The Inner Gatekeeper

“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive—the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”  

 ~ Don Miguel Ruiz

Would you be interested in taking more actions and creating more results in your life?  If you would, then this might just be the coaching tip for you.

One thing I have found over and over again in my work as a coach is that people want to create things in the world and often times the reason they don't get those creations is because they don't actually do anything about them. This means one of two things in my experience; The first is that they don't really want what it is they say they do, it's just sort of a logical next step goal, or it's a 'should' or 'ought to' goal, without any real inspiration behind it.  The other reason people don't go for what they want is because they get stopped.

So what actually stops people?  Gatekeepers.

Now, what is a Gatekeeper exactly?  Well, I looked it up in my trusty dictionary and it said:  a person in charge of a gate,  usually to identify, count, supervise, etc., the traffic or flow through it; guardian; monitor. 


Gatekeepers take many forms, but the two I would like to distinguish are the inner gatekeepers and the outer gatekeepers.  


Many people automatically think that it is the world that stops them from achieving and creating.  They think their circumstances in life are the reason for them not having what they want.  These are the outer gatekeepers.  The people and structures put in place out in the world that stand in our way. An example might be you really want to speak with a certain individual and you attempt to get a hold of them, but you have to go through their personal assistant who is under strict rules not to let people like you in to speak with them.  This is a reality, and sometimes there are very challenging external hurdles like this in the way of us getting what we want; HOWEVER, this is the exception, not the rule.


It is our inner gatekeeper that often stops us from ever moving forward in the first place.  This gatekeeper acts as our inner guardian controlling which actions and behaviors are acceptable and which ones are not.  This is the voice in our heads that is made up of all of the thoughts, beliefs, doubts, generalizations, and perceptions that we've learned over the years about how the world and people are 'supposed' to work.  The primary function of this inner gatekeeper is to attempt to keep us safe. 


Now, that may sound to you like a very useful mechanism.  The problem is, the things that our inner gatekeeper is trying to keep us safe from are usually pretty benign and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  Shakespeare once wrote: "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt."  I agree and I would take that one step further and say it's not the doubts and stories themselves, but that we believe them worthy of our attention.

The gatekeeper uses fear tactics to keep us from doing and saying certain things.  Here's some of the fearful thoughts the inner gatekeeper uses to stop us: 'What will people think of me??? Who am I to request that from them???  It's no use... What kind of person would... I can't do that because it will mean... I'm bad, worthless, terrible, a loser, helpless... etc."  Here's the best part though, these are just stories, completely made up by us, told by us, and believed by us.  They are simply thoughts, not facts.  When you can see that they are fabrications, figments of your imagination, then you free up a tremendous amount of energy that was being used to "keep you in check" that can now be redirected to creativity and action.

One thing to be aware of as you begin to poke holes through your inner gatekeeper and the stories it weaves; other people might be telling themselves the exact same scary story and believing it.  That's what often makes them seem real in the first place. We interact with someone who's telling the same story, which is evidence to support the story being true for us. Eric Fromm had a wonderful quote, he said, "Just because millions share the same form of mental pathology, doesn't make those people sane."  And it's like this with our inner gatekeepers.

 Here's an example: a group of friends might be all telling the story that they can't create what they want because of the economy.  But, just because they all believe it, does not mean that it is true. There are many people who are thriving in this economy.

One of my mentors, Michael Neill, tells a story about when he was giving a talk to several hundred people, and he asked, how many of you have been negatively affected by this economy? Pretty much everybody raised their hands.  Then he went through and systematically asked how many of you have lost more than 25% of your investments or retirement? a couple people raised their hands.  Then he asked, how many of you have lost a home? Nobody raised their hand.  Finally he asked, how many of you have lost your jobs?  Again, only a couple people raised their hands.  He went around and asked why if only a few people had been significantly impacted, they all raised their hands in the beginning.  The answer again and again, was fear.  They were all caught up in fearful thoughts and stories that they were believing about the future economy, which was in turn stopping them from moving forward.

I was recently having a session with a client and we were discussing this action that she was afraid to take.  She was wanting to make a request of someone and was completely stopped by her inner gatekeeper. She was caught up in her own insecure thoughts about what it would mean about her if she asked for help, and how terribly this other person would think of her, and on and on.  It suddenly occurred to me that she had made up ahead of time that there was an outer gatekeeper(somebody that had what she wanted and was unwilling to give it to her) without bothering to actually find out for herself.

We all do that, do we not?  We all have this inner voice that makes up stories about the resistance we will face in the outside world.  This might be useful if the stories were accurate representations of reality, but they rarely are.  I've found more often than not, there's not actually any gatekeepers  in the outside world where we imagined there would be.  And even if there is, at least they are real obstacles with real solutions that you can then bring your creative resources to.  Made up problems are much harder to solve.

One last thing.  You may be having some resistance to ignoring your inner gatekeeper because you think you will go on an evil rampage.  One of the major concerns I get is this, that if I'm not kept in check by fear, then won't I just do bad things or hurt people?  I don't know the cosmic truth, but my experience tells me that is just not true. The opposite is actually true.  It is fear and insecurity that have us act out irrationally. When we allow the gatekeeper to quiet down, you will actually become aware of a different guidance system that is far kinder and much more useful.  That guidance is your Inner Wisdom.  To learn more about listening to and following your inner wisdom, keep an eye out for it in one of my next coaching tips

If you are really worried about it, do a quick ecology check. Ask yourself if this action is safe to you, safe to others, and safe to the planet?  If you answered no to any of those, enroll the aid of a coach or friend to make sure that it's not just your inner gatekeeper on steroids. If you answered yes, DO IT.

Weekly Experiment:

1. Think of some action that you think might be useful to move one of your projects forward but your inner gatekeeper has been going nuts 
2. Pay attention to what thoughts and stories you've made up about taking this action.
3. Thank your inner gatekeeper for sharing and acknowledge it as thought not fact
4. Ask yourself, if I didn't have this story about it, would I want to take the action?
5. If Yes, then do a quick ecology check by asking, 'Is it safe to me, to others, and to the planet?'
6. If Yes, DO IT! Then take the action, knowing that your inner gatekeeper will likely be kicking and screaming along the way
7. Notice how often your inner gatekeeper's stories have no basis in reality.

Until next time.

Love and Light,

Coach Ty