00:00:04
You know, as I’m sitting here, I’m in this moment experiencing a lot of happiness and joy because I have been working on this topic for some time now, and I’m very happy to be sharing this with you.

00:00:25
I have been working on bringing some of amazing techniques that I have learned from somatic psychology, somatic mindfulness based, somatic psychotherapy, which I trained in for many years. And then as I got trained as a coach, I found that those techniques were instrumental to my work. And I feel like they’re underrepresented in the coaching world. And so this is an effort to kind of surface a little bit of this.

00:01:00
And I assume that you’re here because you’re interested in that. And so let’s begin. There will be time for questions and other stuff.

00:01:11
We begin with a transition, and there’s a lot of reasons for this, and I would encourage this also in your coaching practice, begin with the transition. And so I just want to invite you to take a moment and to take a breath and just check in with yourself. However you do that, whatever method you use, whatever process you go through, to take a breath and just go, wow, whatever I was doing in my life, I’m here. Of all the things I could be doing, I chose to be here and to kind of connect with what is that intent? What is that movement, that motivation?

00:02:04
And just for a moment, just for this next hour, we’re going to press pause on the flow of daily activity and just be present with our experience of this presentation.

00:02:29
Maybe disconnecting from your buzzers and bells and alerts, just noticing right in this moment what’s it like to be you.

00:03:07
Just noticing and then begin to organize as you at your own pace, at your own rate, to come back to our little webinar, our little presentation, a screen in front of you, picture and maybe some faces.

00:03:34
And again, just checking in, like, oh yeah, okay, here I am. Now, maybe some parts of you feel different than before, and that’s a really important thing to notice. And just this one little piece is an introduction to Somatic work.

00:04:01
One of the things you can do with clients is take them through a transition of this sort and then maybe say to them, how do you feel now?

00:04:19
Do you feel any different? And which of these used the one that was before the transition or after the transition? Do you feel like would be better? Would you like to have engaged the world from that place? Would you rather engage the world from this post transition experience or the pretransition experience?

00:04:42
This is the thing I learned from John Eisman called Reference for the preference. You give a client two different experiences. Now, they need to be embodied experiences, not ideas. They have to feel them and then they say, oh, yeah, this is so much better. I would much rather walk around in the world more relaxed than the way I normally am.

00:05:06
And when it’s very clear, then you bypass a lot of storytelling, you bypass a lot of stuff. And that’s one of the big values of Somatic work. I have so much to say. I have to watch myself because I’m just going to fire hose you guys, and I really try not to. So please bear with me.

00:05:27
What are we talking about? We’re talking about how suffering is really unnecessary. Suffering is so much the norm. We live in a world where that asks too much of us that we’re not really neurologically equipped to manage. And, I mean, that not because you haven’t done your work or you’re failing in some way.

00:05:52
I mean, all of humanity as a whole is not equipped to deal with the world that we live in. And this is coming out of recent science trends and neurological studies. The vast majority of change that has happened in humanity’s scope of humanity millions of years. The vast majority of change has happened in the last like, 100 years. I mean, the graph just goes straight up in terms of change.

00:06:24
It took millions and millions and millions of years for us to develop a neurology that was attuned to our environment. And our environment has shifted radically in the last hundred years, 200 years, more so than the entire previous history of humanity. And our nervous systems don’t adapt that fast. They just don’t. And so we’re living in a world where our nervous systems are slowly trying to catch up to the changes that we’re introducing.

00:06:58
And that has an impact. There’s a cost to this, and that cost of that is anxiety, disconnectedness feeling. I don’t really know what’s going on in the world, the inability to make effective decisions. And so a lot of suffering is happening because we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. What’s going on?

00:07:18
What’s going on? And the world, the culture that we’ve created is encouraging this more or less disconnectedness from mind, body holism. The whole notion of somatics embedded in the idea of Somatic work is that the mind and the body are a unified piece, and that if you disconnect the input from your sensory experience, what’s really going on for you? And you are living in a thought bubble, living in a world of ideas, beliefs, or disconnected from your sensation, so to speak, then you wind up living in a pretty unhappy place, even though and creating systems that don’t sustain the kinds of lives where we can thrive. If you could relate to what I’m trying to say here, just make a little comment.

00:08:19
We’ve had a lot of people that have been posting that. They relate. Yeah, exactly this and so somatic work is the beginning of rewiring the brain to bring into your consciousness what is true in the moment for you in our little transition, I asked you what’s it like to be you. This is a powerful question. It’s a powerful somatic question.

00:08:48
What’s it like to be you sitting in a meditation if you do meditation or contemplating what is the experience of breath right now? And if I really settle into that, a whole lot of stuff starts to surface, whereas I’m doing a presentation. So parts of me are wired up that aren’t normally wired up. This isn’t an intellectual process. We’re not saying, how do you feel when you’re on stage at a conference?

00:09:14
Or how do you because there’s nothing wrong with that. Those are just in cases you’re fetching an experience from memory and reporting on it. We’re talking about what’s going on for you right now in this moment. This begins when you begin to help, when you begin to do this, and whenever you help clients do this, you start the process of rewiring our neurology to bring back into our awareness these important information that the body has. It’s beyond your thoughts.

00:09:53
You could say it’s underneath your thoughts. It’s like, you know, I didn’t realize that I’m clenching my stomach the whole time, all day long, every day. That doesn’t feel good. But I’m not even really noticing it because I’m so busy and integrating that information into our experiences. So rather than taking a step in a direction of more burnout, you press pause.

00:10:19
You go, you know, I’m getting the message. Be best for me just to take a break now, to go for a walk. That’s actually going to help me be more productive, more creative, more engaged. We have this false dichotomy that if you’re not doing, you’re not keeping up, you’re not getting things done in the world we live in, that will be true every day, every moment. There’s going to be more to do, always.

00:10:48
So the question then is, are you going to fill your life up with that to do list?

00:10:56
If when you’re connecting to your body, to your senses, you have a bigger sense of what’s true for you and you can make better decisions? And really importantly is learning to develop language about that. One things I have found in my work is that people just we just don’t have the language to talk about what’s going on. For me now, I do an exercise in my training that’s like, in the moment speaking. You can only speak in the moment for like, three minutes, meaning everything starts with I am, I am feeling I am uncomfortable.

00:11:31
I don’t like this exercise. I’m noticing tension. But everything starts with I am. You can only talk about it. People are not very good at it, and I’m not blaming them.

00:11:40
We just aren’t coached in those things. We don’t have skills in it. And so I want to ask the question, what kind of a world would we have today if having access to this more somatic information, what’s true for us in our bodies were the norm. Let me go back to that for a second. This is a really important question.

00:12:04
What kind of cities would we build? What kind of businesses would we create? What kind of relationships would we have? I truly believe that this is one of the most important skills that anybody can learn to help us reconnect the fabric that’s been ripped in our way of interconnectedness to a deeper mosaic, a deeper capacity for us to be in relationship in healthy ways that help us thrive not only as individuals, but as a culture.

00:12:51
Now, I talk a lot about mindfulness and somatics because the body is always in the moment. I really like for people to know that as like a fundamental truth. The body is always in the moment. So you can always reference. This gives you a doorway to an incredible capacity to just regulate yourself and help your clients regulate.

00:13:16
Because the body is always in the moment, you can reference your sensory experience and be present. What am I seeing? Really, really seeing? What am I feeling? What am I noticing?

00:13:31
What’s the quality of the air? And this is why mindfulness and other practices focus on a sensation like breath or some other kind of somatic sense to bring you into the moment. And so when you’re stressed out under stress, this is a fabulous technique. Go back to your sensation as long as you’re not completely panicked, in which case your sensation was panic. Go back to something underneath that.

00:14:01
There’s a core there that’s even deeper than that really important. Somatic experiences are not thought processes. This isn’t about remembering. Although you can invoke a somatic experience through a thought and part of the more advanced practices are like that, like bringing in a sense memory. I call it what’s it like for me to be in this particular scenario.

00:14:28
And usually I like to have a library of rich somatic experiences I can just kind of invoke and inhabit on request. Because they’re like little resources. They’re like resources. And you can help your clients do this too. So an experience like my shoulders are tight.

00:14:48
That’s not up for debate. You don’t go, well, really, what do you think about that? Right. It’s more like it’s just a fact of experience.

00:15:04
I feel a pressure in my chest. I want to jump in with both feet. Now, that’s not necessarily in the moment experience, but it’s a very somatic expression. If a client tells me something like that, I know that they’re feeling full body. I want my whole body in.

00:15:20
I want to really leap in the work that I do. I can feel without making it a big deal, feel in them the urge to be all in. When I resonate with that and reflect that back, that creates a lot of trust.

00:15:40
I wanted to just do without spending much time on this. I wanted to just review kind of what’s out there in the world. I’ve been the lucky receiver of some amazing training in coaching therapy world. I studied with Hokomi and recreating of the self. I did some work with focusing and some others nonviolent communications.

00:16:05
I’ve studied a lot of these methods.

00:16:10
Somatic work really started like in the 70s, came out of like the when it really started being a big deal with Ralphing and Feldman, christ, Alexander Technique, Heller Work, Traeger, all these things were body based. And then out of that there became a coaching or therapeutic model. And that’s when Hokomi started and some other techniques, focusing came out. And those are really brilliant creations to help people use mindfulness based somatic methods to begin to get into, as Ron Kurtz, the founder of a combing I studied with, would say, the contents of the unconscious. And so I’ll give you an example a little bit later.

00:16:58
But this is a way you can begin to help people access information that’s important to them that isn’t in their consciousness. And because it’s not in their consciousness, you can’t ask them about it. They’re not aware of it yet. It’s having a very powerful influence on the way that they work. It’s almost like if a person who’s walked around, if you’ve ever seen young Frankenstein, which is an incredible comedy, there’s a good example of this Marty Beldon, I think it is.

00:17:31
He plays the hunchback, and he’s got this big hunch on it, and he’s like and Dr. Frankenstein is talking to him, and he says, by the way, what are you going to do about that hump on your back? And he looks at him and goes, what hump? That was so funny because it’s an example of someone walking around with a maladaptation I’m going to call a wound or a limiting belief. And it’s so much a part of their soma that they don’t even notice it.

00:18:01
It’s like the water you swim in. And so you can’t ask them about it because they don’t know, even though it’s maybe obvious to you. And so you have to help them become help them discover the truth of it. And it’s important that it be their truth, not your idea about it. And that’s one of the ways that this work, helps keep things really super relevant for clients, because it’s always coming from the client.

00:18:35
You’re always working with what presents from their world.

00:18:42
So this became psychotherapy, and then from that world evolved a whole bunch of great PTSD traumatic treatments, including Sensory Motor Institute. Pat Ogden was a hokomi trainer, and I worked with her back in the day as well, and a bunch of other amazing stuff. Somatic experiencing all of this is out there, and you can go and look these things up and go and learn these things. And I recommend studying some of it. It’s amazing.

00:19:15
Now, the coaching aspect you can see is kind of glued in here with the therapy because it hasn’t really differentiated much yet. And so consequently we’re going to and that’s where I’m stepping in a little bit here. You can see I took the liberty of listing my own method, The The Mindful Coach Association Association, to take some of these techniques which evolved from psychotherapy and reframe them for coaching. There’s a lot in that and we cover it in a class that I’m teaching. But the point here is that with coaching, we’re not going after healing the wound as much as we are accessing resources for people.

00:19:59
So in psychotherapy the focus is kind of dealing with the woundedness and hopefully helping people deal with core woundedness. So you can use Somatics to integrate to the pain point. And if we’re doing psychotherapy, we might go more into the wounded. We’re doing coaching, we’re going to go into resourcing and there’s a flip there I call reframing. And I’d like to go into that more at some point, but maybe I’ll do another webinar on that.

00:20:25
But we do go over that in the deeper training. So that’s a key distinction here. The Somatics will allow you to quickly access kind of the struggle. You get to the struggle pretty quick. Often say the story kind of isn’t that important.

00:20:44
I mean, it is important, but it’s not as important as in traditional coaching methods. All roads lead to the same core knot in a way, when you’re limping, all roads kind of lead to this adaptation. So you can say, I feel like a problem in my shoulder over here. Oh yeah, what’s that connected to? What’s connected to my hip?

00:21:08
And there’s tightness there. What’s that? And everything goes to the lip because everything is adapted around that. So it doesn’t matter where you start, you always get there. The difference is, in coaching, we’re not going to focus on the woundedness as much as we are on the resilience and what’s access to that.

00:21:28
I probably went overboard on them a little bit, but I hope that’s clear. This requires a different framework for coaching and over time I was just talking about this much. Coaching is about doing things and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s fabulous work and people really benefit from it. But it embraces this old mindset about the mind is from productivity.

00:21:50
We need to get more done, we need to be more efficient, we need to think better, we need to have the right mindset. And all of this is good stuff, but it’s in the frame of doing means more success. Instead with a Somatic approach, particularly this method, my coach method, focus on grounding senses in your experience, then you look out from this more centered, grounded, connected, resourced, informed, embodied place. And then you look out at the lay of the land and it looks really different. Suddenly the thing that you were worried about doesn’t seem like that’s the thing you should be so worried about.

00:22:39
It seems like you were over focused and over amplifying its importance because you’ve discovered something in yourself that is so much bigger and so much more whole. And when you step into that, it’s what I sometimes call your embodied authority or your essence. And you look at the world from that place, your priorities shift and the things that worry you shift. So rather than focusing on fixing the problem while you’re all focused on being small, we land you in a more resourceful bodied experience of you. Now we go back and look at your problem and it looks really different.

00:23:24
This is one of my catchphrases, if you will, is that your problems don’t go away. They just get smaller because you get bigger. Another example I use is like a snow globe. You shake it all up and there’s a blizzard. You can’t even see the little scene in there.

00:23:39
And people are like that. They’re like in the center of this snow globe of activity trying to figure out, how do I build more houses? How do I be a better boss in this giant flurry of activity? If you let that settle a little bit, the landscape becomes clear and the path that is right in front of you, you can see it’s right in front of you. Instead of trying to resolve faces in the snow storm, what is that?

00:24:10
I don’t know. You wait till it clears, you take action to help it clear, then you can see a bunch more clearly and the decisions that you make are better, more effective, and you wind up with better outcomes all around.

00:24:28
Somatic work is efficient because it cuts through a lot of the noise. I do a section in other work. I call it mindful interruption. We’ll talk about that in a moment. It’s client focused and so consequently, you are always working with the client on their stuff.

00:24:50
So it’s always relevant and it’s always coming from the client. What they present is what you’re working with. It’s instructional because you’re helping the client learn to resource their own native embodied information that’s in the body, the resources and the resilience that they have inside themselves that they’re just not fully empowering, fully embracing or accepting. And as a result, it improves outcomes. Your clients have discoveries that go far beyond what they can imagine.

00:25:33
And so clients are going to love it because they have really great results from this. And there is nothing more satisfying than bearing witness to a client having a deep insight that changes their life. So as a coach, this is incredible, right? So Mary Gleason just says, I tell my clients I cannot heal them, but they have the power to heal themselves. Exactly so.

00:26:05
And so one of the key points is you may know the conundrum that a client is working with because you’ve seen it before and you have an idea about who they are. And if you tell them you might be right. And it might be helpful if you help them discover it themselves. That’s empowerment because not only have you helped them find the answer, you’ve helped them learn how to find future answers, it also helps set your, your room apart, your work apart. And even though you might not cast your work as a coach, as a healer, this is healing.

00:26:44
This is literally integration of disparate parts of ourselves. There’s a whole story about that, but it’s really about the various alignment within our various aspects of what we might consider. I so here’s some examples and we’ll get to questions here in a little while. Oh, we’re doing great. So I’m 1028 some examples that I’m trying to make as clear, like what might a regular coach do versus a Somatic oriented coach?

00:27:24
And I want to be really clear, I’m not at all down on coaching. I just think it would be better with Somatic skills. And that requires coach mindfulness, coach presence to use it.

00:27:41
So the client says, you’re dealing with the client. The client says, I really felt bad coming away from that conversation. They turn their head a little bit, they take a breath. I really felt bad about that. They take a breath and they let they exhale.

00:27:59
And you can see they’re remembering something. As a Somatic oriented coach, that lights up for me. Now, without Somatic training a coach, and this is a decent question, I say, well, what could you have said in that conversation that would have made a difference? All right. Sends the client into a space where they’re imagining and thinking of what might be different, and that’s really great.

00:28:27
But from a Somatic point of view, you might say, well, that sounds you because you’re noticing they’re like doing this, it’s not easy for them. So you might contact that now that’s a whole training called contact statements and say, that sounds hard. And then I want to bring their attention to that moment and say, what happened right there when you turned your head away and you took a breath? I want to press pause on that moment. I want to get them to embody that experience right there.

00:28:58
What is that? Oh, I don’t know. I just have to check it. I want to really get them to look and really slow it down. That’s the hardest thing to do with people who aren’t skilled in this is to slow it down long enough for things to resolve.

00:29:15
Now, the client’s going to have to trust you to do this. There’s a whole issue of trust. There has to be trust and rapport. And I’m assuming that you’re doing the work to have that created to begin with.

00:29:30
The next piece, for example, is I don’t know why I don’t speak up in meetings. I don’t know why I don’t speak up in meetings. I just really want to, but I just can’t. Regular coking question might be well, what might help you speak up perfectly legit question. A more somatic approach would be can you feel that moment?

00:29:55
Like you don’t want to speak right now? Now, that’s an important question because you don’t want to ask the client to try on something that isn’t happening right now. This is very in the moment, but she’s like doing or he’s like doing. I just don’t know why I can’t and they’re kind of tilting their head a little bit, and they’re shaking their head, and you can kind of feel them contract, like right around in here. And I don’t want to bring too much attention to it, to the specifics.

00:30:23
I just want to say, is it there? Are you feeling that contraction? And I’m not going to say the word contraction. I’m just going to say what is true for you, sense into it and see what’s true for you. Do you notice anything physically or emotionally?

00:30:38
This was from a real session I had with a real client, and the answer was, it’s like there’s a hand on my throat. And so we worked with that for a while, and it was very powerful.

00:30:54
Another example, I just want to break out of it. I just want to break out of this rhythm, break out of this client does this. Now, I’m using a lot of nonverbals, but they could also say this powerfully just verbally. So I just want to break out when they say something like that. Break out, jump in.

00:31:15
It was so amazing. Anything like that. That’s what you in the in the lingo we call Olympic state shift. We’re we’re tracking. And and tracking is another skill that you can be trained to do really effectively if you haven’t already.

00:31:32
Tracking limbic state shifts in your clients when they go, I just want to break it. Well, that’s a dramatic limbic state shift, and I’m going to notice that, and I’m going to help try to help coaches notice that because it’s important. So standard coaching question says standard coaching coaches are trained to watch nonverbal behaviors. You could say that looks like you were breaking a stick or something right there. What does that mean?

00:31:56
What’s that about? Now, this is going for meaning, and it’s not wrong. It’s just asking the client to go in and subscribe a meaning to the expression. Fine. But better, in my opinion, is instead have them repeat this experience really slowly.

00:32:18
And rather than go for meaning, just surface the experience more fully and see what is present. And then let meaning come rather than go and get it. Let meaning surface. Looks like you’re breaking. Is that right?

00:32:38
Can we do an experiment? Sometimes our frame is as an experiment. Can we just do a little experiment? I’d like for you to repeat that expression really slowly, really slowly, really sensitive. And I might say it for them.

00:32:53
You just want to break out. And it’s important if you do that you use their words, just want to break out. Just want to break out. And you repeat that. What’s going on for you?

00:33:03
I don’t know. I just feel like this I just grabbing these sticks with both hands, and I’m just feeling so glad, just really angry and frustrated. Okay, suddenly now we’re in touch with this anger and frustration. So before it was, I want to break free, but underneath it, there’s some anger and frustration. So you can go either way with this.

00:33:26
You can go into the frustration and anger, or you can go more into the break free. As a coach, I’m going to want to go into the more break free thing.

00:33:38
And yet within this anger, you just want to break through. You just want to crack the nuts or just become I use words like that sometimes, and they go, yeah, I just want to so what is it? Who’s the you that wants to break out? Well, I just want to be so free. Okay, great.

00:34:04
Just notice that what’s it like when you say those words, I just want to be so free. And you just keep deepening this experience of their desire to be free. And this is going back to finding the resourcefulness, reframing the struggle into resourcefulness. I want to be free. And we know as part of the framework or as a human being in my case, we all deserve to be free.

00:34:36
We all want to be expressive. We all want to have the capacity to say what’s in our hearts and minds and to live the life that we want to have. And when you land in the experience of, yes, I do want this, and you carry this around with you everywhere you go, it becomes a lot less of a struggle, and a lot more of that’s just who I am. I am someone who lives and wants to live more freely. And when I encounter this struggle, I’m not going to frame it as the struggle.

00:35:13
I’m going to frame it as the natural expression of me meeting the world. Yeah, I have to fight sometimes, but it’s a great fight because I’m bringing goodness into the world, and sometimes it’s hard, and I know I can because I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I have the school of actual living. It provides me with the authority I need to make an assertion that I know something about this, not from an intellectual place I’ve been living it when you land in that place, and when your clients land that place, then you go back and you look at what were you struggling with? It’s kind of like that was a twig. That jail cell I was in was made of twigs because I’m so much stronger than I realize.

00:36:13
Okay, oh, here’s the big drama now. Let’s stop sharing. And I wanted to just kind of take a moment and do a little bit of a demo. Here. If anybody would like to just volunteer to just talk to me for a couple of minutes about something that is happening in your life.

00:36:37
Not the most pressing dramatic thing, but something is happening that has got your attention, and it can be good or it can be bad or challenging. Just, you know, so we can have a talk. And I’m gonna take and this is being recorded, so keep that in mind that I’m going to narrate a little bit as I engage with someone and talk about what I’m noticing and the techniques that I’m going to be using. So if I do this, it’s like means, let’s just wait for a moment, and then I’m going to maybe if I was doing this in a room, this fishbowl thing, they call it, where you sit across from someone and the trainer does a demonstration. They turn around and narrow right to the room, what they’re doing.

00:37:24
If you’re up for that, if you could just raise your hand and let me know and I can’t see everybody.

00:37:33
Mary Gleason is up for that.

00:37:40
Hey, Mary. Hey.

00:37:44
Full disclosure, I know Mary from a previous life in Bellevue, and Mary is a very can I say something about you, Mary, to the crowd? Sure. Mary is a gifted intuitive, and so I know something about Mary already. So, Mary, what’s up? I see a couple of other hands, and if we have time, we’ll do some more.

00:38:07
So, you know, as a psychic and an intuitive, the hardest person to read for is yourself. Yes. And so I’m having some conflicts in my own entrusting, my own feeling. Right. Shifting sounds here.

00:38:21
Okay. Can I stop you right there? Yes. What I would like for you to do, if you don’t mind, is that okay with you for me to interrupt you this early? Sure.

00:38:31
A couple of times you kind of did this, right? Did you notice that? Can I ask you to just kind of really just kind of like shifting stance. I just ask you to tune into this and feel what’s it like for you to consider the things that you’re shifting with and see if that’s alive for you. And if it’s not, that’s fine.

00:38:56
It’s just an experiment. See if what and see if it’s alive for you. Like when you were doing it, you were going, there’s a shift. I can’t do it for myself. So I heard some frustration.

00:39:10
It’s like, why can I do this? Is that right? Did I hear that right? Yeah. Okay.

00:39:17
And so go ahead. Yeah, that’s right. And then shifting, just shifting, going on. It’s like standing on shifting sands. And I’m in a situation where I truly have no control right now, trying to sell our house in a market that’s crashing around us.

00:39:39
And we’d already made a deposit on another house we’re having built.

00:39:46
And I don’t trust this feeling that I might not get there. So there’s this concern that you’re not going to get there. Just let that be so. Let it be so that it feels shifting, feels uncertain. All these things are part of your world right now, and you’re married in this, who’s a sensitive person who has these gifts, and all these things are true for you, and there’s some concern about what’s going to happen.

00:40:29
So how does it feel to hear that? Numbing. Numbing. Okay. So I’m just going to time out here that catches my attention, because what that means to me is is it okay if I talk about you right now, Mary?

00:40:49
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

00:40:54
Her sensory apparatus is backing off a little bit because that’s a protection, usually saying, I don’t want to feel what’s behind here, and that’s perfectly fine. We want to so important to honor that and don’t go well, what would it take for you to feel more? She doesn’t want to feel more. She’s saying, I don’t want to feel this. My response to that is that’s perfect.

00:41:25
Just let that be. So a part of what’s involved with this is this shroud of I can’t feel enough to feel my way through it. I’m I’m going to take a little bit of a leap here with you, Mary, because I know you’re a very feeling person. And so part that sounds like that might be pretty frustrating for you to have that not be so present in your experience to know what to do. Am I making that up, or is that true?

00:41:55
No, it’s very true, but I like what you’re saying about it’s a protection for me. Yeah. Because the truth is there is no way for me to take control of this right now. Exactly. So I could drive myself crazy trying to feel things that I still have no control over.

00:42:19
So in some ways, it’s letting go and allowing yeah. Okay. I would encourage you to do that a lot more in this, because it’s like, right. Just letting go. And Lord knows I know how you know how to give this to spirit.

00:42:36
Yes. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get that doesn’t mean you’re going to get the answer that you want. No. We have to live in uncertainty. So what I also hear is Mary Gleason struggling with uncertainty, and it matters.

00:42:51
Right. It matters. This is uncertainty that matters. So who am I in relationship to? Uncertainty that matters.

00:43:03
Okay, so that was can we end there for a little bit? Was that helpful at all? Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you.

00:43:08
So you can see what I was doing was directing her back to her experience, her expression, deepening her in the moment experience as much as I could in that I maybe have time for one more short one. Denise. Denise. Right. We’ve got 15 minutes to close.

00:43:30
Okay, hold on. Let me look at my deck real quick and see how much more I have. Oh, my God, I have so much more. Did you want to come back to Denise if we’ve got time at the end? Yeah.

00:43:41
So what I would like to say was that helpful? Was that useful? Okay, great. I would like to do more of this, and if you want to stick around after I get through this, then I can do another demo or two and answer questions. As you can tell, I’m a little psyched, a little pumped around this stuff because I love it so much, and so I want to make time to maximize and honor your presence here.

00:44:07
So let me go back because I do have some more stuff to talk about.

00:44:16
In my lead in, I said, I’m going to give you some simple things you can do that. You don’t have to go to training or get a certificate to do these things in your sessions with people. Mindful transitions. Oh, my God. I could talk for an hour around transitions.

00:44:33
Remember, I started with, our world is not respectful. The world we’ve built for ourselves is not respectful of who we are neurologically, and we don’t give ourselves organic time. I call it organic time to transition from things. We just need it. We’re not binary.

00:44:51
We’re not binary means you can’t just turn on and off.

00:45:01
Am I sharing my screen? I’m not sharing my screen. Sorry, just a quick second. The I’m still not sharing my screen. Sharing resume slideshow.

00:45:25
Still not sharing my screen. Hold on. I will get this done because I am a technologist now you are. I can share a screen.

00:45:40
All right.

00:45:44
Are we good now? Yes. Okay. Thank you.

00:45:51
Add transitions into your work, and let that be a teaching moment for your clients and for yourself. You’ll be a better coach if you give yourself transition time into your coaching sessions. And here’s an important question. This confuses people. People will say, well, you might ask a client, do you feel calmer now?

00:46:13
Do you feel better now? Or how do you feel? And they’ll say, oh, I feel a little calmer. Then I might ask this to take them deeper. This is what I call a question that is more like somatic immersion in the direction of asking the question in such a way that they have to check with themselves.

00:46:33
You say, how do you know you feel calmer? Well, it just feels better. That’s good. But what are you actually experiencing that tells you that you’re feeling calmer? I’m more relaxed.

00:46:46
Oh. Do you notice that anywhere in particular? Yeah, I just feel like my shoulders are relaxed and more at ease. That’s where we’re going now. We’re now we’re getting a language that’s about the somatic experience.

00:46:58
It’s a very interesting thing to do to help people transition from the general to the specific. And it’s so valuable because that’s the same skill you need whenever you’re trying to help people not be reactive, like in coaching. Very often you deal with people who are like, well, my problem is I’m just being reactive. And you have to help them learn to connect to, oh, I’m feeling this tension where I just want to blurt things out and learn to notice those things so that they can breathe some space into them. But you have to notice it first so that helping them name their experience in transition is pre staging that training.

00:47:44
Do you think it’d be a better place for you? Most of the time, yeah. That’s the same question that I asked earlier. Look up box breathing. Fabulous technique.

00:47:52
Super great for people who are over amplified, over stimulated. They’re coming to you and they’re like, I can’t calm down. Box breathing.

00:48:03
Another one is, if your body part could speak, if your stomach could speak, if your fists could speak, what would it say? What would they say? That’s a really good one.

00:48:16
As you say, what’s going on for you in your body? Or someone says something like, I just would have break three, as I did earlier. As you say, that what’s going on for you in your body, your feelings, your emotions, what’s coming up for you. And you want to deliver this in a way where you give a lot of permission, a lot of space, as you say, that really tell me what’s going on for you. What comes up all by itself?

00:48:44
It could be thoughts, memories, sensations, feelings. It could be nothing at all. And that’s fine. Want to be sure to be giving a lot of permission. This is a very powerful gift to clients.

00:48:55
Help them learn to speak about their in the moment experience rather than tell a story. This is a huge, huge gift, and a lot of people don’t realize that they can do that. And as a culture, we’re not really good at it. And really, truly, this is the heart of helping us all learn to access these body based experience, the body based knowledge as a resource in our lives and improve the quality of our lives. And from that, we improve the quality of our world.

00:49:30
Here’s a quick script about how this might work. So what’s going on for you right now in this moment? The coach says, well, it’s like when I was applying for this job and that initial interview, I felt so wound up. I was just so wound up. Like, there was this tense, like there was this big rock in my stomach.

00:49:49
And so here’s a contact statement that sounds pretty tense. Yeah, it was, they might say, acknowledging your statement. So my question, though, is asking more about this exact moment right here with you and me. They’re like, Wait, what? Well, it’s kind of like that, but it’s not quite the same.

00:50:08
Didn’t have that same badge. It was more like that second round. Clients still in their head. They’re still in the storytelling mode. Hold on, time out.

00:50:16
I’m just going to interrupt you right now, if you don’t mind. Is that okay? And I always ask, or I frequently ask for permission to interrupt. The job interview is really interesting and I think it’s important. But what I’m asking you right now is for you to describe how you’re feeling in this moment, in the conversation between us right now.

00:50:36
For example, you said you felt a rock in your stomach at the time, this interview. Are you feeling that right now? Now, that’s an important question here because that’s going to cause the client to go and look. Oh, well, often they’ll turn their gaze away and they’ll check, is that happening in my stomach now? In that moment is a pure moment of mindfulness.

00:51:05
They’re in the moment on purpose, being present with their in the moment experience, non judgmentally. That’s the john. Kevin’s indefinition. And so when I see the client do that, I’m going to say, that’s right, take your time here and really just pay attention. Is that happening now?

00:51:27
Yeah, I still do that. In fact, I feel that like all the time now we got intel, body based intel. It’s not just the job. The walk around like this all the time. It just got so amplified in the job interview that they noticed it.

00:51:44
So now we have actionable intel, so to speak, from the client’s body, and we coach them on how to be mindful. If your stomach could speak, what would it say? There might be a way to follow up. So that’s an example of how to help clients get into their in the moment experience.

00:52:08
As we get towards the end here, one of the key things to keep in mind is that somatic work has the potential to trigger trauma in clients. And so you need to be trauma informed if you’re going to do this work. That’s just the responsible thing to do.

00:52:29
In this case, the client goes to his stomach, he says, yeah, I walk around like that all the time. He could have said something like, I just feel like someone’s going to hit me. Well, that’s a different thing, right? That’s a different thing. In that case, I don’t know that I want to facilitate towards that anymore because I’m not sure that I want to go into a memory or in trauma work, they call this thing, they call it the window of tolerance.

00:53:00
And we may have just entered the window of tolerance, and it’s queuing up a bigger trauma, a bigger somatic experience. They really don’t want the client to pre experience. So I would suggest that if you’re interested in somatic work, that you study trauma and you learn how it’s different than normal wounding. It’s not your typical kind of, I had a heartbreak or I got disappointed or I didn’t get promotions. That’s all legitimate and needs to be worked through.

00:53:31
But this is deeper in the body than that. And it has a different neurological approach. I have here some different approaches that you can look up and you will all get a link to this recording when it’s done and you can go back and look this up.

00:53:49
That’s kind of everything I wanted to cover. We’re going to go into some questions here. I want to say that if you’re interested in going deeper with this stuff, I’m not pitching you too heavily here, but I do want to say I do a deeper training on this called The The Mindful Coach Association Association, which starts in a couple of weeks. And if you’re interested in that, please let me know because here’s the kind of things we’re going to be talking about. Coach centered, mindfulness facilitating towards resourcefulness, the somatic insight cycle, which is a method that I created from all the psychotherapeutic approaches and reframed it for coaching this mindful interruption, like how to do it, how to frame it, when to do it.

00:54:27
One of the mistakes I made earlier in learning somatic work is I was thinking every nonverbal move was like significant, right? It’s like, oh, what was it? Whenever you looked up to the right just then, what was that like? You have to learn like when to do this and when not to. How to build authentic trust and rapport.

00:54:45
Like some techniques you can use that really powerfully, do that somatic inquiry and reframing, I’ve talked some about that today. Alignment and somatic immersion. We talked a little bit about that today. And then integrating how you bring all this together so the client can be more whole and you as a coach can be more whole with the method.

00:55:09
And before we go to Q and A, I just want to say I would love to hear from you about your biggest takeaway for today. So here’s my email. It’s easy to remember. I hope it’s Brett at Bretthill coach, you write me and tell me what you think, what you like, what you don’t like. Here’s my phone number, text, email.

00:55:27
I would love to hear from you. So let me know what you think. And now we have some time for questions.

00:55:38
Questions come and I will stay on past the next few minutes. So we have time for a quick question if there’s any out there. And I believe Denise had to go and the number of people were asking about how they will receive this, will they get the slides? And so, yes, you will be emailed the link and that will include all the goodies. Yeah, you will all get a link to the recording.

00:56:05
The The Mindful Coach Association Association is training is themmindfulcoachmethod.com. The Mindful Coach Association. Jane, can you type that into chat? Sure. The Mindful Coach Association.

00:56:23
And I’m doing another presentation next week that’s going to have some of the same content with a slightly different focus. I’ll send you a link to that as well. Any questions? Yeah, brett, I have just one comment. When you were talking before about not giving your clients what you consider to be the answer to their problems.

00:56:48
Remember mentioning that earlier? Yes, I do. And I work as a tutor for a college, and it reminded me of what in my training as a tutor, we’re trained to use the Socratic method that, of course, we’re not supposed to give answers or give the students answers, but just help them to get to the process of learning. Exactly. So it’s so important in this work that the client learns the methods that they need to discover the answers that they are searching for.

00:57:31
You can point out. So a lot of it, I feel like, is I’m like a sherpa right, I’m there to help them. Like, there’s a bridge over here and they cross the bridge. But you can point out like, this is a dangerous cliff. Let’s be cautious here or over here is interesting.

00:57:50
And it’s my job just to kind of shine a light on things that might be helpful for them to explore and then let them explore. Meaning will emerge without you having to provide it. And when it does, it’s so powerful because then it’s like an awakening within the client as opposed to reinforcement of something that you’ve said. And those awakening moments can be transformational, really. Transformational.

00:58:22
Thank you. Thank you, David. So, Brett, we are at time. A number of people are needing to leave. Some are saying thank you and farewell.

00:58:31
I just really like to acknowledge the number of people that showed up today. And as a person who’s benefited greatly from the coaching that Brett has, I just encourage you as well to know that that’s another option if The The Mindful Coach Association Association is not something that appeals to you, to reach out to him as a coach as well. And if you want to stay, we are going to be continuing. I know there was a question that was asked, how would you amend your approach if you were addressing someone very familiar, an employee, family member? Well, I love that question because one of the reasons that this is so powerful is because you can use it all the time.

00:59:16
Like, over the years, I’ve had the occasion to work with some people, and they know something that I use all the time as a lesson, a technique I learned from Hakomi, and it’s called context statements. And so if someone says to you, you know, Brett, someone says to me, like, Brett, I just don’t know what to do about that. And I can ask them to tell me details, which is fine, or I can say it sounds frustrating and you’re concerned about that. I’m asking a question. I’m naming their emotional experience.

01:00:03
So that’s concerning. I want them to confirm it, that I got it right. That will take you far in relationships at work and that you’re close with, because rather than you getting into back and forth storytelling, instead, this is a technique I also call one on one interpersonal mindfulness called managing the spotlight. You let them have the stage, you don’t make it about you. And you’re not asking them to report from their head.

01:00:35
Instead, you’re saying, I see you, I feel you. I get you your experience here more than the details. It’s your feeling.

01:00:46
And a little bit we were doing some of that with Mary, if you don’t mind me. Mary. It’s like going back to the feeling rather than the story, because there’s a lot of story that matters and she wants to tell it. I don’t blame her. But it’s like, oh, here’s the feeling.

01:01:02
So using a contact statement is something that is immensely valuable everywhere, all the time.

01:01:11
Reina, just to answer your question, reina. No, you do not need to do David’s trauma informed work before pursuing the training.

01:01:23
I would recommend that you expose yourself to some kind of trauma work in the sense that if you’re going to do coaching, you ought to be able to recognize when someone has entered into a sort of tolerance and you have to be worried or not worried. It’s the wrong word, but you need to be paying close attention to your client’s experience. This is something I teach a lot. Coach centered mindfulness. You as a coach, have to have a lot of awareness about your client and tracking them.

01:01:55
Not like I’m an eagle, I’m on every not like that, but open, sensitive awareness so that you’re experiencing them in what I call a full spectrum sort of way. This is very similar to the work that I teach about in intuition. Some of you have been to my intuition stuff, and it’s like you want to be an open receiver where you’re taking in the client on multiple levels, and when they enter this trauma zone, something in you hopefully is responding, going, oh yeah, I recognize the sense of this. I need to be cautious here and not facilitate towards that stimulus that is triggering them. Maybe you can’t do work, maybe they’re not a good candidate for coaching.

01:02:47
I don’t know. That’s up to you to decide. But you need to be full spectrum listening is what I call that. David full spectrum listening. What I call from a technologist.

01:02:57
I wasn’t kidding. Up and down the stack, like your body, your eyes, your ears, your heart, your emotion, the whole thing. How am I experiencing someone intuitively? When I do intuition work, which I sometimes do, that’s really important. I get a sense of the person I’m talking to and I speak from that place without trying to make judgments.

01:03:20
Just a sense. It shows up for me, like curiosity. I wonder if they’re like, I wonder if this is like this. I wonder if it’s like this. And when I speak from that place of authentic curiosity connected to an effort to actually be in legitimate, authentic rapport and caring, because behind it all, I care.

01:03:43
I care about people, I got to help her. And that opens doors for trust rapport. It helps people bring more themselves into the conversation.

01:03:58
Any other questions or comments?

01:04:09
A question. Is there a difference in the approach and the age of a client 80 years old may not react to emotional appeal? Yeah, well, yeah, you have to deal with generational differences as a part of your work and there are significant generational differences and it’s really important that you be aware of that. I love working with up and down the stack. Again, the full spectrum.

01:04:41
I’m not that great at it in the 20 something range, but I have sort of a thing with millennials for some reason. I don’t know why, but I have this kind of weird rapport there. So when you’re dealing with an old guy or an old woman or an older person, the thing to keep in mind about them is that their neurology is really conditioned a great deal more than someone who’s 20 something, 30 something. They have a lot more experience and so a lot of frameworks are harder wired and so you’re going to do different kind of work there. You may or may not be able to affect that neurological system enough to get to the kind of thing you want.

01:05:27
It just may not be possible. It depends on openness, right? It depends on if they’re bringing to the conversation enough capacity to feel and sense into what’s going on, then that door is open for them. But otherwise the problem is when you get older is that the networks just get so wired up so hardwired you can’t inject a breath into it. There’s no leverage point.

01:05:56
There’s no moment you can push. Pause kind of late in the game, right? I’m not saying you can’t. I’m just saying that the time to learn to play the piano is probably not starting at 80. If your ambition is to be a concert pianist, it takes a long time.

01:06:17
So there are just things you can’t do. At my age, I’m never going to be a weightlifter, professional weightlifter. It’s just not going to happen.

01:06:30
It’s important to respect the biochemical neurology of the different generations and also the context as best you can. There are things that I know because I’m an older guy that anybody under 40 just doesn’t know. And I’m not saying they’re smaller or less than. It’s just a different context. I know what it’s like to spend days not knowing where people are.

01:07:00
That just doesn’t happen anymore. Oh yeah, they’re over here and then they were over there. Right now doesn’t matter where they are on the planet, you know, where people are. Used to be, that wasn’t the case. And I don’t want to go off on what it was like back in the day, but that’s in my world and it’s just not in other people’s world.

01:07:19
So those kinds of things actually make a difference on your perspective.

01:07:25
So if someone’s out of touch for a day, I’m not, like, freaking out because it’s like, you know, if we didn’t have these devices, that would be normal.

01:07:36
I’m wondering if that important realization is a good point to stop the recording, and we’ll still stay on with people that would like okay, so thank you, Jan, for keeping me on point. Janice.