Your body is your home
Your body is your vessel. It is the vehicle you inhabit during your experience of life. The quality of the relationship you have with your body has a significant impact on the quality of your life.
If you are as I once was, you are conditioned to see the body as a machine that you use as a means to perform all the activities you participate in and to go about your day to day life. If you are as I once was, you take your body for granted when your body is cooperating and isn’t presenting with pain or sickness related symptoms. If you are as I once was, when your body isn’t cooperating and presents with pain or any of the myriad of symptoms, you think your body is betraying you.
I have learned that there is a better way. I learned that I could come to my body and care for it from an entirely different perspective. I could be fascinated and in awe by all that it does. I could be curious about it and what it communicates to me. I could be compassionate toward it. I could express appreciation for it. If you are like me, you’ll take the step to become familiar with the relationship you have with you body and take that relationship and your life to a whole new level!
A Better Way
Holistic Body Coaching focuses on guiding you into partnership with your body as well as into cultivating what is at the heart of every one of your body-related goals. At the heart of it is our desire to feel elevated emotions such as peace, satisfaction, joy, and appreciation, and to move beyond disharmonious emotions such as frustration, anxiety, and hopelessness.
Holistic Body Coaching is a method that is built on a two pronged approach: the “what-you-are-doing” component and the “who-you-are-being” component. As with traditional health and wellness programs, we’ll engage in the external behaviors by defining goals and developing new habits and systems to reach those goals, but then we’ll dive beyond that surface to the deeper, more impactful focus which is on cultivating a new internal way of being.
A way of being is defined as the mental and emotional states you embody. These internal states are what fuels your external action. Your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, stories, identity, perceptions, and emotions make up your internal states is your way of being. You are the creator of your life. Your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, stories, identity, perceptions, and emotions are the elements or the ingredients that you create with. To experience new, more desirable outcomes, you need to upgrade the quality of the ingredients you are creating with.
At the heart of it
Personal training programs and fitness classes are focused on external actions and objectives. Losing weight. Getting tone. Increasing strength. Enhancing athletic performance. Improving fitness. Resolving pain or dysfunction. Health coaching programs focus on cultivating better eating habits, better sleeping habits, better exercising habits, and better mindfulness habits. I’m not suggesting that working toward these objectives isn’t valuable. After more than 20 years of experience in the health and fitness arena, I’ve come to realize that these programs aren’t getting to the heart of the matter. Getting to the heart of the matter is what will lead you to the sustainable outcome you truly desire.
Most of us have engaged in some type of formal or informal behavior change program placing our attention on some external goal like the ones listed above. In these experiences, the deeper motive wasn’t identified. When you think about the goals or outcomes you want to achieve, ask yourself, “what is it that I really want?” Why do you engage in these programs? Why is it important to you to lose weight, improve your fitness, or resolve pain? If you explore the question deeply enough, you’re going to come to the central motivation. That deeper motivation is quite simply the mental and emotional state you want to experience. You want to let go of the disharmonious emotions you currently and habitually feel as it relates to your body and your health and you want to replace them with those emotions that are elevated.
The disappointing reality is that changing the external variables only results in a momentary experience of the mental/emotional state you desire. The state of satisfaction, joy, peace, etc. does not last. The mental/emotional state you were trying to escape and leave behind inevitably returns. The most common conclusion is that you then think the answer is that you just have to do more. So you set a new goal and work to achieve that. After this happens over and over with the same result, you resign yourself to the belief that it’s not possible to experience this state permanently. You lose hope.
Most of us do not realize it, but each of us have a relationship with our body. It’s largely no different than the relationship you have with another human being. Like the relationship you have with another, you have thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, stories, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors associated with your body. This relationship and the variables it’s made up of are rarely part of our awareness let alone examined to determine if the way we relate to our body serves us in a desirable way or not. As many of us have experienced, it’s possible to become aware of, examine and even recondition the way we relate to another human being to create a more harmonious dynamic. That possibility is recognized and the basis behind the Holistic Body Coaching Program.
HOlistic body Coaching Process
Step 1: Holistic Body Coaching Consultation
Are we a good fit? Let’s start with a consultation to make sure my coaching philosophy and approach is aligned with your needs and preferences. The consultation is a complimentary 30 minute session performed in person or virtually. This is an opportunity for each of us to ask questions and get to know the other so we can determine if our partnership will meet both our needs.
Please click HERE to set up a consultation. If the consultation is unnecessary and you are ready to move forward, proceed to Step 2A.
Step 2: Holistic Body Coaching Discovery Session
Review Intake & 5 Whys Forms
For the Holistic Body Coaching Discovery Session, you will have completed the Holistic Body Coaching Intake and the 5 Whys forms as sent to you shortly after scheduling your session. The intake form captures your health history, injury history, current orthopedic conditions, lifestyle variables - physical activity, nutrition, sleep, etc., as well as the objective lifestyle goals you intend to achieve. The 5 Whys Exercise helps to identify the deep motivation behind your engagement - the desired experiences that will come as a result of achieving the objective lifestyle goals. You are driven in two ways: by the experiences you want to create - your vision and by the experiences you want to avoid and believe will happen if you don’t take action. We will capture both to help keep you engaged and accountable.
We will start this session by discussing the contents of your intake and 5 Whys forms. This will allow us to review the events and experiences that you have had in relationship with your body, the central motivation behind your engagement in this process and the specific goals you want to achieve.
Discuss the Coaching Framework & Introduce Step One
From there, we will discuss the four steps of the coaching process. these steps are as follows:
Establish Your Current Way of Being
Create Your Vision
Develop an Action Plan to Fulfill on Your Vision
Engage the Action Plan and Fulfill on Your Vision
Finally, we will enter into step 1 of the process - Establish Your Current Way of Being. You will contemplate your current relationship with your body and then complete the Establish Your Current Way of Being Worksheet before the first coaching session.