Awareness
12 Ways To Avoid Collusion In The Coaching Relationship
Whenever I’m training wellness coaches and use the term “collusion” a definition is required. The term can have a variety of meanings and a search done on “coaching and collusion” will yield an array of articles that seem to add to the confusion. While murder mysteries love to portray collusion as two of the bad guys conspiring to evil ends…
A Thousand Pots of Brown Rice: A Mindful Way To Be Well
We all want to be as healthy as we can be, and are usually anxious to get there quickly, like it was a destination we could actually arrive at. Mastering a wellness lifestyle is rather like mastering any art, craft or skill. It’s more of a journey than a destination. Lifestyle means a way of living, and doing it well…
Bringing Home Wellness: Souvenirs of Awareness
The gastronomic capital of the world has to be Italy. Everyday life seems to revolve around composing the next meal or, as you travel through the country as a tourist, finding the next market, ristorante, or trattoria.
A long-awaited vacation to Italy with my wife, Deborah, and our dear friends Carolyn and Donnie, created many wonderful memories, and also…
Dancing In The Moment: Awareness of The Coaching Process/Interaction
Sometimes I find that the coaching I am doing with my clients flows into a combination of elements in their lives, their own wellness, their businesses, their families and their leadership opportunities. Such a client related a story today that unexpectedly led us into talking about what worked so well in our coaching relationship. She had just recently attended a…
Downshifting To The Speed Of Life: Coaching Slowness
“Summertime and the livin’ is easy.” How long has it been since the words of that old song rang true? In response to the accelerated pace of life a conscious movement has emerged to help us slow down and reclaim our quality of life again.
In my last post I shared about Time Affluence (http://wp.me/pUi2y-hV) and how…
Getting Yourself Out Of The Way: The Self-Vigilant Coach – Part Two – Projection In Health & Wellness Coaching
Our previous blog post: Getting Yourself Out Of The Way: The Self-Vigilant Coach – Part One (https://wp.me/pUi2y-mu) explored the many ways in which the coach can interfere in the coaching process and “get in the way” of the client’s own coaching work. Our own agendas, attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, projections and unfinished emotional business can all impede the coaching…
Giving Our Lifestyle Power Away To Celebrities
The rise of celebrity chefs and food programs has been phenomenal. True, there are some excellent shows that feature healthy cuisines, and more wellness-oriented content. However the alarming trend has been for more and more shows to do what television shows have learned works for ratings: to shock and to “give the public what they want.” I’m talking gluttony and…
Inner and Outer Awareness: Coaching and Living Mindfully.
Suzanne Ballantyne, Wellness and Health Coach and Yoga Teacher, recently shared this piece below with me and her classmates from her Wellness Mapping 360° training course.
“I am taking more anatomy classes for my yoga teaching and Thursday the topic was breathing anatomy. The first thing the teacher did was have us breathe – no big surprise there. Anyway…
Motivation Plus Mobilization: Coaching For Success At Lifestyle Improvement
“I just don’t seem to have the motivation to really make changes.” This is a lament frequent to the ears of health and wellness coaches. Our clients are often puzzled by a lack of success in their efforts to start living a healthy lifestyle, or keep such efforts going. They blame it on either a lack of motivation to get…
Process Coaching: Yes, Coaches “Do Emotions”
How can we walk with our clients through the landscape of emotion and stay on solid and fertile ground? How can we avoid the mud, or even the quicksand of faux-counseling/psychotherapy? We want our clients to harvest the insights and benefit from the emotional release that comes telling their story, while feeling heard, understood, and even affirmed. We want them…
Really Full Engagement in Life, Work, and Coaching
In 1971 Ram Dass (psychiatrist turned meditation teacher/guru) admonished us all to BE HERE NOW! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book), and the battle with the distraction capacity of our big brains has never let up. How many wonderful books, mindfulness practices, institutes, and even religions have arisen in our quest to focus on this very moment in front of us. Today a…
Refining Coaching Linguistics: Verbal Tics, Placeholders and Fingerprint Words
In a recent New York Times article, writer Gregg Easterbrook shared this observation of modern day speech. "The verbal tic of saying “real quick” is surging ahead of “you know” in the American lexicon. “You know” is an empty expression, a verbal placeholder. By contrast, “real quick” has significance, reflecting the continuing acceleration of life. “Good morning, I would…
The Mindful Embrace: Awareness of The Other
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
-Thich Nhat Hahn
When we work as any kind of human helper we are living on two levels at once. There is the role and function of being the ally for our client, and yet there is…
The Quandary of Closeness And Compassion in Coaching
“Don’t get too close to your clients.” It may have been my junior year of being an undergraduate psychology major when a professor offhandedly gave this warning to me and a couple of other students. There is always this question about ‘therapeutic distance’. Clearly when a therapist allows their own feelings of attraction or repulsion, insensitivity or caring to interfere…
Time Affluence: What New Findings Mean For The Wellness Coach
No matter how intensely we human beings think about time, the Earth rotates on its axis in the same twenty-four hour cycle. Yet time is all about our perception of it, and far too frequently we view it as a scarce commodity. Time scarcity thinking is just as detrimental to our health and wellbeing as financial scarcity thinking, maybe even…
Where The Listening Starts
Where Listening Starts
An essential part of any wellness coach training is focusing on developing competency in what the ICF (International Coaching Federation) calls Active Listening – Paraphrase and Restatement; Reflection of Feeling; Request for Clarification; the use of Silence and Intuition; Summarization. Yet the active listening skills that we talk about aren’t really skills about how to listen…
