Personal Coaching

Helping you navigate the speed bumps of life

How Personal Coaching Can Help

Socrates Said…

Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher said over 2000 years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living“. This was (and still is) a pretty bold statement, but it begs the question, how deeply have you examined your own life:

  • Are there parts of you that you have been reluctant to look at?
  • Are there parts of yourself that you aren’t even aware exist?
  • Is it possible that you have beliefs about yourself that keep you from being the wonderful person you were born to be? How well have you done at truly knowing yourself?

Many people decide not to look into the mirror of their own life. You are clearly not one of these people or you would not be reading these words, so here is how personal coaching can help you on this journey.

Coaching can help you see yourself from a different perspective. Your coach can watch you deal with your life’s constant flow of challenges, both big and small. He can observe what is going on from an objective perspective.

Coaches draw your wisdom from within you rather than telling you what they want you to hear.

A Certified Clear Beliefs coach can help you identify and replace limiting beliefs. I know this may sound a bit strange, but I have seen it work on others and even on me. The essential elements in changing beliefs is to reaffirm the new belief and anchor the feeling of having that belief daily until it can stand on its own.

A coach can challenge you to step outside your comfort zone and explore new worlds.

A coach can help you build self-confidence and better social skills.

A coach trained in Voice Dialog can help you identify and transform your sub-personas.

Regardless of what stares back at you in the mirror, you are far more complex than you can imagine.

My Coaching Style

My coaching practice is a reflection of who I am as a human being. Here are some of the things that influence my coaching style:

  • Compassionate Curiosity – I am deeply curious about who you are, what drives you and what gets in your way.
  • Deep Listening – When I listen to you, I am paying attention to what you say, how you say it, whether you are speaking from your head or your body, your body language and even what is going on around you.
  • Your Beliefs – What you believe frames how you live your life, and even how you show up as a coaching client. I want to draw you out and help you discover what beliefs serve or hinder you and what beliefs you are not even aware of.
  • Your Family of Origin – Since many (if not most) of your limiting beliefs were created when you were a young child and were given to you by your parents, your siblings, your friends, your teachers and the religious and cultural beliefs of the people around you, it helps our coaching work to know as much as I can about where you came from and what formed you.
  • My Intuition – As I listen to you, I will get intuitive hunches about what is really going on or how to communicate more effectively with you. My intuition is not always spot on, but it is usually pretty close.
  • No Judging –  This is very important. If I form judgments about you, some part of you may sense that I am judging you, feel less safe and less trusting and pull away. When judgment includes a trigger (an emotional reaction), it has become a defense mechanism called Projection which is a a real connection buster. Fortunately, I have done enough of my own work that I can usually spot when I am triggered and own it.
  • Emotionally Present (empathy), Compassionately Detached (boundaries) – I can be quite empathic and actually feel some form of what you are feeling in the moment; however, I recognize that these are your feelings, not mine.  I also make sure to notice my own inner process and make sure that I am not getting hooked in any way by your feelings or story.
  • Direct – I don’t beat around the bush. I speak my mind directly.
  • I-Statements – I speak about myself using I-Statements, and I expect you to do the same. This has the effect of our taking emotional responsibility for what we are saying.
  • My Life Experience – I was born in 1946 and am now in my 70’s. I have been around the block several times, so I have a fair bit of life experience to draw on. I am also quite aware that there are many life experiences that you may have had that are completely alien to me.

Coaching MKP Warrior Brothers

Serving Men I Know and Love

One of the critical failings that so many coaches have is not being able to identify their target audience. My focus for the last two decades has been teaching men who graduated from The Mankind Project’s New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA) how to “sit in circle” with each other and go deep. I have been both teaching groups of men and facilitating individual men’s processes for that entire time. This makes me fairly aware of what skills are present in most I-Groups, and what value I can bring to men sitting in I-Groups by simply showing up periodically and showing them some tools and techniques they are probably not aware of. Here is a simple example.

Although I have driven many thousands of miles in the last 20 years to attend I-Groups, the advent of Covid-19 has made it possible for me to visit I-Groups I could never have reached before without leaving my home. In the past eight months, I have visited I-Groups all over British Columbia and Alberta and reach and coach men as far away as Australia. Hence, my ideal clients are MKP Warrior Brothers who sit in Zoom-based I-groups and want to go deeper than they can go in their I-Group.

Case Study

In I-groups, we teach a process called “Bucketing” which is intended to help a man get in touch with the energy that is showing up now in some troubling way. We ask a few questions that are an attempt to get the man to feel his feelings and eventually identify the source of those feelings. This works OK in many circumstances, but we never teach them the theory behind Bucketing and how to tell in some objective way whether the energy is being relieved or intensified and what to do in either case.

The training I have received has made it possible for me to help a man who felt like he had a 10 pound lead ball in his stomach that was so painful that he was ready to go to the Emergency Room. Using the tools and techniques in my new, updated tool kit, I was a able to help him remove that pain completely in about 20 minutes.

Learn more about coaching MKP Warrior Brothers ==>

Are you ready to grow up?

Are you ready to grow up and be a healthy, happy, balanced adult? These may sound like harsh words, but you would not be reading them if a part of you doesn’t hunger to be a better person. This short video lays out five important  choices you can make that will help you grow up.

  • Are you ready to take control of your life?
  • Are you ready to take responsibility for your choices?
  • Have you learned to contain your emotions?
  • Can you put the speed bumps of your life in perspective?
  • Are you able to deeply understand the feelings and intentions of others?

Watch this video to learn more about these questions.

The Three Phases of Personal Coaching

  • Waking up – Recognizing that a part of you has been asleep, unconscious, reactive and childish is the first step in the Hero’s Journey of life. Not everybody is ready to take this step, and many people are not ready to wake up. Are you? And are you ready to take the next step? Learn more ==>
  • Growing up – This is the hard work that  Doctor Steven Marmer describes in this video. His words may sound harsh, but they are simply direct. He is telling you how life is. Growing work is the challenge that every hero faces. It is tough work. Are you ready to dive in the deep end? Learn more ==>
  • Showing up is your victory dance. It is your opportunity to step into your magnificence and show the world the unique gift you have become. Sometimes this comes late in life. For too many people, showing up happens prematurely, before they are ready. This can be a costly mistake, but mistakes are how most people learn. It is at the heart of growing up. Learn more ==>

So are you ready to jump in and continue your journey? Notice that I said “continue” rather than “begin”. That is because you have already begun that journey or you wouldn’t be reading these words.

What is personal coaching?

Learn how to live fully

Everybody’s life includes some speed bumps. Most of these are minor and can be navigated easily. Some, however, may feel like you just fell into a giant sink hole. When this happens, you may need some help getting out of the hole you have fallen into. This is when you most need a personal coach who can help you climb out.

Not all problems in life are as dramatic as being swallowed up by Mother Earth. Even though the problems you face may feel overwhelming, good coaching can help you deal with them more effectively. Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective. Other times, your coach can ask you the questions that will help you draw on your own wisdom and see the issue more clearly.

Personal Coaching is a structured way of helping you examine your life and discover what you can change. Your coach will ask you lot of questions, many of them deep and probing, but all designed to deepen your self-awareness. Sometimes you will see some aspects of yourself that you have been hiding, repressing or denying because you don’t want to acknowledge these parts of yourself. This may be painful, but the pain usually goes away if you can fully experience it for only a short while.

 

Personal coaching involves:

  • Listening deeply to you
  • Being compassionately curious about your life
  • Asking you deep and probing questions
  • Helping you see yourself from a different perspective
  • Giving you effective feedback

How does coaching work?

Transforming Energy

When something happens in your life that is scary or painful, your natural instinct will be to want the experience to stop and go away. If your parents fought with each other and you heard them fighting, you probably wanted them to stop fighting. When that didn’t happen, you developed some strategy to cope with the discomfort. Maybe you used the “Duck and Cover” strategy that one of my clients described. He headed for his room, closed the door, put on his headphones and played music loud enough to drown out their shouting. Or maybe you tried to intervene and got hurt in the process.

When something like this happens, your body remembers the experience, even if your mind has suppressed it. The experience stays in your body as a form of energy. Here is a simple example. Remember back to a time in your life when something painful or scary happened. How does that memory feel? That feeling is the energy left over from that experience.

In most cases, these traumatic experiences show up in one or more of these three ways:

  • Shadow
  • Personas or Parts
  • Limiting Beliefs

Collectively, I think of these as a form of energy block that is keeping your psyche from being free, open and balanced.  I use an assortment of tools to help clear energy blocks:

  • Helping you release painful energy you are carrying in your body
  • Interviewing personas or “voices” that act as autonomous programs running in the background of your psyche
  • Change limiting beliefs
  • Helping you learn when, where and how to set boundaries
  • Helping you step out of your comfort zone
  • Helping you become more honest with yourself

Coaching Testimonials

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