It's about the brain for me.
Here’s why I feel in love with, and why I practice Life Coaching.
I saw my brain try to go somewhere that I didn’t want it to go today.
I find this to be the most magical part of my own study of life coaching. I watched it. I saw it. Pre-2016 I would have never noticed it. And that would have caused all sorts of emotional pain for me. Possible also some results I would not have liked. BUT I saw it. What a magical and life-changing thing.
The industry of Life Coaching is multi-faceted and there is no regulation which means that it’s very possible that working with one professional will be very different than working with another. This is for a myriad of reasons– their own personality, their focus, the program they’ve created, their reasons for being in their own business, etc.
There are amazing parts to being in this field right now, but it is new and unregulated so from a customer perspective it’s like there’s a ton of choices and almost no way to understand how one business stacks up against another in terms of your own results. They might have a lot of customers, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right program for you. It doesn’t even mean it’s working for those people. Because we all know that purchasing decisions are influenced by more than quality of product.
It’s important for me to be honest and open about why I am different and what I feel is both my calling in this field as well as what I find really valuable in its study and that is The Study of Our Own Brains.
Mostly there seems to be a thread that ties many business owners in the industry– a desire to help you achieve a certain result in your life. That could be loving yourself, un-learning internalized thinking, making more money, building a successful business, learning to create healthy and helpful boundaries, etc. Often they’re selling a certain result and their business is focused on solving for that result in their own way. Many times, the coach themselves has done the thing they are selling, but not always. Sometimes they’re just really good at helping many folks get the result.
And there is also the business of the method they use to get the result. I was introduced to coaching in 2016 and what felt to me the essence of it was the study and understanding of the brain. It was so absolutely freeing for me to finally understand the connection between my thoughts and my results. It gave me relief, hope and a method for finding a measure of agency in my own life that I had never been introduced to. I was able to see that my brain was operating separately from my heart, from my intentions. It has its own agenda (to keep me safe, to avoid danger, to predict the next thing, to assure certainty, etc) and when it operates without my awareness there’s all sorts of results I will get that I just don’t want.
And then there’s the study of our emotions and how they’re tied to our thinking and to our societal norms. It’s not socially acceptable to cry in public, to question authority, to acknowledge you’re really a woman if you were born a man, to leave your marriage, to speak out against certain types of people, etc, etc. The rules that we hold as a society influence what we believe is possible and available to us. And we will have all sorts of thoughts and emotions about that. These collective ‘norms’ crush so many of us and must be changed. But doing so will only happen when we have larger scale acceptance that they’re just rules and now how we’re innately meant to be. It requires we understand the connection between thoughts and feelings and outcomes and realize that we may need other thoughts to get different outcomes (always).
This, to me, is why I practice this profession we call Life Coaching.
I want a better society.
I want my clients to have better lives today.
I want my clients to understand their own brains so that they may decide what they want to do with that knowledge.
My passions are also Creativity + Women Working for Themselves. That’s why I work within my two containers, “The Creative Shift” and “The Slow Startup.”
And I get there by helping folks understand the power of seeing their own brain as both separate from their heart and separate from society as a whole. What WE believe is always up to change, it’s based on shared values. It’s ok to break up with long-held beliefs that no longer serve you. They’re just thoughts that many people believe together. It gives them power in society but when we should shift, it’s necessary for us all to see that our shared thoughts must be changed, to offer a different result to those in our society, in our community, in our family.