Find Solid Ground Coaching

Women are flexible and resilient; they can adapt to change. While that’s true, it goes in the category, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. I have adjusted to the career choices of my husband multiple times, moving to where his best opportunities were because I was up for the adventure and knew I could “grow where I was planted”. That’s all well and good, but I could have asserted my ambitions and done more with my career. What held me back was not believing in my ambitions enough to defend them. I did not seek out role models or mentors to help me, instead I kept my nose to the grindstone and hoped for the best. What would have helped me was to intentionally visualize where I wanted to be in 5, 10, 20 years. I hope you are intentional about your career and life!

Last week we went into the mountains, and I realized (again) how valuable it is to get away and get a different perspective on your life. I always come away with fresh ideas, new possibilities and renewed motivation. It struck me that Life Coaching is like that too. You get to work with someone who guides you to see your life from a different viewpoint, someone who can help you see possibilities that you may not have let yourself see and someone who will motivate you to pursue your desires. I’ve seen it happen with my clients over and over! If this sounds good, get ahold of me and we can change things up for you!

Old Dogs New Tricks – My journey into Life Coaching started when reading an article about neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity, or brain plasticity, is the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or experience or following injury. This blasted the doors open for me as I came to grips with the FACT that I could change the way I thought, I could change my habits, and I could even change my beliefs!! Since then I have learned a lot of new tricks; I truly see things differently and am happier for it! I still struggle with old pesky thoughts that seem to always circle around fear, but I’m working on changing those synapses.

After active listening and curiosity, my third principle of life coaching is intuition. Intuition is our gut feeling. We all have intuition because in prehistoric days, and even today, we used this intuition to stay safe. When we got a feeling that an animal was lurking in the forest and going to harm us, we got out of the way. Today it’s not so straight forward, but we do all have intuition. The trick is to notice how you feel, trust how you feel and then act on how you feel. Think about how you tune into your feelings. Is it through conversation, journaling, sitting with yourself in a quiet setting or maybe in the shower! What you are doing is creating space for our feelings.

After listening (see my last post), curiosity is the next important principle in life coaching. It's very easy to form judgements, jump to conclusions, and try to solve a problem when we are (not really) listening to others. It’s our human nature to try to “fix” things but trying to "fix" someone is a showstopper and more likely than not will shut down the conversation. A different approach is to be truly curious, in a nonjudgmental way, about someone's story. It always amazes me how people seem to sort things out on their own when they are genuinely listened to!

The most important principle in life coaching is listening, better yet, “active listening”. Active listening is the practice of paying full attention to and absorbing what someone is saying. It is an attempt to demonstrate unconditional acceptance and unbiased reflection of what you are hearing. It helps me to come to a conversation with a blank slate, no agenda and a lot of curiosity. Another useful phrase is to listen “for” instead of listening “to”. In this case you are listening with a curiosity to learn from what the other person is saying. Try it out!

Apparently, the video I created from my webinar was "private". Now it is "public", and you can watch it! Principles-listening, curiosity, intuition...Process - what, why, how. That's all you need to know.

If you didn't get to make it to the webinar, here is a link to the recording that should work. https://vimeo.com/711869442

Tell me if it doesn't!!

I really enjoyed sharing my thoughts about life coaching and how you can use tools and processes to create the life you desire! If you didn't get to make it to the webinar, here is a link to the recording. https://vimeo.com/711869442

I hope you can join me Tuesday, May 17th at 4pm for the third in our series of Spring Cleaning for the Soul webinar. Emily and Whittley did a great job talking about mindfulness and now it's my turn to talk about life coaching and how you can use it on yourself to create the life you desire! Here's how to sign up: https://bit.ly/SpringCleaningSoul

Loved this quote from Brene Brown's new book, Atlas of the Heart, "So often, when we feel lost, adrift in our lives, our first instinct is to look into the distance to find the nearest shore. But that shore, that solid ground, is within us. The anchor we are searching for is connection, and it is internal." Self-compassion is where it's at these days for me.

Stand Up, Step Out and Find Your Solid Ground!