What makes someone start looking for a coach may range from wanting to develop some new skills, have more confidence, improve balance and alignment in life, better time or business management skills to navigating a career or life transition or help with orchestrating a whole life makeover.
People want to release old, outmoded ways of thinking and behaviour, break free from the tyranny of negative, self-deprecating beliefs, and create new ways of being that more effectively reflect who they are and enable them to become more of who they truly are – a happier, more empowered presence living life on their terms.
Coaching provides you with tools and techniques to help you assess and accept responsibility for your reality. In so doing, you begin to recognize the dynamics at play in your life and gain clarity on available options enabling you to make better and better choices.
The nature and quality of the coaching partnership create the safe space in which you can explore issues of concern to you; learn to recognize, appreciate and honour your feelings; trust your intuition and inherent creativity, and make empowering choices. The result of the process often manifests first in enhanced coping skills – the ability to manage stress, and be more responsive to situations that previously may have led you to react, experiencing a sense of overwhelm or depletion.
Attributes of Mindfulness
Mindfulness coaching helps clients cultivate the right attitudes to foster an inner culture of peace and harmony. With a healthy mindset, the client can more effectively set clear intentions and direct their attention into strategic and inspired action. Reflective practice, self-care, disciplined action and self-accountability are the hallmarks of mindfulness coaching. Trust and self-reliance are two of the most consistent outcomes. The step by step process cultivates a real sense of a grounded and authentic presence.
The client begins to recognize themselves as multi-dimensional, open energy systems – their thoughts, feelings, intuitions and physical being an integrated and balanced whole. In the process, the coaches become more physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned.
The result is an enhanced sense of personal health and wellness, greater self-assurance and better coping skills. Engaged and attentive, yet unattached, the coaches brings the best of themselves to whatever the situation presents, now responding from a position of strength and inner calm.
Experiencing an expanded sense of presence with feelings of peace, joy and happiness having replaced the contracted emotions of anxiety, clutching, grasping, panic and worry with any vestige of poverty mentally transformed into one of abundance – the inner being made whole.
Awareness is the greatest agent of choice and the mindfulness coaching partnership facilitates the coachee’s inner freedom that leads to healing at the core.
Even if mindfulness is used by the banker or the soldier to improve their professional skills, it will also nurture the innate compassion of their humanity. It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware. Jon Kabat-Zinn
Developing mindfulness practices can benefit anyone with a genuine desire to create a positive change in their lives. A great place to start is with mindful breathing. It will give your body a chance to recover from the tyranny of your ever-busy monkey mind and help heal the aches and pains of a compressed and suffocated heart.
Learn more about the Kaizen Mindfulness Training Program
About Julia von Flotow
