Sarah Hope
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Long term Coaching Practice Client:
Even though this unit concluded in the summer, I recently had an opportunity in my professional work to offer a long term, coaching model to a potential client.
This client initially came to me looking for something I did not offer. I had to draw a boundary and clarify what I do in my work.Boundaries are a tough spot for me and I was so I was fully unattached from the idea of “winning over” this individual as a client. I think my lack of need gave me strength and a sense of composure that ultimately served us both. Through our conversation he became curious. He shifted his perspective and asked how I might coach him.
I listened deeply to his story and took a few days to create my offer.
He is a man of Native American heritage but he had been adopted and did not learn of it until he turned 50. This knowledge awakened something inside of him and he has been searching for a way to connect with the culture that lies dormant inside of him. Ritual and ceremony are my passion as a coach so I was really inspired to create a model for how I would coach him. Paganism is my primary ceremonial orientation. It is a nature based practice completely devoid of dogma. I was able to use this framework to provide a coaching model the follows the wheel of the year with nature as a common ground for development of his own unique relationship to himself and his new-found community.
I think doing this structure and pricing it was a bit easier for me because I was not attached to any outcome. I had not expected this inquiry to turn into a prospect.
What I love about this is that it was a leaning into my unknown that yielded a surprise. I surprised myself by designing a whole year of content.
I do not know if he will accept my offer or not, but nothing is lost. The model he inspired is something I can now use as a framework in future long-term offerings.
Because of this immersion, it was easy for me to listen for the deeper need and the want that it revealed. It all comes back to nature again and again. What I understand now is that the way I guide and live is one and the same, congruent with the seasons, harmonious with nature.
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Awareness is a key concept here. Awareness in nature feels so natural and never needs to be forced when attuned to the environment. Coaching presence and deep listening follows naturally. When I listen to a client in nature, it is like I am tuning into creation itself.
I usually take clients to a canyon near my office. (How lucky am I?!) When we leave the space, there is a process of re-entry. I like to ask them. “What are you taking with you?”
“How will you work with what you’ve learned this session?” “How is it different than how you were being last week?” “What will this mean for you?” “How will you notice the shifts in your life?”
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I am still in deep process, a year later with the concept of the threshold. Words are inadequate to describe the inner knowing that arises when I am tuned in to the environment with a client.
The other during a winter coaching session, a rare and unusual animal appeared in the canyon. A white weasel- whose coloring has shifted in synchronicity with the coming of winter. Although the weather had not caught up, the animal was still honoring a code written into her very being.
What this tells me is that we are all programmed to survive and thrive as beings of nature. This unusual moment matched a threshold for my client in which her realized that he was withholding the truth of his feelings from his aging father.
I cannot explain why but in this magical moment in nature, he suddenly decided it was worth the discomfort and vulnerability, to share his truth.
This was a threshold. Was the animal saying… “It’s safe to be yourself- even if the Environment is not caught up”?! I don’t know, but NCC is really like nothing else I have known.
Sometimes all I do is slow down and help a client notice, really notice what is going on in the baseline. When it shifts so does the the client. The session almost completes itself when we truly tune in.
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For this assignment, I worked with an existing long-term client. I started with this client before I began with EBI, but I used what I had learned to re-create the container.
We took a look at his progress throughout the year in his business, but this time I took it to a deeper level. I asked him to look at the ways that working the changes in his business reflected the changes inside of him. We looked at his business as sort of an ecosystem and system of concentric circles, himself in the center, surrounded by his family, surrounded by his business, and then his community. We took some time to notice the way his internal changes influenced his relationship with those elements in his life.
From this reflection we made a plan for where he would like go this year and how we will use his work with me to envision his life and work in a new way.
(I gave myself a raise this year- and this session helped me re-establish my value as a coach and the time and investment I put into training)
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In this last immersion I understood the invitation to really up-my game as a coach. Shortly after the immersion, I left for Costa Rica, where I was invited to co-facilitate a ceremony in beautiful natural setting.
I took all of the skills with me to the jungle. The jungle took on a new meaning for me because through EBI, I learned to view myself as part of nature. So rather than being a foreign exotic place, I related to the jungle as a co-creator for the healing space I was called in to manage.
I worked with clients there who were having an immensely difficult time accepting their own nature. I understood their deep woulds of acculturation and internal colonization.
During this time, I did a nature connected coaching session with one individual who had been having a really hard time in the group. We took a wander together and I noticed he seemed to be shutting out his surroundings- deep in self-reference (left-brain). I noticed some lovely birds landing on the tree above and asked him if he saw them. I did this because he wasn’t noticing anything but his own pain- so the question “What are you noticing?” was not yet available.
Something shifted in that moment, it was as if he woke up from a dense fog and suddenly saw where he was. From there out session began to flow- he was able to identify which part of him was projecting a dense fog and a feeling of being lost. That part was a younger part- that got lost in his professional life and had been feeling lost and abandoned for many years. In the retreat space that part got to be expressed but its’ expression was woeful. When we started to notice things in nature, it was almost as if the young boy part was awakening and realizing he was not alone.
We spent the whole session just letting that part notice the sights, sounds and expressions of the forest around us.
Ironically, I did very little in that session, but my knowledge of partswork, nature connection and the brain informed my way of being – that gave me the confidence and understanding to do less. The client was different after that session, more engaged with the group and more open.
I never intended to do a nature connected session but the skill was with me when someone is in need.
What this is showing me is that, being a nature connected coach is not a suit or a hat we put on but a way of walking in the world. It is always with me and will change how I am in the world and how I relate to clients.
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As I reflect on the readings about the brain and synthesize this with our learnings about partswork and nature connected coaching. One of the things I realize is the nature is actually a space where the right brain- expansive, interconnected, playful, creative and innocent can harmonize with the left brain, planning, analytical, meaning making.
Even when people hike or get outside, they often engage with only the left brain, missing the magic of our connection to nature. As a Nature Connected Coach, I think we have a rare opportunity to slow down and help people rediscover the magic of their very own being. This is essentially shamanism, was I understand it.
Often times in modern life the two hemispheres of the brain are at odds. We value the left brain over the right. As a left handed- right brain dominant person, sometimes I feel that the only place I make sense is in nature.
Even completing this online program was difficult to me, I found it to be a great effort to fit my expansive understandings into a sensible container.
I now see being a nature connected coach as synonymous with my spirit work-a deeper calling to hold the space between worlds, brain, body, earth-cosmos, self-other.
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In this session with partswork, we were able to access the oracle of nature to relay and mirror our parts back to us. I got the opportunity to work out my own parts before working with my practice client. It was monumental to see how easily I could find my own parts expressed in nature.
Through this experience, I was able to conceptualize working with my practice client in the nature space. I had a session with an existing client after the immersion in which he was able to identify his protector parts as elements in the space where we meet. As this unfolded he began to spontaneously address his biggest source of conflict and began speaking to a thorn bush which represented both his own protector and his father. He was able to clearly identify what he wanted to say (this was an identified goal of the coaching container). Once he was able to do this he began to clarify which parts of him were authentic and which parts were introjects from his upbringing.
I am amazed at the way the nature setting accelerated movement and growth in my client’s mandala.
My insight here, is that nature is the ultimate expression of parts. The earth itself, grew and developed as we do in life, in order to survive. Parts are like an ecosystem functioning in harmony and identifying threats, then coming up with different creative ways to solve them.
Wow! This was a profound realization. I now view parts as an ecosystem which has enhanced the way I am able to work with them and both for myself and my clients.
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Dear Sul,
I am particularly drawn to the way you have highlighted the tendency to “relapse” without maintenance. Something shifted in me when I read this. A little lightbulb turned on.
I really began to see how the long term model can make change sustainable. Suddenly I can see the role of ritual and neuroplasticity in a long term coaching model.
I sort of missed the connection before. I love when that happens. It often takes another person to turn the switch on and give me that aha moment. Your share just did that for me!
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I like the way you used the coaching competencies to manage your own emotional pain while relating to this client. It seems you were able to turn your emotional understanding into a strength by using those competencies with skill.
It sounds like as an artist and a coach you had the right blend of what he needed to return to the space.
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I am feeling this one deeply this year. It is not just a coincidence that anxiety and depression are on the rise. The sadness and confusion we feel is held in a greater context. I don’t think we were taught about our deep connection to nature as our ancestors were. Modern life can give us the illusion that we are separate from nature but our souls feel the earth and grieve for the imbalance that surrounds us.
A gift we have as nature connected coaches is to be able to help people find context for their lives and a deeper understanding of the connection between their feelings and the environment. Thanks again Ally for inspiring me.
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I don’t know why but I feel emotional reading this. I love coaching but I have avoided selling. The package I sell most often is a month-long package, but I think it is because I have trouble visualizing past that and valuing my long term offer. I find myself stagnating at my current offer.
I think in order to sell the experience, the romance, the intrigue of it all, I need to sell myself on it first. This might take some work. I am going to check out the book you shared.
I hear in what you are sharing, the opportunity to level up. The idea come to mind to “be the experience we are offering”.
Long term coaching remains for me an obstacle. I like the way you shared these principals for us. It allows me to see the specific areas where I lack an organized approach to my offer.
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ooh! I like that statement “20 percent is for us”. I have noticed that too. anything we hear in a clients story has wisdom for us as well- but it doesn’t need to detract from their experience. Conversely, I think this enhances our ability to engage with them.
The self-severance process is always at play for me and one of the reasons I love coaching, is that it is always inviting me me to grow as a being.
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Ally, I completely understand the struggle with parts. There are so many of mine I wanted to deny, only to learn that they prolonged my struggle. I really appreciate the way you describe how integrating your inner child part is showing up in your healthy expression of adulthood. This is eye-opening to me and suggests I have more work to do,
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Jen, your post is changing something for me. I am understanding grief and death in a way I never could before. It just doesn’t make sense in the logical brain- it is much deeper than that.
I appreciate the way you illuminated the grief for a part/introject that no longer served you but was deeply ingrained.
Losing a way of being is like a death and we often want to skip to the “yay! What next?!” phase, but maybe you’re showing us that there needs to be space for the loss, even if it is a desired change.
MIND_BLOWN!
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I agree Ally. It was a rare treat to read Jen’s post. Her willingness to share the depths of her grief is liberating.
I learned from your session Jen. It occurred to me something like this. Only when we have the courage to disintegrate, can we begin to transform and create ourselves anew.
