If you’ve ever worked with a life coach, you might have noticed something: they tend to have a few key sayings they return to, again and again. That’s normal. They’re a quick, easy, shorthand way of communicating complex ideas, and a lot of people will use them to share familiar concepts among other members of a group who don’t need the whole thing explained to them all over again.

And yet, as in any profession, some of those sayings get used over and over to the point that they lose all meaning or, worse, obscure important truths. They become the dreaded cliche.

Cliches: The Bad

We thought we’d have a little fun with some of those old cliches today. Here are three cliches from life coaches that we wish would go away.

1. The early bird catches the worm. Well, maybe, if you’re the kind of person whose body and brain naturally work that way or if you can teach your body and brain to work well under those parameters. It’s worth giving it a try to see if you adapt and end up performing better. But if you’re a confirmed night-owl and you truly do your best thinking between 11 pm and 2 am, then listen to your body and what you know about yourself. 

2. Everything happens for a reason. That depends on your beliefs about the universe, but we’re not here to get metaphysical right now. How about this? We can find reason in just about everything, but some of it is really just senseless, and that’s okay.

3. Live every day like it’s your last. Great advice when you’re trying to motivate somebody to overcome their fears and avoid regrets, but there’s just one little problem: for most of us, today is not our last day, and we still need to do responsible things like pay for our bills, care for our families, and save for retirement. 

Cliches: The Good

On the other hand, there are some of those old cliches that we think are actually worth holding on to. They’ve given us some good guidance over time, and we think they might be helpful to you, too. Here are three of our favorites.

1. The journey is the destination. Learning to enjoy ourselves along the road to self-care and improvement is important, because there is no end-point where you will be a perfect human being. That’s an impossibility. Even if you reach a point where you perfectly implement each of your intended habits and feel like you have your life optimized, you still have to start over each morning and travel the same journey of making good choices and enforcing your boundaries. Learn to enjoy the journey, then, and you’ll have achieved something great.

2. You can’t pour from an empty cup. This is one of our self-care mantras. Many people are committed to caring for those around them, but they can get so distracted by it that they forget to take care of themselves until they’re completely run down. That serves nobody. If you want to help others, you have to take care of yourself, too, so that when the time comes to give, you’ve got something in reserve.

3. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This one encapsulates one of the hard truths about lasting change: it’s hard work, done over a long time, in small increments. Sometimes, focusing on the true scale of the task at hand is so overwhelming that it keeps you from getting started at all. That’s why we like the one-bite-at-a-time approach, one habit a day, one choice each hour. Make change in small increments, and you’ll get there in the end.

Cliches sometimes turn out to be cliches because they hold a deep, abiding truth. We think these three are full of wisdom that can be deployed in a wide variety of situations.

Do you have a favorite or least favorite cliche? Share it with us in the comments!

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