What do you want for your clients and your coaching practice? What obstacles block the realization of this desire and how do you overcome them?
These are the questions we explore in the Strategic Narrative Embodiment methodology. We also explore how we typically respond to the obstacles and ask: “How can we change our response so that we can get the outcome we desire?”
At the end of such a workshop I asked delegates how the method differs from the coaching methods they are use to. Here are some answers:
“More motivation. For me I had to actually feel my obstacles in my body. And as I go through them again in my real life, I will repeat the way I usually react to them, but i won’t be able to shirk it. I would be able to recognise my reactions and I would not be able to let it end there. There is more motivation now to react differently than usual. There is also the insight that says: If I do it differently, I actually know what the purpose is of doing it differently. So there is both the push and the pull to do what I need to do. Very practical not ‘wah-wah (hands flapping in the sky) at all, very practical.”
“I have to echo that. My cognitive space is safe space. You know: ‘done it before, been there before.’ This embodiment work…I mean… I had nausea when I was in my obstacle place and I came out and I don’t have that nausea now. I actually felt in my body how bad that position is for me. I have to take responsibility for that. I felt nausea also in that other place, my reaction to my obstacles. And I am doing that. I am keeping myself there. This is not a means to beat myself up over it, but just to see it, recognise it, so it can be looked at and moved through. Really powerful, really powerful. I mean, it’s not going to go away. This is what happens and it will happen again, but now I can respond to it differently.”
“I was amazed at how unstable the position was that I chose to sit in – immense instability. I wanted to choose a reflective thinking position. I might have expected it to be stable, but discovered it was not. In my thinking position, my leg was not stable, by moving it, the stability came in. When I move I work at things, but when I am sitting, i ponder and I think too much. I think I am strategising, but it isn’t. I am just thinking about the problem and making it larger.”
“I had a very positive experience. It is very different from what I am used to because I didn’t realise how much body work would be involved. I think as coaches we spend so much time in our heads and in other people’s heads that to get out of it and do something physical makes an enormous difference.”