a global knowledge-sharing project for sustainability called Appropedia… but all through, I struggled hard. At the age of 41 I was diagnosed with ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder. (To use current medical terminology, ADHD-PI: Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder – Primarily Inattentive.)
This gave me an understanding of why I’d struggled, but it was harder to find ways to live better and achieve my goals. But I realised as I did so that many others could benefit from what I was learning, and not only those with ADHD.
So I read, applied, and studied. I became a certified Master Life Coach & NLP Master Practitioner, trained by Rik Schnabel and certified by the Australian Board of NLP. Rik, his course and his community have taught me a lot about myself and others and about creating change. Soon afterwards I completed a program with the Center For Applied Rationality – an amazing program and community. I think of them as nerdy intellectual types who are deeply committed both to self-improvement and to doing good in the world.
I continue to learn and grow through my connections to these people.
I continue to work on myself. I have my own coach, I work on my habits and routines, working on my goals and my relationships, and in particular, becoming more skilled, experienced effective as a coach.