My Coaching Philosophy
…more puzzle-cracking than problem solving, more experiential than theoretical, more personalized than formulaic.
Commitment
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In a world of distractions, coaching helps you keep your focus and your commitment. Commitment is what gets results. You showing up for yourself week after week - even when it’s hard, even when you’ve messed up, even when you’re busy and other things seem more important - is what gets results. Sustainable results don’t come from flawless execution, nor the perfect plan, nor extremes, nor putting it off until the right time, nor waiting until inspiration hits. It’s the small, daily, easily forgettable efforts that will get you results.
Guidance
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This is a collaborative effort. We are equals in this process. You are the expert on you. I help guide you back to yourself by questioning, not telling. You’ve adopted a way of thinking and behaving for a reason – it was a brilliant solution at one point, but may no longer serve you. Today’s ‘problems’ are often yesterday’s solutions. We explore other possibilities.
Experiential
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We drill down into your life; notice what’s working and what’s not. Yes, it’s action-packed, but not without also aligning with your interior landscape, magnificent intellect, powerful emotions, faithful body, and all available resources in service to the whole. It offers a place to rest, breathe, brainstorm, experiment, bumble, fail, start fresh, reflect, dream and discover. Where coaching can really be felt is reducing the time it takes to dust off, get back up and try again when things don’t go your way because anything can look like failure in the middle.
Support
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This can look like a lot of different things: providing a safe space to fall apart; staying present as a witness without trying to make you feel better or jumping into your story with you; giving the gift of an outside perspective to slice through the noise and confusion that keep you from taking action; creating accountability; dealing with the stress and discomfort that accompany change; creating structures to support your growth and allow you to self-correct; prioritizing self-care and soul-care; learning the art of fear-whispering; meeting overwhelm with clarity; identifying and deconstructing habitual thoughts that aren’t supportive; developing emotional agility with all of your emotions; reframing setbacks and ‘failures’ so you can continue moving forward.
Resistance
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So much of what we do together is to soften the resistance. Resistance is what keeps patterns and behaviors locked in place, draining us in the process. Sometimes it’s hidden resistance to a goal or desire. More often, it is resistance to where we are right now in relation to that goal or desire. Softening the resistance frees up our energy, creates space for movement and flow, and allows us to inhabit the sweet spot where creative solutions often bubble up. The mission, should you accept it, is to learn how to make peace with your life right now, wherever you’re at, before all your goals and dreams come to fruition.
Fear
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This may sound ridiculous…you desire this goal intensely with all of your being and don’t understand why it hasn’t happened already. On one level, that may certainly be true. But opposing factors lurk just below the surface because there is usually a down-side that accompanies most up-sides.
Consider this: as you change, it has a ripple effect. It changes the dynamics of relationships you’re involved in; it may unleash desires you weren’t aware of; it may necessitate change in other areas of your life; you may find long-standing habits, hobbies, and people no longer compel you; your choices may create distance between you and loved ones. These subsequent changes can be painful, unexpected and fear-inducing. They can also sabotage you from the change you so desire. Thus, it’s important to explore conflicting motivations and desires which may be operating at a deeper level so they don’t undermine your efforts.
Problem
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Problems are unwanted negatives. Problem-based thinking focuses on the issues you want to avoid, fix, or solve. Furthermore, how you define the problem determines what solutions show up, much like how you ask a question determines the answers that follow. It tends to be a convergent process, narrowly focusing our attention on the one best solution, rather than the many possible solutions. Another common pitfall is the bias of problem/solution symmetry– you tend to only see solutions that match the scale of the problem. However, scale is a byproduct of perception. If an issue dominates your thinking, drains your energy, and carries a high degree of emotional intensity, you will likely perceive it as a ‘big problem,’ which prompts you to look for a big, complicated solution. In so doing, you may overlook a simple, effective solution because you’re looking for one that is on scale with how you perceive the problem.
Creative thinking is a divergent process which not only widens the lens through which you view the issue, but also expands the scope of possibilities. It often requires a step back to examine assumptions, rules and constraints. If you consider that today’s problem was in fact yesterday’s solution, suddenly that puts it in a different context and reframes the issue. Creative thinking processes explore relationships, connections between disparate things, patterns and context. The way we facilitate creativity is through openness, curiosity and questions.
The Gap
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This gap is where we direct our attention. If there were no gap, you would have already done it, attained it, and crossed it off your list. I help real people, living real lives, create real change…people who haven’t been able to do it on their own for various reasons. Together we find stuck points, identify resistance, pinpoint where fear is active, notice how sabotage operates in small and big ways, and keep momentum moving forward. Remember, you can do the impossible if you have proper support.
Change
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Change triggers feelings of uncertainty and unfamiliarity, which can activate our stress response. Our stress response (also called fight-or-flight mode when it’s fully activated) is designed to allow us to react quickly in life-threatening situations. It does this via the ‘amygdala hijack,’ a term coined by Daniel Goleman to describe how emotion suppresses cognition during fight-or-flight by activating the amygdala and disabling the frontal cortex of our brain. This serves us well when we are in danger and need to act quickly and thinking would otherwise slow us down. However, the frontal lobes are the seat of rational thinking, logical reasoning, clear decision making, and organized planning. These processes are extremely important when adopting new behaviors, navigating change adeptly, changing long-standing habits, and achieving multi-step goals. Coaching can teach you skills to soothe your stress response and get out of ‘amygdala hijack’ while you face your fears, manage new challenges, troubleshoot setbacks, and navigate change. If you don’t address your stress response, it can sabotage your best efforts at change.
Embodied
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Your body is the warehouse for all kinds of important information, so we want access to it and its wisdom. The false separation of mind and body, which is a defining hallmark of westernized culture, and subsequent demotion of our physical selves to second-class status, detracts from the quest to fully know and honor ourselves. We resource your body in the coaching process, by reconnecting to it and learning to read your physical cues. This can be a painful process for many clients, who have tortured relationships with their bodies, but no less important. If you have any history of irregular eating behaviors, dieting issues, weight struggles, distorted body image, and/or trauma, you have likely forgotten what it’s like to feel good, strong, confident and safe in your body. Instead, it’s quite possible that you have strenuously disliked, disparaged, disconnected from, and disowned your body to avoid pain. Coaching can help foster a new relationship with your body, and it begins by learning to speak and understand your body’s language, which is sensation.
Curiosity
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Revered thoughts become habitual. And habitual thoughts go unnoticed. I’m talking about dull, fly-under-the-radar thoughts that 95% of the population would agree are true. Pesky little things, hardly worth a second look. Except our habits are everything, and thought habits are especially powerful and insidious because they are invisible. Thoughts that are often repeated turn into beliefs, so you want to ensure they are supportive. Unsupportive beliefs can be disabling with far-reaching effects. Our habitual thoughts arise when we are dreaming of, in conversation with, and pursuing our deepest desires. With coaching, we don’t want to exile the habitual thoughts, but rather, notice them and get curious about how they affect us.
Process and Outcomes
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Paradoxically, we achieve real, sustainable, often dramatic results by not hyper-focusing on the goal and achieving it as quickly as possible. Focusing only on quick external results often shortcuts the path to sustainable change. We keep a soft focus on the goal, but allow our peripheral vision to capture all the other relevant, contributing elements, to create the sustainable change we desire.
Change happens, whether we want it to or not. Micro-managing change, by imposing unrealistic timelines, demanding that it look a certain way as it manifests, overcoming obstacles with grim determination, relying on discipline and willpower to perform difficult or unpleasant tasks, and using questionable methods to achieve the end, are short-sighted and hugely energy intensive. Too much change, done too fast, elicits our stress response (which works against us), requires lots of conscious supervision (which is a finite resource and goes offline when we get stressed) and uses large amounts of energy to sustain (which is unavailable when we’re tired). That’s why slow is fast when it comes to change. Creating the conditions for change and then allowing it to unfold are much more effective than forcefully micro-managing it according to a predetermined list of steps our mind devised.