Coaching with Clarity: Mindfulness for Helping Professionals

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The Mindful Coach podcast.

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Hello and welcome to this edition of the Mindful Coach podcast.

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I am your host, Brett Hill, founder of the Mindful Coach association and Mindful Somatic Coach.

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I wanted to talk today about something that's very important to coaches and people who do any kind of work with other people.

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So people who use their voice in a way that is intended to be helpful and, you know, you're out there selling your services or want to sell your services as someone who can be helpful to other people.

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The main key point I want to make is that if you have not pursued engaging mindfulness practices as a means by which you can improve the quality of your work, then you're missing, oh, my God, this is like the biggest thing ever.

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I sometimes call this kind of thing like diamonds at your feet.

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It's so powerful and so helpful for you to engage intentionally and, you know, repetitively in practices that can help you learn to be more mindful and present with your clients, with your work, with your negotiations, with your conversations, not only, of course, with your clients, but in your whole life.

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I did a podcast called the connected conversation, and one of the things I emphasized was like, what does it take to learn the skills to turn even ordinary conversations into extraordinary experiences?

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And the foundations of that practice are mindfulness.

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You must be able to be mindful and then therefore present with not only yourself, but with your clients and with other people in your world if you hope to have authentic connection, as well as, you know, meaningful communication, interaction, particularly whenever you're trying to provide services to people, where your insights and guidance and clarity and intuition and I, your curiosity, lead the way to help people to have better experiences of life themselves.

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Now, let me explain a little bit about how that works.

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Mindfulness is the capacity to be present in a way, in a very specific way.

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This isn't about sitting on a cushion.

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That's the practice.

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That's like, you know, biking is, you know, you're getting on your bike and biking around, but the practice of learning how to ride a bike is different than, you know, going on a race or even in mountain biking, there's practice involved.

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There are things skills that you can learn, and the mainline skills can involve meditation.

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They don't have to, but they can involve meditation.

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And the thing that you're trying to do here, and this gets a little technical, is improve the capacity of your neurology to take advantage of the executive functioning capacity in your brain.

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Now, the executive functions in your brain are in the prefrontal cortex, which is the yellow youngest part of the anatomy of your brain.

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Now, that means that in terms of the evolution of humanity, the newest.

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The newest addition to the neighborhood in terms of neurology is the prefrontal cortex.

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And the prefrontal cortex is where all the good stuff happens.

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That allows you to really deeply consider, what is my experience now.

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Now, think about that for a moment.

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That might sound like.

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What does that mean?

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I don't make any sense.

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But consider that if you are not present with the quality of your experience now, then what's going on?

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Well, what's going on for most of us, and this is no judgment here, this is just the way our neurology works for most of us.

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We're just trying to get through the day, doing what we do to make the world happen for us in terms of our plans, the things that happened to us that are expected, unexpected.

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Managing our exceptionally complicated world, dealing with the stresses of our lives, which are way too stressful.

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Unfortunately, for some reason, humanity has created a lifestyle for people, a way to live in the world.

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All the technology and the advertising and the politics and the economics and all of it being exceptionally complicated and stressful, a lot of stress, and we're not really designed to handle that 24/7 stress.

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It's just not the way we're built.

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We have to have a way to mitigate all of that, and unfortunately, we're not very good at it.

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And so people are stressed out, which is one of the reasons why people want to go to coaches and other facilitators and helpers to help them learn to manage the stress.

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Mindfulness has been proven through many, many studies.

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Just Google mindfulness and stress reduction, and you'll see thousands of studies that indicate that the practice of mindfulness helps reduce stress.

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And so, one of the key things that you do for yourself when you practice mindfulness is you calm your own inner neurology, the rate at which your neurons are firing instead of following a stream of consciousness 24/7 it's just like, oh, there's this, and then there's this, and then there's this, and then, now I got to do this.

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Now I know all about that because I'm kind of add myself.

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So I have a hard time kind of staying on point.

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But when your executive function is on literally online, then one of the things that happens is you become aware of the rapidity of your inner state.

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You become aware that you're not really paying attention.

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Instead, you're just thinking about this, and you're thinking about this, and that's okay.

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There's nothing wrong with that.

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But the problem with, and by the way, that's called the default mode network.

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There's a name for it.

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The problem with that is that you can spend a lifetime there and you don't really kind of wake up from that trance, sometimes called a waking trance until something really serious happens, like you get ill and you're sitting in a hospital bed.

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Covid was a big hit for a lot of people.

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They began to look around and go, oh my God, what kind of world am I living in?

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How do I make this better for myself?

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So sometimes an outside calamity can kind of knock you sideways enough that you start to really examine it.

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That examining is the, is inviting your executive functions processes.

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Now the thing about executive functions in the brain is that it's not an unlimited resource.

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There's only because it's a younger part of our system and also not a very well endowed, if you will, like supplied with a lot of energy resource that you can consume all the energy that you have that's available to be present pretty quickly without practice.

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Now how does that work?

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Think about it like this.

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Traditional mindfulness practices for learning how to be more mindful and present involve often.

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I'm not saying this is what you should do, I'm just describing one of the common practices, sitting down and paying attention to your breathing.

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Straight up, right?

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Hardly anyone's threatened by their breathing.

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And so consequently, and we all have to do it, right?

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And it's one of the few things that we can actually control in terms of the systems that our bodies depend on.

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You can actually intentionally hold your breath or take a big breath, whereas you can't intentionally turn your ears off or you can't intentionally make your heart stop beating.

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At least most people can't.

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There's some stories around people who have become so adept in terms of being like yogis or other forms of martial arts where people can do those kinds of things, those kinds of lifelong practices aside, typically you just go, oh, I'm just going to make my heart stop for like 5 seconds and have that thought.

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But you can go, I'm going to hold my breath for 5 seconds.

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Why is that?

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Obviously it's not a good idea to breathe underwater or in smoke filled room.

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And so our back in the day on the savannah, it'd be like in a forest fire or something like that.

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And so over the years, over the centuries, our systems divide where we have a conscious control of our breathing to a certain degree.

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So that's a really natural, easy way to interact with our routine process.

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And you can sit down and focus on your breath, in and out.

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You're not trying to make something happen.

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You're not trying to.

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There are practices like that, but the kind of thing I'm talking about is just the basic mindfulness practice of learning to pay attention to your breath.

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And if you just sit down and you said to yourself, as an objective test, how long can I pay attention to my breath before I start thinking about something else?

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Just as a matter of technical curiosity, is it, I wonder what that is like.

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You know, how much weight can I lift?

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How much?

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Yeah, how much weight can I lift?

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How many feet, miles, yards can I run?

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How many notes can I sing?

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You know what I just as a technical curiosity, how many, how long can you sit down, maybe close your eyes, or at least have the intention to go?

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I want to pay attention to my breathing for as long as I can.

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And maybe you try that.

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And what typically happens is that people will do this.

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And the interesting thing about it is that you'll say, okay, great.

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So you're taking pictures of your breath.

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You're paying attention to your breath, and then after a little while, remember I said that, that prefrontal cortex or that executive function has a limited amount of energy available to it.

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It is one of the most, if not the most, what I call expensive in terms of energy consumption, parts of the brain.

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So that uses a lot of energy in your brain.

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And for that reason, the brain wants to kind of mitigate the use of it so that you can reserve those really high cost functions for situations that really need them.

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And so your brain has a tendency to kind of squish things out of conscious awareness in order to preserve your capacity to be aware when you need to, generally speaking, that develop because, you know, you need to be conscious during extreme situations.

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We don't have a lot of super extreme situations these days, you know, get attacked by lions.

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Things do happen, and you want to be conscious about it.

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Of course, you want to have your best capacity available whenever those things do occur.

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But the brain is designed to kind of actually take the things that you're paying attention to and make them habituated so you don't have to think about them.

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Breathing like this is no different.

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Pay attention to your breath, and let's just say you have, let's just consider it like a vat, a small glass of water that has a tube coming out of it.

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And that water is powering your ability to pay attention.

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And the more you pay attention, the longer the glass starts to empty, and there is some water dripping into the glass, but it's emptying faster than it fills.

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And so consequently, when the glass gets empty, your thoughts just go to something else.

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You literally, your thoughts just simply go with a stream of conscious, yeah, yeah, you know, I'm feeling a little this or that, you know, and I guess that's because I just didn't get enough sleep last night.

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I really should focus on my sleep now.

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There's nothing wrong with those thoughts.

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There's nothing bad about them.

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And you're not wrong for having thoughts of those or any sort while you're doing any kind of practice like this.

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The thing that happens, though, is that now you're not using the prefrontal cortex.

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You're just kind of going along with the stream of consciousness.

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And as a result of that, that glass starts to fill a little bit better because you're not draining it so fast.

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And when enough energy, when enough capacity recharges, you'll suddenly go, oh, I'm supposed to be paying attention to my breath.

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And it happens just like that.

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It's like, oh, I'm.

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I'm supposed to be paying attention to my breath.

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In that moment, that exact, precise moment, you become mindful.

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You switch from default mode to intentional presence.

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Oh, I supposed to be.

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I supposed to be paying attention?

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Come back.

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Pay attention.

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Notice breathing.

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Notice in and out, following your breath.

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And there are lots of beautiful practices along with following your breath.

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And you can do that for a while, and then your mind will slip away as soon as that glass empties into another stream.

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Great.

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Notice and come back.

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Notice and come back.

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Now, does that sound familiar?

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Notice and come back.

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Is that repetition is like lifting weight.

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It's like you lift the weight, your arms get tired.

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You put the weight down.

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You wait till the muscles regenerate their capacity.

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You lift the weight, and you put it back down.

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What's happening?

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You're building strength in your muscles.

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Your body is going, you know what?

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If Brett's going to keep doing this, I better build some muscle, because this is, he's going to need this.

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And, you know, because we're putting stress on these, on these muscular system, and then, excuse me, your neurology and musculature will organize around building muscle in the same way.

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If you stress your executive functions, it will build capacity, and consequently, you'll get better at holding presence and being present with, in this case, your breath.

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Now, the beautiful thing about that is that it works for many things besides your breath.

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And one of the key ways this is valuable is when you're interacting with other people.

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Then that executive presence becomes an incredible superpower.

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Seems fairly mundane when you're just focusing on your inner world in some way, or in this case, your breath.

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But what happens when you focus on this question?

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What is the quality of my experience now?

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Remember that from earlier.

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Am I feeling stressed?

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Am I feeling anxious?

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Am I feeling calm?

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Am I feeling loving?

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Am I feeling compassion?

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Am I nervous?

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Am I worried?

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No judgment in any of that.

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It's just noticing what is so super powerful.

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So when I start a meeting or a session with a client, one of the very first things I do, and I do this for myself and I invited the client to as well.

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Just notice what is true for me now.

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Notice what is true for you now.

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And I try this right now, as you're listening to this, just take a breath and notice what is true for you now.

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Another way of saying this is what's it like to be you?

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What is what is going on for you in your world right now?

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Not, oh, I'm having a terrible time, but what are you feeling?

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What's your somatic, which means your body felt sense?

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Oh, I'm stressed.

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I have tension in my shoulders.

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I can just feel how tied I am.

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Or maybe it's a brilliant, beautiful experience.

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I am just loving this day.

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I'm having the best time.

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The key isn't, of course, I'm wishing you have a great moment.

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But if you're not, there's an immense value in simply noticing and naming what is.

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So now, as a coach, that is exceptionally valuable because you can name and notice what is so about your experience of your client.

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Oh, I'm feeling really great about this client.

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I'm feeling challenged by this client.

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I'm feeling like I really, and this happens, you know, I'm really attracted to this client, or I really don't want much to do with, you know, all those kinds of things can go on, and they influence what goes on in your session.

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And noticing and naming those things is a tremendous value to your client.

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You don't have to name them, you don't have to say those things to your client, but you want to notice them in yourself so that you can organize your advice, your experience, your practice in such a way or what you're saying to them in such a way to acknowledge those things within what you suggest.

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Right?

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So, for example, if I'm feeling really stressed about a client, I'm going to take time to slow myself down, take a breath and really track what's going on and ask myself in a very serious way what's going on here?

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Can I actually serve this person in a way that is going to be useful to them and then really get real about what I should be doing with my next bits and my number one go to.

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And this is one of my best tips for coaches who practice is when you get stuck, just track your curiosity.

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What are you curious about?

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You don't have to have a brilliant answer.

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You don't have to have a big plan.

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Just ask what are you curious about?

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And let that curiosity lead you.

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That's a really great way to to help you navigate to a place where you feel you are going to gain some traction.

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And so consequently, I'm advocating that a mindful practice is going to help you be present with yourself and help you be present with your client in ways that you cannot do otherwise?

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In the one way I mentioned is it's going to help you notice what's going on within you.

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And the other way is it's going to help you notice what's going on with the client.

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You're going to be more observant of their nonverbal behavior, of the way they use their words, of the tone of their voice, of the quality of their connection, of the gestalt, if you will, which is a term that means like the whole experience of the person and what that means to you in terms of where you want to guide them or where you feel inclined to guide them.

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Oftentimes a good coaching is not so much about guiding as it is about helping the client explore.

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There is some guidance in that.

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But facilitating their exploration is very powerful way to facilitate and be of service to clients.

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So consequently, we're talking about how mindfulness is going to help you be a better mindful professional, whatever that is, whether you're a therapist, a coach, a counselor, a sports coach, an attorney, a healer, a doctor, a physician, a nurse, whatever it is that you do where you're helping other people, being present in a way where you can really hear, really see not only what's going on for you and for them.

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Now here's one of the most powerful benefits as well.

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When you are being present with yourself, you will often take time to just pause, or I would say often you have the opportunity to just pause and rather than figure out, here's what I got to say next, just give it a little space and also give the client more space to be with their own process because that's often much richer than you, you know, providing input just letting the client kind of steep in their own process, not abandoning them afloat, wondering what they're going to do next.

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But sometimes it just takes time for insights to surface.

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Whenever you do this, you will often have insights and see angles into problems, issues, avenues to explore that you didn't see otherwise because you were moving too fast.

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Your assumptions were over driving you.

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The client was overriding you in a way.

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There's a whole thing I teach in the mindful coach method, which is a series of lessons I created to help coaches learn to do somatic mindfulness in their sessions that involve slowing the client down so that they learned that telling you their story isn't necessarily the most important way for them to get their point across.

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There's a whole lesson around all of that.

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But rather than that, what I'm trying to say is when you're really present with the client, you'll see ways to proceed that you don't otherwise see.

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I call this diamonds on the ground, because oftentimes I'll hear coaches struggling for how do I find the right way in?

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What's the insight here?

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How can I be brilliant?

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How can I be helpful?

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There's nothing wrong with those thoughts.

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But if you can just let go of them all and notice, oh, I'm really noticing.

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I'm really working hard.

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I'm really concerned about getting this right with the client.

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I really want to do that.

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And good for you.

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You know, you want to be a good service, but when you can step into your executive function, be present, allow for some stillness, and then you might notice something about the client that you didn't notice before.

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And rather than saying, well, tell me more about how it feels when you speak up, you can say, is that familiar?

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Or does that feel a little scary to you?

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Or probably not a good one, because then you're offering the notion of scary.

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If you notice that, then you can say it, but rather saying, what's that feel like?

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Whenever you feel like you want to speak up, is your.

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Do you notice it in your, your neck, your throat, or your voice?

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And you would say that if you notice them, kind of like tightening up.

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So they're.

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The key here, I'm trying to say is noticing what's going on with the client, naming that and inquiring about it can lead to very, very powerful insights for the client.

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Oh, you know, now that you mention it, this feels like, you know, all those times I wanted to just speak up at home, and I couldn't because I just felt like it was.

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There were six or seven other kids around it because I had a big family and I found out it was just better if I just shut up.

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That way I just didn't ever get into trouble.

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And so here now youve led the client to a place where they automatically remembered that their problem with speaking up in a meeting is related to the same problem they had when they were growing up.

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Now, the difference between therapy and coaching here is that were not going to go back and try to solve that problem.

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Were just going to wire up the memory.

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And that insight in and of itself is often empowering enough to where they realize that this problem that they're having with speaking up isn't related to the situation, it's related to their life learning.

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That's a whole other level of working.

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And whenever you can do that for a client, you're really working foundational issues now that are exceptionally powerful for them.

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And you might have missed that had you just gone on to get more story about how the your client is being talked over and not heard.

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While it can be very powerful to hear those stories, it often isn't in the best interest of a client for them to just spend the whole session just telling stories.

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And so you have to learn to kind of interrupt that and ground down into the in the moment experience.

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So these are just a few of the ways that mindfulness and coaching can be exceptionally powerful for people.

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And this isn't, you know, also, keep in mind with this, you're not teaching the client how to be mindful directly.

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I would say you are.

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You are actually being a good model, I hope, for mindful communications and giving the client a felt sense of what it means to interact with somebody who is being very present.

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That in and of itself is another one of the big values.

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Have you ever, you know, been impacted when you're talking to somebody and they're just really there for you?

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They really are listening and paying attention in a very refined way to you.

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And if you pay really close attention to what happens to you in your neurology, whenever that happens, it changes you.

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It changes the conversation.

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And for most people, that is a very positive change.

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And people, if I ask, would you like to have more of that in your life, then most people are enthusiastically, yes.

Brett Hill: 00:26:24

Now, I know there's some introverts out there.

Brett Hill: 00:26:26

They're going, well, I don't know about that, but to those introverts, I would say we're talking about a level of presence that is way beyond small talk about someone who's really going deep with you.

Brett Hill: 00:26:38

And for most introverts that I know, and I'm married to one, that's the key thing.

Brett Hill: 00:26:44

It's not that they don't like to talk.

Brett Hill: 00:26:46

It's just they don't like small talk.

Brett Hill: 00:26:48

And so the kind of coaching I'm talking about is the antithesis of small talk.

Brett Hill: 00:26:52

It's going deep as needed.

Brett Hill: 00:26:55

You can do small talk.

Brett Hill: 00:26:56

Absolutely.

Brett Hill: 00:26:58

And that's why I say taking ordinary conversations and turning them to extraordinary experiences.

Brett Hill: 00:27:05

And so take these examples and ideas of how mindfulness can help you in your profession, in your work.

Brett Hill: 00:27:14

And if you're not a coach or a helping professional, these skills are still going to help you.

Brett Hill: 00:27:20

Something I sometimes say is, imagine if there was something that you could do that would make every conversation for the rest of your life better.

Brett Hill: 00:27:31

Would that be something worth doing?

Brett Hill: 00:27:34

Would those outcomes just imagine the impact on your life if every conversation you ever had or will have was suddenly empowered to be a better conversation for the rest of your life?

Brett Hill: 00:27:51

Wow.

Brett Hill: 00:27:52

I mean, I don't know about you, but that's like a really, really huge thing deal.

Brett Hill: 00:27:57

There are.

Brett Hill: 00:27:58

We have important conversations.

Brett Hill: 00:28:00

You know, do you want to get married?

Brett Hill: 00:28:02

Do you want to take a job?

Brett Hill: 00:28:03

Do you want to change locations?

Brett Hill: 00:28:05

Do you want to have a particular kind of surgery?

Brett Hill: 00:28:09

Do you want to sign a contract?

Brett Hill: 00:28:12

Do you want to buy a car?

Brett Hill: 00:28:13

There's so many conversations that really make a difference.

Brett Hill: 00:28:17

Do you want to buy a house?

Brett Hill: 00:28:18

Do you want to move to a particular part of the country?

Brett Hill: 00:28:20

There are so many things that really matter to people that really have big impacts.

Brett Hill: 00:28:25

And if you could take, if you could practice a set of skills that were easy to practice and they would impact the quality of every single one of those conversations, wouldn't that be a good idea?

Brett Hill: 00:28:39

I mean, yeah.

Brett Hill: 00:28:41

I mean, this is like, one of those check boxes is like, where do I sign?

Brett Hill: 00:28:47

And so how do you do that?

Brett Hill: 00:28:50

This is very simple in a lot of ways.

Brett Hill: 00:28:52

There are a ton of resources for how to get more mindful.

Brett Hill: 00:28:55

You can go to my website@themindfulcoach.com, and I have a page there called how to start a mindfulness practice.

Brett Hill: 00:29:01

And, of course, you can always look me up.

Brett Hill: 00:29:03

I'm happy to talk with you about what the best way to go.

Brett Hill: 00:29:08

I'm in practice.

Brett Hill: 00:29:09

I'll talk to you about the best way to help you with this.

Brett Hill: 00:29:13

And also, I coach coaches, and so I'd like to.

Brett Hill: 00:29:17

Oh, yeah, and one more thing is if you're a coach or a helping professional and you'd like to hang out with people who also value these things to support each other in how to learn and implement these kinds of practices.

Brett Hill: 00:29:31

You can take a look at the mindful Coach association@themindfulcoachassociation.com which is free to join.

Brett Hill: 00:29:37

List your services, come to meetings, and participate in our conversation around what's it like to be a helping professional who values mindfulness in our life and our work?

Brett Hill: 00:29:46

And how can we be successful?

Brett Hill: 00:29:48

How can we support each other?

Brett Hill: 00:29:50

It's not trying to pitch you on a month mastermind or anything like that.

Brett Hill: 00:29:55

In fact, it's completely free to join doing that as a public service to the community because I am passionate about the skills that I'm talking about, mindful communication skills and presence also like somatic presence and somatic word as being the very skills that we need in these crazy times we're in.

Brett Hill: 00:30:18

So with all of that, if you are using mindfulness in your work, blessing, blessings to you.

Brett Hill: 00:30:25

You know, double down.

Brett Hill: 00:30:27

And if you are not, get started, because it really, truly is the fastest, best, most powerful path to raising the quality of your work, improving outcomes for your clients, not to mention many, many other aspects of your personal relationships and your health.

Brett Hill: 00:30:47

There's a whole lot of research on how mindfulness work can improve your health in many, many dimensions.

Brett Hill: 00:30:54

So that's it for me.

Brett Hill: 00:30:56

My name is Brett Hill, the mindful coach, and this has been useful to you.

Brett Hill: 00:31:01

Then drop us a note, follow the podcast and leave us a review.

Brett Hill: 00:31:06

We really appreciate it.

Brett Hill: 00:31:07

You can find me@themindfulcoach.com and we'll talk soon.

Brett Hill: 00:31:11

Bye now.

Brett Hill: 00:31:14

The Mindful Coach podcast is a service of the Mindful Coach association.