The first time my client, Linda, said she couldn’t believe she needed a life coach to tell her to make her bed, I laughed.

The second time, I paused but let it go.

The third time was my cue to probe a little deeper.

“Do you think that’s what we’re doing here?” I asked. “Just keeping you on track to make your bed?”

“Well, no,” Linda said. But I could tell she was hedging. And maybe beating herself up a little bit.

“Let’s talk about what making the bed really represents,” I said.

“OK,” Linda answered. Her tone brightened. I could tell she was opening up to the idea.

The truth is, Linda is a hardworking professional and a divorced mother of five. Almost every session, she makes me laugh out loud because her own laughter is infectious. She is a classic giver with a big heart and actually hired a life coach because she wanted to do something for herself. I was all for that.

In our initial consultation, Linda shared a number of things, among them that she has no sense of self and that her bedroom is the last one in the house to be cleaned. I didn’t know if she realized those two revelations were linked, but to me it felt like the logical place to start. She immediately took to the idea.

Well, we’ve been working in a coaching-client relationship since late December and Linda has been paying attention to her bedroom – i.e., organizing drawers, purging handbags, decorating with candles. While much of that part of the process has been gradual, she has been making her bed on a near daily basis.

“I love how it feels when I come home and see it made,” Linda said.

There is so much associated with this simple task. It is the room in the house she feels she can control. It sets a tone for her day. It soothes and envelops her at the end of a long day of work and caring for her family. She equates caring for her bedroom with caring for herself. And, might I add, this is only one of four terrific goals Linda is working on consistently.

It bears mentioning that Linda is not the first client I’ve worked with who doesn’t immediately recognize the impact a simple-on-the-surface task can have. Take Amy, for instance. She is concerned with a little bit of extra weight on her body, a cluttered e-mail inbox and an overstuffed closet. The weight seems to be her biggest challenge, so I got her started on cleaning out the e-mail and the closet. Trimming excess in one area almost always has a ripple effect onto others, I told her. I expect to see gradual, real change happening for her over the next month.

But what about the flip side to all of this? What do we often do when we want to punish ourselves? Yes, we sabotage. Linda knows the payoff of making her bed – a fabulous feeling at the end of the day. She also knows how to make herself feel not-so-fabulous – skip the bed routine in the morning. Our habits-- the ones we consider good and the ones we consider bad -- are so linked to how we feel about ourselves in the moment and in the world.

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best,” Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way. “It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough.”

Cameron is talking about it in the context of creativity and she goes on to say that letting go is a “normal part” of our creativity. Yes, it must be. And when we apply it here, even to a chore we feel is mundane, it is more like forgiving ourselves and allowing ourselves to move on to the next thing with a fresh feeling.

“The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household,” Cameron writes.

Sometimes it pops up in her literal household, too.

Either way, it must be shown the door.

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.