Why Shifting Your Perspective is Key to Creating a Life You Love
"We are gods in the chrysalis." ~ Elbert Hubbard
Just like a sports coach, a life coach's role is to motivate and support you in doing better--whatever that means to you. Life coaching often addresses a specific goal you want to achieve, like switching careers, learning to speak up for yourself, or taming your inner critic. Transformational coaching, as a niche within life coaching, is also goal-oriented but it focuses on who you become on the way to your goals. It recognizes that what solves our perceived problems and achieves our goals is fundamentally a shift in perspective and taking action from that more inspired and enlightened state of mind.
The goal of transformational coaching is to cultivate the mindset and emotional maturity that creates a balanced and fulfilling life rich in health, abundance, and joy. Unlike therapy and counseling, which tends to focus on healing the past and treating mental illness, transformational coaching is about growth and moving people from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow. It is about clarifying their purpose and passion and supporting them in taking actions to bring that passion to life. Whereas the therapist analyzes and fixes, the transformational coach celebrates and calls forth the innate power and potential yearning to emerge.
Transformational coaching, like its close cousin ontological coaching, does this through a particular lens. It sees the person being coached as a wellspring of their own wisdom and guidance, fully capable of creating a life they love. Instead of telling you what to do, the transformational coach helps you see beyond the edge of your current thinking and guides you to deeper levels of self-awareness, insight, and self-trust. When you learn to view the situations in your life in new, more objective ways, consistent with higher consciousness, you make different choices that create a different life experience. In short, you transform your way of thinking and being, which transforms your life.
Transformational coaching expands your awareness
At the heart of transformational coaching is a shift in your perspective, which expands your consciousness and allows you to see the world and your place in it in a clearer and more profound way. You start to understand that your consciousness is the source of anything and everything that you could want because you are the one creating your life experience. You discover that so much of what we consider problems or roadblocks are just perceptions of a nervous mind that has been biased toward negative thinking. So much of what holds us back is old ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that lull (or sometimes scare) us into keeping things the same and not taking what we (mis)perceive as risks.
But doing what's been expected of us and what we are used to isn't always (I'd say usually) what leads to the greatest growth or gives us the joy and freedom we are seeking. Our consciousness knows we are each capable of so much more than our old stories.
Which is more empowering...believing that we have to work with the hand we've been dealt or believing that we have the power and freedom to change anything in our lives? Which feels more inspiring and exciting...choosing between options A, B, or C or stepping into the unknown and seeing what might appear?
In letting fear win and playing small, we steal from ourselves our own unlimited potential.
When you shift your perspective, you are also shifting your energy, which allows new possibilities to start lining up. A new way of thinking and being gives you access to what is available where the new energy (metaphorically) dwells. Change and choice are what get new energy moving toward you.
For example, when I believed it was important to climb the corporate ladder, make money, and stay busy, I drew in opportunities that gave me more responsibility and took more of my time and effort, usually in exchange for more money. These were wonderful opportunities based on the criteria I was using at the time. But when I decided it was more important to me to feel happy, abundant, and free, creatively express myself, and help others awaken, and started to align my beliefs to that vision, I drew in what I needed to become my own boss doing what I love, which I find more fulfilling.
Observing our way into truth through coaching
What makes transformation different from change is that there is no changing back. It's like once you see your dad as Santa Claus, you can never go back to believing in jolly ol' St Nick. There may be some grief as we say goodbye to what made up our old world, but in my experience, that disappears quickly once we are rooted in the new. If anything, we might wish we had woken up and crossed the bridge sooner.
It is hard to overstate just how powerful a shift in awareness can be, particularly the shift from feeling like a victim where things happen to you to realizing you are the writer of your life's script. It's like Sisyphus endlessly pushing the rock uphill only to realize that the backside of the hill had an elevator or that he could simply walk away. Because we play this game of coming to Earth not remembering who we are as eternal and divine and absorb all of the programming that keeps us asleep, we often end up working against the universal laws instead of with them. And so we self-sabotage, often unaware that is what we are doing.
We arrive at greater awareness through self-observation. This is really where a skilled coach adds value. Through a guided introspection process, the coach notices where there is an opportunity for greater realization and asks questions designed to elicit the client's own awakening. Often when we say things out loud or have our beliefs repeated back to us, we more readily see them for the nonsense they are, which goes a long way in us releasing them.
Once we create an observational gap and see something as false or flawed, our mind starts to reject it.
Identifying flawed or self-limiting beliefs is so important because they determine our frequency (vibration), which determines how we feel and what we draw into our life. For example, a common belief that crops up in coaching is “I don’t get to have what other people have.” I particularly hear this from women frustrated with being single. Through coaching, we can tease out this belief, understand where it came from, and why it is not actually true. From there, we can identify a new belief that the client is ready to accept as true and that aligns with what she wants in her life, making it more likely that she will receive it.
Compassion is an essential ingredient to the observation and introspection process. While the goal of coaching is not to dig around in the dark, many people find it helpful to trace persistent beliefs back to early childhood memories or specific traumatic moments, including behaviors that we may not be proud of. Because a self-awakened coach sees the client as a divine being having a human experience, there is no judgment or condemnation of anything the client shares. We were always doing the best we could at the level of consciousness we were at.
Transformational coaching awakens you to greater joy
An important distinction between traditional life coaching and transformational coaching is that achievement is not the end goal. While all coaching is results-driven, transformational coaching focuses on how you want to feel and experience life. Meeting specific goals is important but transformational coaching does not place your worth and value in the hands of your accomplishments. It emphasizes that we reach for new things not because we are lacking in any way or we become better when we achieve but because creating is what creators do. It is why we are here and it makes us feel really good.
Transformational coaching can be an excellent fit for those who are awakening to the more that is available to them. Some people are looking for support for what is perceived as major life changes, like changing careers, leaving a significant relationship, or coping with illness or loss. Coaching can help them get clear on what they truly want, let go of what is standing in the way, identify and take action on next steps, and bring forth their own voice of wisdom to crystallize a new way of thinking and being so that life gets easier, more fulfilling, and more fun.
Other people come to transformational coaching to be stretched into accelerated personal growth. They feel the calling for deeper self-awareness and insight and the curiosity to explore larger spiritual questions. In transformational coaching, everything is on the table because we are working with the totality of a person, which goes far beyond the physical body looking back at us. As my clients often say, “You are the only one I feel I can talk to about this!” whether that is messages from a loved one who has passed, dreams in another dimension, intellectual discussions on the nature of reality, or anything else that is outside the mainstream.
Much of what is transformed through coaching is doubt to hope, disappointment to excitement, frustration to fulfillment, and fear to falling in love with life. This is not a three-step process but an evolution of consciousness that unfolds by shifting away from old stories based in lack, limitation, and separation and embracing the higher truths we all carry. When we live from a new set of truths, our lives will transform to match it. The coach's job is to create the space to see what is true for you, from your own realization, revelation, and aspiration.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about transformational coaching, you can check out my service offerings here or book a free discovery call here.
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