Understanding Roadblocks to a Successful Coaching Practice
Willing to join me in this “I statement?” My ego morphs faster than a virus, is more slippery than a greased pig, has more heads than a Hydra! Due to absence of the right healing modalities and energy release techniques we frequently seem a step behind the client’s crafty ego defenses against our best coaching practices and between us and the additional coaching income we want.It’s all good and everything is relative until it isn’t. Time might just be an illusion but don’t try to convince your boss of that when you’re 30 minutes late and didn’t call.
To you the client might seem ready to take a huge leap forward but regardless of how certain you are, they’re not moving as long as it still feels to them like they’re stepping off a cliff to a sure death.
Believing that accountability means taking responsibility for consequences intended and unintended makes perfect sense until you’re dealing with someone who’s lived their whole life making excuses and getting away with it.
Convincing the head (mind) what’s what and what’s beneficial or destructive doesn’t matter when seared-in habits of the heart and gut don’t get it yet.
If someone is completely identified with their false ego images to protect the painful emotions in their wounded true self, asking them to die to their ego is like asking them to actually die.
If you coach, teach, mentor, parent, or counsel, I imagine you understand what I’m saying.
So what techniques do you use when the person with whom you’re working hits one of those emotional walls? It’s a place where the past trumps all your presence, where your accurate perceptions run directly up against defenses against past trauma still alive in their body.
I often turned to voice dialogue for help, calling in the sovereign or wise one to offer insight and perspective, inviting the individual to take charge of what’s really happening anyway so they heal themselves. Stepping back to facilitate their inner conversation feels appropriate and is often effective at creating awareness my pushing on the wall cannot.
Yet, I was always looking for a technique that could point me directly at the blocking emotion, old wound, and get that long held emotion to release, to come pouring out. I’d imagine it gone, the person shaking their head and saying to me how much lighter they feel, clean, clear of the anger, fear, urge for revenge, etc.
And then I met Olga… and what I’d imagine started to actually happen!
My first Experience with PhysioEmoDynamics
I’d been “doing my inner work” for years. Teaching yoga, practicing the yogic path of refining my body, deepening awareness of the senses, building the power of concentration, gaining control of the breath and energies of the body, looking inward past sense perceptions for understanding, surrendering into connection with the vastness. I’d been teaching and coaching clients, using mainly Shamanic processes to help them see and find their power. People would rave about the results, express profound gratitude but not actually make radical shifts in their behavior and soon wander away, looking for something more powerful, effective. I wasn’t making enough money to make a significant difference in my life.
Personally I was active in the ManKind Project doing powerful men’s work and sitting in circles of accountability, emotional intelligence and support. But I was haunted by the emptiness at my core that had lived in me since my mother died suddenly when I was 11. The popular, personable, happy-go-lucky false self I created in response to her death was exhausted from more than 40 years of pretending, sapped from suppressing the sadness and anger hidden in my true, buried self. And all the supposed inner work I was doing was being stopped at the surface by my persona.
I met Olga when she came to my Yoga Center as part of a healing expo I hosted. Something about how good the first hug felt, the brightness of her light, the power I sensed in her, moved me to ask this lovely little Ukrainian woman to do her PhysioEmoDynamics (whatever that meant?) on me. Like an arrow shot at the Sun she somehow pierced the persona, fought her way past my dragons and literally demanded I release some of the buried pain.
The eruption reminded me of the one time in therapy almost ten years before when I’d touched the anger and spent an hour in tears pounding a pillow. Like that time, after the session with Olga I felt lighter, moved differently, saw the world differently and, had it not been for her relentlessness, like that last time, I would have soon gone back into hiding. This time though she would not let go and caught between attraction to her and desire to escape, was too confused to run. She eventually gained full access to the trauma and courageously managed to withstand the full force of the anger and sadness that emerged.
Looking back it was a perfect storm, the many years of yogic preparation, the right time and place and the right spirit wielding a powerful, effective modality, PhysioEmoDynamics, all combining to blow apart the false self, and reveal and then heal the inner self to produce a blessed state.
Processes & Techniques That Transformed My Understanding Of What It Means to Be A Coach
Today my coaching practice incorporates PhysioEmoDynamics as a way to help clients feel their way into dis-identifying from the protections they’ve used for the fear, anger, shame, longing. When I hit a stuck place I have clients do a session with Olga to drain off the emotion their block is protecting. With less to defend, they return to their work with me less identified, feeling lighter, different in their lives and ready to anchor in a more expansive, connected awareness that allows them to fully integrate new behaviors in their lives.
Clients frequently repeat this cycle several times during their work with us. They begin to be able to rapidly peel away layers of the onion or karmic patterns, to use another analogy, and develop an increasingly healthy relationship with their true self and a graceful effectiveness and sense of fulfillment in the world that is generously reflected in profit and referrals for me.
Effect Of A New Coaching Model On Customer Retention
I’ve always sought to model an ideal state of being when working with clients; savoring the moment, being comfortable, present, clear, expansive and compassionate. But, I’ve always felt limited by my ego’s fearful, craving, identification with being a successful coach, whatever that means.
Empowered now by having PhysioEmoDynamics as an effective method to handle the most difficult situations that arise as I nurture of clients, I feel significantly less fear.
The peace I now feel allows for that extra moment of patience during processing that’s often beautifully filled by the client saying exactly what was needed to be said, by their dropping into authentic emotion in the space provided, by a deepening sense of connection allowed by the absence of me not nervously “knowing”. These powerful empty moments speak into both our souls and create connections that benefit the work, produce real trust and wind up ironically making me a more successful coach.
That’s my story. What’s yours?
