Cleaning your own temple first: a primer for coaches (part two)

Energy Work and Coaching Community of Practice
Led by Rhona Post, MA, MCC
When: April 16, 2012

In March, we began the discussion of what it means to get our acts together so that when we meet with clients, we can meet them where they are, and be confident that we will bear witness to their experience, fully present to what is being shared. 

The funny thing about being present is that it is not a thing, rather it is a way of being, spacious and lucid, a result of our intention to consistently recognize and release stories to which we are attached. This skill is built over time employing various practices, including mindfulness meditation and clutter clearing.

First you have to recognize that you’ve got some cleaning to do; then you have to start the practice. Cleaning our own temples first is not a psychological exercise.  It requires a felt experience, our ability to observe our emotional, physical, spiritual and even intellectual clutter. Clutter can obscure all our sense faculties and reduce our ability to be spacious and whole. 

No matter how much control we exert to contain/avoid/negate the impact of our stories on others, the containment and control create mental agitation/stress. We’re just so impervious to our own stress that we don’t realize how spacious we can be until we eliminate the stressor.

Rhona Post

I’m inviting my coaching colleagues to bring their clutter cleaning practices to the conversation on Monday, April 16th. What are some of your best tools, including energetic modalities you use to keep your temple clean? The more the merrier on these calls.

For more Information on healer coaching,  contact Rhona Post: www.facebook.com/rhonapost or by email at rhonapost@gmail.com.

Cleaning Your Own Temple: A Primer for Coaches

Energy Work and Coaching SIG
March 19 2012 11:00AM ET
Call In: 712-451-6000
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Facilitator:  Rhona Post MCC

During the February Energy Work and Coaching SIG call, we explored how we can more effectively communicate the value and benefits of offering clients an integrated approach to coaching that would honor both the energy or alternative healing modalities we’ve studied while still preserving the dignity of the coaching models we utilize.

One of the recurring themes during these calls is the idea that we serve our clients better when we have done the work on ourselves, first.

That has been my experience. Several group members have asked me to lead a conversation about how we can better clean our own temples first prior to trying to coach clients in those areas with which we are not familiar.

So what does it mean to clean our own temple first? Some of us have spent years learning about ourselves, studying the mind (our minds) to become better acquainted with our mental formations, our viewpoints that direct how we interpret and interact with others. We’ve dissected our emotions and our narratives to better understand and accept our frailties and our gifts. Awareness, we have learned, is the first step to changing ourselves. You cannot change what you don’t know.

This commitment to learn more about the self, not from a strictly analytic or psychological approach has helped many of us become more discerning in our coaching. Because we have cultivated the wisdom to realize that one size does not fit all, we keep learning new modalities so that we have a toolkit from which we can work. Our wisdom is rooted in experience, knowledge and compassion. 

Rhona Post

On our March call we’ll explore the types of practices we can engage in that will support us to clean our own temples and to keep them clean. What are those rooms in your house (mind) that you keep closed? What is it about those areas that scare or frustrate you? What are some practices you do on a regular basis that support you to be fully present and engaged? How do you keep your energetic distance while still maintaining a compassionate presence? How do you know when you are in your head and not fully in your body? We will address these and other questions during the call. A community is a place where our gifts are received. Please take the time to share your gifts with us.

For more information contact, www.facebook.com/rhonapost or call +1.941.554.8466.

The ICF ADHD Community of Practice: What’s It All About?

The ICF ADHD Community of Practice thanks the ICF for hosting us and for validating us.

What is the ICF ADHD Community of Practice?
ADHD coaching is General Coaching amplified.
ADHD Coaches work with life issues that are often of a greater intensity, more challenging, and often filled with greater humor, as we help clients to see themselves. 

The ICF ADHD Community of Practice calls are about the many aspects of ADHD coaching and the topics apply also to General Coaching. 

If you would like to join the ICF ADHD CP or be on the email notice list please email: Chana@KleinCoaching.com. 

THE ICF ADHD CP Experience
The best way I can share what the ICF ADHD Community of Practice experience is like is to tell you about the calls we have had this season.

The information that the speakers have brought us can be applied to our everyday coaching practice, which is likely one of the reasons that the people who join the call are coaches with many different specialties.

The 2011-2012 season began with David Giwerc, MCC, the founder of ADD Coach Academy (ADDCA) and author of Permission to Proceed. David’s topic at the CP call was “How to Prosper By Getting Into Your Heart and Out of Your Head.” 

David shared with us the source of real success, success from the inside and how to achieve it. He spoke about how to choose so that we are in integrity with who we really are, with our inner spirit.

He told us how to rediscover the small voice within for ourselves and how to help our clients hear theirs. He spoke on the value of being vulnerable rather than in isolation, and how to choose that He inspired us about how to grow our business from a place of spirit, from the inside-out, rather than from the outside-in. 

Then, in October we heard “Listening to Linda – Confessions of an ADDiva.” with Linda Roggli, PCC, author of Confessions of an ADDiva, Midlife in the Non-Linear Lane. 

This was a one-hour entertaining and informative journey into the inner workings of the ADHD Brain, and even more, into the ADHD Spirit. We heard how they come together in a hysterically funny expression, as portrayed in one woman’s life. Linda’s words helped us to better understand ourselves and our clients.

We traveled with Linda through missed plane flights, robbed offices, checks with decimals in the wrong place, struggles with miscalculation of time, the need to control. There was not a boring utterance and no way that anyone could have stayed in a bad mood listening to Linda.  

Next, we heard Andrew Lewis share “The Benefit of Having an ADHD Brain - How to Get Your Clients to Love their ADHD.”

Andrew gave us information on how to become a more effective coach by understanding the thought mechanism underlying the things we are coaching.

We learned from Andrew a way to explain for ourselves and to our clients why they behave the way that they do. He taught us about finding the inner strength of a client and building on those strengths in our coaching. 

Then, on another call, Andy Bounds, author of The Jelly Effect: How to Make Your Communication Stick, dazzled us with his techniques of how to enlist clients and network. His topic was “How to Communicate Persuasively So That Your Communication Works Every Time.”

Andy taught us a new way to use the skills of good manners and the ability to chat in an unfamiliar context.

He shared with us ways to quickly create persuasive, inspiring messages and how to deliver these messages so they – and we – impress the people we are speaking with. He shared with us how to ensure that people buy into – and act – on all that we say.

It is difficult to put into words how valuable some of these calls have been, for me and for the people who call in. Andy Bounds was an absolute winner.

The February call featured the speakers who will be presenting at the ADD Coaches Organization in February. The speakers shared a lot of information with us and were informative, whether or not a coach planned on attending the conference.

Our Next Call
Coming up, on Wed, March 14th at 3 p.m. (New York), we will hear Kelly Dorfman MS, LND, author of What’s Eating Your Child? Kelly will speak on  “The Hidden Connection Between Our Coaching Issues and Nutrition.”

Join this call to learn some powerful “out of the box” information from a true expert who cares.  Email me (Chana@KleinCoaching.com) to get the call information.

Kelly Dorfman is a nutritionist who often focuses on the issues that we focus on in our coaching.

Perhaps in working with clients daily we don’t think of, or we overlook, a very important part of optimal functioning, one that may make a world of difference. Some of what will be covered:

• How can we as coaches help our clients and ourselves to improve cognitive functioning?
• What clues can a coach look for that will guide him further about what may alleviate many of the client’s issues?
• How can the knowledge of nutrition and environment make my coaching more effective?
• What are clues that a nutrition change would help a client to get more from the coaching and from life?
• Is there a way of eating that helps alleviate some of the issues of ADHD that our clients bring to the coaching?
• How does a coach help her client to “master the meandering mind?”
• How do our food choices affect us?
• Is it different for an adult that a child?
• How is our brain connected to our gut?
• How can I improve my cognitive functioning through nutrition?
• How do I know if my coaching issues have an environmental component?
• How can I help myself, and my client, to improve word retrieval?
• How can we improve our concentration?
• What should I know about medication? How as a coach can I share information about medication within the framework of the ICF competencies?

Kelly Dorfman will blow your mind with new avenues and ways of thinking about our clients and ourselves.

 

CCEU’s

Each of the calls has qualified for a CCEU and each participant who sends the code words within 24 hours receives a personalized certificate of the earned CCEU.

 

How to Join Us

I hope that gives you some idea of what the ICF Community of Practice is about.

 

It has been a joy to connect with each of you who has reached out to join the ICF ADHD Community of Practice.

Chana Klein

If you have any questions please email me at Chana@KleinCoaching.com. I look forward to connecting.

Chana Klein, MSEd, PCC, EEM-CLP, MACC, ACG, PACG, CCUG, EFT, NET, AGI, SSS®

 

ICF ADHD Community of Practice Leader