Ten years ago, I started a journey to love my work. When I was first looking for a coach, I was still working at a full-time job in my creative design/marketing career. I knew that I wanted to work for myself making a difference in the world. I wanted a coach to help me figure out what my business was going to be.
What I didn’t know was how much deep healing and transformation work was ahead of me.
And what I ended up with was not only work I love but self-love on a level I didn’t know, or think, was possible.
Today I’m going to share with you what it takes to experience lasting transformation, inner and outer (confidence, peace of mind, happiness/new career, better relationships).
The Coaching Industry
There are a million different styles of coaching out there. From health and nutrition to business and relationships.
Many coaches work with a strategy/framework that they guide clients through to get to their desired outcomes. This is great and can be very educational and effective.
But what if what you really need help with is changing who you are and who you’re being in order to take the steps to get different results.
Following a step-by-step process isn’t going to get you anywhere if you’re still operating with the same level of thoughts and beliefs that kept you stuck in the first place.
I’ve worked with many coaches over the years and the ones who made the biggest impact helped me access my own answers and discover where I was getting in my own way.
Ultimately, I started to make progress when I was guided into my body to access the wisdom within, processing the pain and false beliefs that were stored there and accessing my personal power.
The future of mental health and human potential is in somatic healing work: trauma work, shadow work, inner child healing, breathwork, mindfulness, energy healing – all experienced through the body in a trauma-informed way.
It’s through the body/mind/energy systems where lasting transformation happens.
Disembodiment Culture
We live in a very heady world. Most people are all up in their heads: thinking and worrying about the past or future, checking off to-do lists (including for well-being and spirituality), etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a list checker – I track my yoga classes, meditations and business progress and it does keep me on track. I also have shiny object syndrome, so if I don’t track my goals then my mind will be on to the next thing and a month later, I’ll wonder what happened.
This isn’t our fault either. We’ve been trained this way. The “disembodiment culture” values the mind over all else. This cuts us off from our bodies’ inner wisdom.
What we all need help with is:
- finding peace and presence in our bodies and to calm the mind
- accessing our true essence within
- learning how to regulate our emotions and nervous system
- learning how to run our energy from an embodied center versus a collapsed/disembodied place
That’s where the answers are. That’s where the quantum leaps and living your dreams happen.
Turning Breakthroughs into Transformation
Have you ever worked with a therapist/coach, read a great book, taken a course and experienced huge insights and breakthroughs only to find yourself, a month later, back in the same unhelpful thought/emotion/behavior loops?
You didn’t turn the breakthrough into a transformation.
Breakthroughs and insights only get you to the awareness part of change. You must then act on this new awareness in order to rewire it in the nervous system and integrate the insight into who you are being now. Insight is on the mental level – transformation is on all levels, mind/body/energy (emotion and frequency).
“Transformation is 20% insight, 80% muscle” – Shirzad Chamine
In his book, “Positive Intelligence”, Shirzad Chamine shares that the reason most human potential courses are ineffective is because they spend too much time teaching insights. They don’t focus enough on building new mental habits to rewire the neuropathways in the brain and entire nervous system.
What It Takes to Change
So, what do you do when you have a new insight or breakthrough?
Let me use an example to clearly demonstrate this:
Say you have a breakthrough awareness that you haven’t been setting boundaries for your time at work. You’re answering emails and doing extra work all hours of the day because you want to be helpful and valued. You suddenly realize that’s a big reason you’re burnt out.
There’s a lot to unpack even in those 3 short sentences. Setting boundaries is a muscle you need to develop. That’s going to be hard if you hold the belief that you must do more in order to be helpful and valued. The realization that you’re the reason you’re burnt out (not the job/extra work) may be painful to see and will need to be reconciled through grieving, self-forgiveness and choosing better for yourself going forward.
Here’s what must happen to integrate this insight into a transformation:
- Keep it top of mind – share it with safe, supportive people in your life
- Learn to access your felt sense and emotions so you can catch yourself when you’re feeling burnt out or resentful at work
- Set boundaries in a kind, levelheaded way
- Heal the part of you that feels it must over-work to be valued
- Feel the pain of not being valued – the pain likely goes way back into childhood
- Make and keep promises to yourself to not take on more than you can do and to set and hold healthy boundaries
- Be gentle with yourself and honor your small wins and baby steps forward
This is not a linear process. And to be honest, years later you may find yourself over-giving and needing to set a boundary after you thought you had worked through all that. It’s not because you haven’t transformed, it’s likely because you’re reaching a deeper level of healing that wants to happen and you have more resources to set a bigger boundary or take another leap forward toward your dreams.
Lasting transformation happens through the actions you take after a breakthrough or insight. Change needs to happen on all levels (mental/physical/energetic), not just the cognitive. And repetition will help you embody lessons and support you into the next best version of yourself.
Coaching questions:
- What big insights or breakthroughs did you have this year?
- Have those insights been integrated into who you are now?
- Are there things you could do to integrate them further?
