Embracing Deep Self-Work for Profound Personal Transformation

Over the past few years, I have moved from being a performance coach to a transformational coach, and that is changing who wants to work with me, or perhaps I should say, it is changing the clients that I am attracting.

As a performance coach, I was super happy to share tools, frameworks and models with my clients on running better meetings, making smarter decisions, giving better feedback and delegating with more skill. Progress was easy to track, and results were fast. Since becoming a coach in 2008, I have worked with more than 100 organizations and I continue to work with some powerful organizations in the world, like the University of Oxford and YPO.

While I certainly still use those frameworks to help my clients achieve success, I’m much more interested in what constitutes success. What are their dreams are and where they come from? That is at the core of transformational coaching which can lead to a radical reorientation of your life.

Working with my transformational coach means that I now live every day in active creation of my life. That is a sentence I didn’t understand until I turned a 50. What does it mean to live in active creation of your life every single day?

When I meet potential clients, what I’m most interested in talking about is the life they want to live. At their most profound level, who are they and what do they feel called to do? What are the choices they are making and where do those choices come from? Sometimes people ask, what would you do if you knew you would not fail. I like to know what you would do even if you knew you would fail.

If you are seeking transformational coaching, it may mean a radical reorientation of your life, especially if you are out of integrity with yourself. If you’re not sure about that, start auditing your life and notice your feelings. If you can, track what you are doing and how it makes you feel. How are you showing up to your life, and what are the stories you are telling about the way you show up?

If you don’t like how your audit turns out, it might be time to seek help and summon the courage to do the deep work. Courage is required because if you’re like me, you might see that you’ve been clinging to things because you think they make you feel safe, loved and like you belong.

Transformational work requires us to get clear on how things make us feel; and, spoiler alert, you may discover that what you think you makes you feel safe isn’t actually making you safe, and where you think you belong might actually just be you doing a stellar job at fitting in.

Transformational coaching is not linear, it is emergent. It’s hard to predict how long it takes for people to change and we must let the process unfold. Sometimes our only step is the next step because there is no going around what might be in the way. There is only going through it.

We also need time to cultivate a boundless reservoir of self-compassion. That part is non-negotiable because you may discover some parts of you in the shadows that are less integrated and a little scary. Self-compassion is how you love and support yourself through transformation.

Here are some of the steps I take when doing transformational work with my clients.

Find Your North Star

Using imagination, intuition, inspiration and a set of guiding principles or values, envision the life of purpose that you want to live. This is transformational for anyone who hasn’t done it. Prior to experiencing transformational coaching myself, the only path I followed was the one that offered the illusion of love, safety and belonging. I say it was an illusion because I didn’t know what it meant to feel self-love, safe in my own being and what it has meant to belong to myself.

Engage in Radical Self Inquiry

What are your old operating systems? What are they telling you to do to stay safe? The things about your current life that you don’t like, ask yourself how you have contributed to creating them. With self-compassion, acknowledge and love all that you are with the knowledge that your behavior was learned, maybe handed down from another generation, maybe modeled by your own caregivers from a time before you can even remember. Whatever it is, say yes to it. This is how I’m showing up to my life.

Replace Old Stories with New Ones

To set a new course, we must get clear on the old stories we are telling ourselves, and believe we deserve to tell a new story. Our North Star is our intention and we when we live in integrity with those commitments to being, we can begin to tell new stories of our lives. As the novelist John Barthes once wrote, “the stories of our lives are not our lives, they’re stories,” and you get to write the story of your life. This also means learning to recognize when the old stories are rearing their heads, and finding a voice to respond to them that says something like, “thank you for looking out for me, but I got this.” Return to your North Star and your values.

Practice Awake Awareness

In transformational coaching, we learn to not only live into our vision for our life now, but also to be mindful of the present. To be in active creation of our life every day requires us to notice how things are occurring to us moment by moment. What is happening and how is it making me feel? When you change the way you look at things, it changes the way things look. If you are interested in exploring real transformation, I would love to hear from you. Yes, I’ll still help you be a better leader, but you’ll become a better leader because you are becoming a better human being.

Join Me in Transformation.

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