Imagine Your Reality

This weekend, I finished my final training with the Baraka Institute. Ironically I eneded my training with what originally would have been my first weekend. Ideally students start out with Personal Mastery, but I missed that weekend and made it up this last weekend.

Because it’s the starter weekend, I was already familiar with a lot of the material. I did learn some new processes and it was good to have a refresher course in some of the concepts.

I felt a bit sad as the weekend wrapped up. I’m happy to be certified…I’m starting on a new journey, but I’m also ending a journey. I’ve learned so much about myself in the last six months because of life coaching. And now I’m ready to take that learning out into the world and share with other people so that they can be empowered as well.

I’m a certified Whole Person Design Life Coach. My website is Imagine Your Reality

I’m ready to coach.

Last night, I attended my first NW coaches meeting. It was really inspiring for me. I met a lot of peopel who are clearly very happy with what they are doing and to one degree or another successful. I want to be like those people.

I think it’s important for me to go to events like that because it reinforces my choice to commit to becoming a coach. This coming weekend I’ll be finished and certified as a coach…and the question of now what looms in my mind. I’ve been slowly putting together some parts of what I hope will help me manifest a successful life coaching practice, but I know spending time with other coaches is also going to motivate me to succeed.

At one point, a coach talked about the need to really know yourself and be able to represent yourself with integrity and that really made me think and recognize how important life coaching is for everyone involved. My personal journey these last few months has involved some tests of my integrity.

It was an excellent meeting and I’m looking forward to next month’s meeting.

Last night I learned a new process for lifecoaching from James Wanless, the creator of the Voyager Tarot. Basically you use the tarot to create a Hero’s journey. The symbolism of the tarot is used to provide information on the resources you have within and around you. With the Hero’s journey you need to have a clear objective in mind. In my particular case, my objective was to manifest a successful life coaching career.

James had us split the deck into five different piles. The first pile consisted of the first eleven cards of the major arcana…the Fool to Fortune. This pile was the gift pile…the archetypal force within the person that also was the natural gift of the person. James explained that these cards represented a person’s life journey as well as archetypes.

The second pile consisted of all the negative cards. It represented the noble adversary or the obstacle.

The third pile had all of the royalty cards, the knights, kings, queens, etc and represented the ally, basically people around you that could help you on your hero’s journey.

The fourth pile consisted of the cards from the pentacle or world suite of cards. It represented an action a person needs to take.

The final pile was all of the cards left over. We used that pile to pull a card that represented the present. I shuffled that deck first and pulled out the Synthesis or eight of Crystals card. As the card which represented the present, it showed me that I have everything I need, all the tools, skills, etc, at the present.

I shuffled the Gift pile of cards, which was the first 11 cards of the trumps. I selected the chariot card, which represented the git of momentum and flow. I have a lot of momentum, and also an ability to flow with my situations.

I shuffled the negative card deck next, and select the five of cups, disappointment, which represented my noble adversary. In this case, disappointment with not getting expected results…a good reminder to not expect anything, but to go with the flow and trust in the momentum of the universe.

I shuffled the ally deck next and pulled the man (king) of worlds (pentacles). This is the achiever card, and suggested that I needed to commit to the journey for the long haul, but also work with the right people…a good reminder to keep networking.

I next shuffled the action deck, the one with the world or pentacle suite. I pulled out the Ten of worlds (reward).  This told me to trust in the skilsl I have and promote myself…Ask for the order.

I finally combined all of the piles together and shuffled the cards one more time for the outcome card. I received the Logic card, 4 of crystals (swords). This told me that I have everything I need and I need to take what I learned from the reading and put it all together to create my successful career.

It’s a useful process that I could see using for a client who has a really good idea of what s/he wants, but is unsure of the actual journey. It also provided me some really valuable insights for my own journey to become a life coach.

The last couple of weeks have been busy. I had a convention I travelled to where I co-presented a workshop on Manifesting Wealth in your life. The presentation went really well. People came away feeling like they’d learned a lot about how to manifest wealth, how to recognize their internal attitudes about it, etc.

Besides the convention, I’ve been gradually putting different elements of my life coaching business together. This saturday I set up my business bank account for it, to go hand in hand with the paypal account I have set up. I sent out my first newsletter last week, which also felt good. Tonight I’m going to a two hour workshop, which integrates tarot into life coaching.

I’m also thinking of going to additional training, both for the marketing aspects, but also further development of my skills as a life coach. There are several seminars coming up in April that have perked my interest. The marketing skills, in particualr, are reallyi mportant, because they help you build a business. I’m reading a book: Four Steps for how to market your life coaching practice, and following the steps. The book is helping, just in terms of giving me an outline of steps to follow.

Speaking of books, I’m also going to start using this blog to do some reviews of life coaching materials and related work. Be on the lookout for that in the near future.

I just got through the fourth weekend of my life coaching Training. I have two weekends to go. This weekend was just as intense as the prior weekends. I learned some new processes which have some intriguing applicatiosn to identity work. I particularly enjoyed trying out the six hats exercise, with each hat representing a different aspect that could be accessed to provide a different perspective on the situation.

Each time we learned a process, I made sure I didn’t look at the scripts, but instead tried to adapt the processes to my own language and understanding of them. This helped me become very comfortable with the processes. I adapted them into my flow.

I also got to life coach a new person and I felt really comfortable developing rapport with that person. I relaxed into the conversation and once rapport was established I started to move toward coaching. I feel more and more each time I coach.

I also am seeing the benefit of networking with the people I’m learning with. Coaching is about networking, about working together to help each grow and I find that business model vastly more appealing than others I’ve had access to.

 It was a good weekend, with so much learned and experienced. As always I come away feeling profoundly changed, even if I don’t consciously realize the full extent of those changes.

So as I mentioned in the last post, I had my third weekend. Both saturday and sunday were intense, but fun days. I learned more life coaching techniques and I coached someone new.

With the new techniques, I worked on not using the scripts, but instead explaining and doing them from my own sense of how thye worked. I used my own language…I spoke from my experience and that seemed to make a difference. I certainly felt more comfortable than I did before, and I think it’s because I chose to relax and just be, instead of trying to DO so much.

Not being and not-doing can actually lead to a more profound state of activity than being and doing. I didn’t feel like my ego was wrapped up as much in what I was doing. Instead I was just willing to be there, to be present, to speak to the experience, and let it then speak to me.

When I coached my client, I still did a bit of guiding, but I actually managed to sit back and intentlyl isten and let that client draw on the resources within. I still asked questions, and I occasionally offered an opinion with persmission, but mostly I just did my best to listen. I’ll admit, at times I struggled, not because of the client, but because I’m so used to jumping in and giving direction…but as I’m finding the best direction comes from within a person. 

After this weekend, I feel more confident and I have a much better idea of my own resources, and of who is on my team (there’ll be a later post on that). I have a better idea of the kind of life coaching I can offer. I’m excited for the future, and where things could go.

Best of all, I’m learning to let go, and finding in that, not only the ability to accept my clients, but also the ability to be true with myself.

Tonight the third weekend of life coaching training started.

I felt really comfortable and open tonight. I was ready and willing to be there an engaged.

And tonight I felt really comfortable with the tools we learned. I already have some experience with putting people into altered states of consciousness and what we learned tonight were some techniques for doing that. It gave me a couple news ways to get people into a deep state, so I was really pleased with that.

More importantly, I felt really happy to be there, really glad to have this opportunity. I’m learning so much about communication and about how to make what I learn into opportunities that help people grow. I think I’m really fortunate in this regard.

More to follow in the next couple of days…

The other night I got coached by a member of my cohort. It was quite an insightful experience because it gave me an opportunity to see how someone else approaches life coaching. She used a combination of visual and kinisthetic approaches to get me engaged and focused. She drew a lot on pieces of paper and then gave me the colored markers so I could do the same.  This really got me focused on the actual experience and I learned a lot, both about a situation in my life that I’m trying to work through, but also about how I can improve my life coaching techniques.

I think that the challenge any person in any profession faces is a challenge of how to improve his/her skills at what is being done. For me, one way I’m improving my skills is by doing life coaching sessions with people so I can practice those skills. I’m also learning more about Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and of course I’m incorporating breathign and energy work techniques into my life coaching, but I’ve also been reading books by life coaches and trying out the exercises in those books for myself, with an eye toward how I can apply those exercises to my coaching practice once it really takes off.

Earlier today I did an exercise where I identified the monkey mind habits I have…these are habits or beliefs or thoughts I tell myself that can cause me to waffle and vacillate on making a decision. By actually spending some time writing them down, I was able to identify some monkey mind habits…and you know I think that could be an excellent exercise I use for my life coaching practice.

The more I learn about life coaching and what I can do with it, both for personal development and for the development of others, the more excited I am by the possibilities.  There is a lot a person can do to really change his/her understanding of the opportunities in life. I’ve always known that, but life coaching is giving me even more tools to manifest those opportunities into reality.

While I can be fairly open in some ways, I can also be fairly secretive. I’m already working on undoing some of those communication patterns in my personal life, but while at life coaching training one dilemma I faced was the fact that some of my cohort will be life coaching me! This is just a bit intimidating for me, because it necessarily involves me opening up to people I don’t know that well, to some degree.

However, I think it’s a good challenge, because while I won’t necessarily be developing relationships with my clients, beyond the professional relationship, I still need to be open enough with them that they feel they can talk with me. So I’m treating this as an excellent opportunity to help myself mindfully continue working on how open I can be.

And this very weekend I did get some opportunities to practice. In three situations I was coached to some degree or another and I had to consider what it was I was going to talk about that could help my cohort gain skills, while also helping me experience what it could be like to be a client. I did pick situations that weren’t too high on my scale of what I could work on, but they were still situations that I could use some help on.

It was a little hard to open up, but I did get comfortable and I realized it was good to talk with some people and get some feedback on those situations. I definitely had a different perspective on each situation I was coached about by the end of each session, which speaks to the effectiveness of what I’m learning.

This weekend, I began life coaching training. It was one of the most dynamic weekends of my life. I’m still processing it, but I thought I would write this post as a way of beginning to put words to some of my experiences.

Friday: I started training with the Baraka Institute: Http://www.barakainstitute.com

We met two trainers. Both were very nice people and very engaged. I also met my fellow cohorts. All of them were nice people and seemed really committed to manifesting this change into their lives. I must admit I want into the training with slight reservations. I had paid the initial fee back in August, and it had been two months since then. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but within those first four hours, any uncertainty I had melted away very quickly. I quickly began to see the benefits of going through this training and within a short time was already beginning to think not only about life coaching, but about how I communicated and related to people in general. I learned constructive communication skills and I have to admit I began to reevaluate my own skills in those four hours. I knew I wanted to be more constructive than I was. I also liked the idea that coaching is about helping people manifest awareness and change within their lives.  I walked home that night, my head filled with ideas and my heart content with a recognition that what I could do with life coaching was much more fulfilling than what I had been doing with my life. I also came away with an assignment of sorts, which I’ll be posting up here in a day or two, after I’ve thought it over further.

Saturday: I woke up early in the morning and after doing morning meditations, walked over to the center (which just happens to be near where I live). After doing a wake up exercise or two, we began learning about the systems approach to life coaching. The systems approach recognizes that everything is interrelated, part of a system. Each goal a person wants to manifest necessarily impacts the system that person lives in and engages with.

Another thing I learned was the value of asking permission before sharing feedback that could be considered harsh, or negative.  I have to admit that I can be very blunt and direct and while that can be useful, it can also have impacts that aren’t as good. By asking permission, I allow the person who would receive the feedback to determine if s/he is ready for it. I let the choice reside in that person’s hands, empowering that person, whether or not s/he chooses to accept that feedback. This particular principle has given me a lot of food for thought, in considering how I communicate with people in general and I believe it will help me be more conscientious in how I bring subjects up.

We also learned some NLP techniques. While I was already familiar with some of the concepts and even the practice, I must admit actually having it demonstrated really gave me a much more practical understanding of how those techniques work. I’m looking forward to trying them out in the near future, both in my daily life, and in my interactions with potential clients.

Sunday: Today was the last day of the first weekend and I have to admit I was a little glad it was. While I definitely enjoyed learning about life coaching, my head was stuffed full to the brim. It really helped that today involved much less theory and a lot more practice. We learned more about systems theory, and different stages of life coaching and then…we tried life coaching each other!!!

I got a session which helped me put into some perspective some communication issues that I have with my wife. My life coach did a bit of role playing and helped me try to recognize my wife’s perspectives when it came to communicating with her. And I also did a life coaching session. I have to admit, I felt really good about the session. I was comfortable using the techniques and it felt good to engage in a dialog that could help the other person realize the goal that the person wanted to manifest.

When I left today, I felt good about this change in my life…and now I still feel great. I really feel it fits my authentic spirit and offers to me an opportunity to grow both as an individual and a professional.

So that was my first weekend at life coach training. There will be more posts to come though, I’m sure.