The Mindfulness Advantage in Coaching

Transcription

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You.

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Hello and welcome to The The Mindful Coach Association Association, a podcast where you'll meet the courageous coaches and helping professionals who value mindfulness in their life and work and hear their inspiring stories. Firsthand, you'll hear about new technology that is breaking new ground, as well as discussions with experts to help you be more successful in your practice. It's going to be a lot of fun, and you're going to meet some remarkable people. And I'm your host, Brett Hill. I'm a mindful somatic coach and founder of The The Mindful Coach Association.

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I meet a lot of coaches working with The Mindful Coach Association Association. I'm so inspired by their stories and the courageous work that they're doing that I created this podcast so you can hear them too. If you're aligned with this work, then join us@theThe The Mindful Coach Association Association where you can list your services for absolutely free and receive invitations to community meetings where you can network and meet your colleagues. We hope you'll join us. And now The Mindful Coach Association.

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Hello and welcome to this edition of The The Mindful Coach Association Association. I'm Brett Hill. I'm your host. I am a Mindful somatic coach and founder of The The Mindful Coach Association Association, and I'm doing this podcast because I am deeply passionate about how mindfulness and the practices of mindfulness, as well as, you could say, an orientation around being mindful in your life can dramatically improve a person's coaching skills and the outcomes for their clients. This applies not only to coaching, but to what I call helping professionals.

:: 01:42

Or you might think of advising professionals, anyone in a role where they're professionally helping other people in some kind of advising capacity. Therapists, facilitators, all different kinds of roles counselors, even teachers, trainers, executive coaches, whatever a person is doing in that capacity, any capacity, actually. But in this case, I'm focusing specifically on those kinds of roles, the value of mindfulness as a skill, not to teach it, even though that's a good thing to do. But I'm not talking about teaching mindfulness, I'm talking about a coach. Or I'm just going to use the word coach.

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And please understand that's an umbrella for all these other professions as well. When they have the capacity to be mindful and present with their own experience as well as experience of the client. That's what I call coach centered mindfulness. The quality of the work is dramatically improved, and I can make a fairly bold statement like that because there's a lot of research around this as well as the way it helps a coach to be a better coach. Let me go through some of the details along that.

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Before we get into the ways that mindfulness helps a coach be a better coach, I want to talk a little bit about what do I actually mean by mindfulness, because a lot of people mean different things. I don't want to spend too much time here because this is one of those topics that has been covered a lot john Cabot Zoon is often considered the person who brought mindfulness to the west, so to speak, by teaching and developing the mindfulness based stress reduction training, let's call it version one of quote unquote, secular mindfulness. And that opened the door to a lot of people. Because even though mindfulness might have fabulous practices and benefits when it's embedded in a Buddhist point of view, and I want to be clear, I have absolutely nothing against Buddhist points of view. In fact, I'm very much aligned with that.

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I'm not a buddhist, but I just say I'm buddhist aligned. It pushes people away because they don't want to have to adopt a particular spiritual or religious orientation in order to practice. John Kabazid did the world a favor by secularizing the practice to a fair degree. Now, there's some critique around the versions of mindfulness that are being taught around the world and around the planet today, and that they're still pretty embedded in these Buddhist roots. And I'm not here to argue about that, but I'm just saying, yeah, that's still there.

:: 04:45

There's still oming and beads and incense and things that go on around these mindfulness practices, which I personally don't have a problem with, but a lot of people do. And so there's another layer of mindful practices. There's another way to present mindful practices that really doesn't involve any of that at all. And so I'm talking about that kind of mindful practice. I'm talking about the kind of practice where you can learn to be present with your experience.

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And I actually like the Jon Kabot Sean Kevin's definition, which is on purpose, put triple underscores under that on purpose in the moment, non judgmentally. And whenever you engage in coaching in that way, it improves the quality of the relationship that you can build so much that the coaching automatically up levels, because for a lot of reasons, which I'll get into, so it really is about the quality of presence, which is a whole nother topic. The difference between mindfulness and presence is simply this in my point of view, mindfulness is a practice that creates a state in the coach where presence can arise. That presence is an emergent property in a mindful person. And presence is one of those ambiguous things also is mindfulness in a way you can't pin it down.

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It's not like, oh, how much is an inch? Well, we can say what that is. You know, what color is red? Well, we can say what that is, but what is presence? I'm not so sure.

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But this is my take on it, that presence is an emergent property that simply arises when it can. And being in when you practice mindfulness, that creates the neurological conditions that allow presence to emerge. And presence is one of the core skills, one of the core qualities of a coach. According to The Mindful Coach Association, I was fortunate enough to do an interview with Medalina Nuke, the CEO of ICF, a year and a half or so ago for a conference called The Future Is Mindful. And in that she did a presentation on mindfulness and coaching.

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And she said mindfulness helps increase presence, and presence is the most important of the skills for coaches. And so there you have it from someone that should know, I would think. You don't get a whole lot more authoritative about coaching expertise than the CEO of The Mindful Coach Association. And so if that's, so if that's the most important thing, most important attribute a coach can bring into a coaching context and mindfulness improves that, then there you have all the evidence that you need that coaches will benefit from a mindful practice. I want to be clear once again, I'm not talking about teaching mindfulness.

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I'm talking about the coach having mindful skills and bringing those skills into the relationship with the client. Super powerful, super critical. So there we have like, presence, mindfulness, the definition of mindfulness from John Cabot Jin, the difference between teaching mindfulness and being mindful. And I want to talk now about how mindfulness can actually help in coaching. How does it benefit?

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There's one thing just to be present with your experience. There's another thing for it to actually make a difference in the process, in the actual session and result in better outcomes for the client. Because at the end of the day, that's a big part of what this is all about. The client has to actually go, yeah, this is working for me and I like it. And that's what we all want, right?

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We want clients that not only like it, but love it. We want clients that are enthusiastically engaged in the coaching and maybe even another level, like transformed, like actually, oh my God, this is not just helping me, it's changing me to be a better person. And often when coaches who engage mindfulness in their work, they have that kind of an impact on clients, even if they don't directly go for, oh, I'm going for the big T transformation with my clients. Oftentimes it's not sometimes through what you say and do as it is who you are and how you show up that models for the client, a way of being that can actually work really well for them. So that's how mindfulness helps a coach, is that they model for the client.

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What is it like to be in conversation with someone who's being mindful and present? And that is so instructive. I've had so many people tell me that simply being in conversation with someone who is, let's just say holding space, I'm going to use a vague term like that. But being in present and receptive and making an effort to be aware of a pretty big space in tracking, that's a skill that I teach in the The Mindful Coach Association method, tracking what's going on with the client and with yourself as well, how to be present in a way that demonstrates to the client through direct experience. Not some idea, but through direct experience.

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Oh wow, he's really listening. The only reason I'm able to do that at all is not because I'm a fabulous skilled coach, but because I was taught that. I was taught how to be present in that way, and I practice it. Here's something I learned from John Eisman, who founded the what is it? Mindful Experiential Therapeutic Approaches center the medicine in Portland, which is now close.

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But he was a Mindful somatic coach in the Comey method and one he created called Recreation of Himself. Incredible, brilliant stuff. So I studied there as well, where I learned some of these techniques. And I'm taking all of this stuff that I learned in Somatic psychotherapy and refactoring it to be skills that coaches can learn. And so the foundational skill to make all this possible is mindfulness.

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And so we start there. We start with simply saying yes to the coaches and professionals who want to be more mindful in their work. So I have created The The Mindful Coach Association Association to help any professional who's in one of these consulting advisory jobs, like therapists, counselors, coaches who values mindfulness in their work and also in their life, so that we can have community and so that we can get to know each other, support each other, and particularly in this crazy world of coaching. I mean, if you're like me, I'm a professional coach and coach trainer. It's crazy out there because of the number of people trying to pitch me on $20,000 Masterminds.

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And I'm going to be a seven figure coach, and I can deliver coaching from the beach, pay them $20,000, and in 15 minutes a week I can be a multimillionaire. It's crazy the amount of stuff that's out there coming our way. And so The The Mindful Coach Association Association is a place where we can collect, connect with each other, harvest our collective intelligence, share resources, learn about what we're doing, what our struggles are. We're going to be offering resources for people and skill training as well for those who are interested. And it's free to join the The The Mindful Coach Association Association.

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And so you can just browse to The The Mindful Coach Association Association if you're interested at all, join up. It doesn't cost a dime and you'll be invited to attend. We have weekly meetings. We meet like Thursdays or Mondays at different times depending on so we can adapt, trying to hit a time when you're open and you can meet the people and we can connect. And really important connections have happened in these meetings.

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And you're more than welcome if you're hearing this and you are aligned with this mission and purpose. I want to go back to some of the benefits of Mindfulness for coaches because I've talked about how it helps clients through the demonstration of the experience of connecting with somebody who's mindful and present. Let's take that a step farther. When you are talking to somebody who's being really present in their engagement with you. If you'll notice what happens to you, very often what happens is you get it that they getting you, you get it that they're paying attention.

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Now, if you're a good coach, you're demonstrating that on purpose. You're making it clear to people, yeah, I'm being present with you. I'm really trying to listen to you beyond your words and get a really big picture of who you are and what your struggles are like.

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And in doing that, the client is going to have a response. Now hopefully the client will see that as supportive and trust can emerge and they can begin to relax into the relationship as a container for doing the work. This is really super important. So the key point I'm trying to make is that being mindful and present with your clients helps you listen and be present in such a way that the client automatically begins to build trust and rapport with you. And it can happen very quickly.

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You can really quickly build a pretty deep level of trust and rapport with clients. Not like instantaneous, but faster than you might think when you are experienced in creating trust and rapport with clients in an authentically, connected manner. Now, there are coaches and coaches skills out there that teach you to create trust and rapport in a mechanical way, like just mirror them and speak back. The words that they say to you does actually help in a lot of cases to cause people to think that you're paying attention. I don't mean paying attention like eat a lied, I'm watching every move you make, but more of a generalized open awareness that's operating in a very, very refined state of awareness for the coach that coach is really receiving.

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And on a lot of layers. I have a technical background, so I think of it as a stack physical layer and the cognitive layer, the emotional layer. You're receiving a lot of information and you're just kind of watching all of this appear in your nervous system in observing and making intelligent coaching choices in real time as the client talks to you. And when you do that and you do it well, the client notices that and they begin to automatically kind of unfold and bring deeper issues into the coaching session than they might otherwise. Because you're creating trust, they begin to trust you with deeper and deeper issues that are harder and harder for them to talk about.

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And in this way, a The Mindful Coach Association can create authentic trust and rapport very quickly or as quickly as a client will allow. And that helps you to do deeper work. And because you're doing deeper work, the work you're doing is more meaningful to the client. And consequently, your session work takes on a level of meaning to the client that often goes beyond the initial thing that they brought to you. So instead of working on how do I speak up in a meeting, suddenly we're working on what is my relationship to showing up and taking a stand.

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And when you're working at that level, you solve not only the meeting problem but a whole host of issues in a person's life. And so in many ways a The Mindful Coach Association creates the capacity to do this deeper work that's more meaningful to clients. And as a result, the work is more powerful and it has bigger outcomes or more impactful outcomes on your clients. And the final piece of this is when your clients get it. When your clients have these kinds of breakthroughs and you're a witness and a part of that, that's a pretty satisfying experience for a coach to see someone have those kinds of insights, breakthroughs and growth in session and in their life.

:: 18:48

And so I want to say it improves the quality of the coach's satisfaction as with their own work. And so all of these things presence, the building trust in rapport the going deeper, the more satisfying outcomes for both the coach and the client. The ability to kind of be present with unexpected scenarios in your sessions. So many things that could go on like when you're mindful and present and you really reach a place where you can be kind of still inside. You can create space in which curiosity can emerge.

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And curiosity is an extremely valuable coaching skill. I use it all the time. It's one of my favorite go to techniques. So there's so many other ways that mindfulness can help you as a coach. And so this is why I believe that mindfulness and the practice of mindfulness is one of the most valuable skills, if not potentially the most valuable skill that a coach can have that creating the relationship with your client is such a central important skill that makes everything else possible.

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And that's the reason I teach mindfulness to coaches and want to help coaches be more mindful and present in their work. Because in that way we can be a ton more effective in the world that we're working in. And we need The Mindful Coach Associationes to be effective. We need people. People need help.

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Wow, these days it's crazy, right? So people need help. And I believe that mindfulness as a coaching skill is transformational not only for the coach, can be for your client and for your session work as well. And for those reasons I created this podcast and we've been interviewing and we will continue to interview other coaches who have many of the same orientations. They believe mindfulness is a valuable skill in their life and in their work and they're bringing it to the population that they work with.

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Whether it be children or doctors or laid off tech workers or any of the other people that we're doing interviews with. And then also The Mindful Coach Association Association which The The Mindful Coach Association Association where you can meet other people who are this resonates with. And it's a really amazing community of folk. So please, if you're inclined, go there, sign up, and you'll get an invite to our meetings. And there's going to be plenty of other benefits as well.

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People can discover your profile. They can find you there by doing searches. You can link to your profile; you can post articles. You can do all kinds of things there. So we have big plans for that.

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And then also I have a class I called the Mindful Coach Association Method and I teach coaches mindful somatic coaching, where I take some of the techniques I've been describing and put them into a whole framework. That's a hewing class that won't start again until September. But if you're interested in that, sign up on the early bird list on the waitlist and you'll get a discount when it does. Registration opens and you can find that@themindfulcoachmethod.com themindfulcoachhood.com. So you can find that there.

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Sign up for that. That's kind of the lay of the land for the The Mindful Coach Association. Why I believe mindfulness is so imperative for coaches as a cornerstone skill from which all these other skills become amplified in their impact. Really can't say enough about that. When you become more mindful and present in your work, it lets you do this.

:: 22:53

Bring the skills that you have into your session work in a much more powerful way. And that is a game changer. It's going to separate you from the crowd of coaches who can't do that. And I'm not trying to say they're doing bad work, but they're not doing you that kind of work and it's not doing it at that level. And that's the work that people need these days.

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So that's it for me? For The Mindful Coach Association. So if you like this, follow the podcast. Send it around to your friends. We're just getting started here.

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We have big hopes and we hope that you have enjoyed the show. Please leave comments, write to me, you can find me on The Mindful Coach Association Association. Just search for Brett Hill and leave a message there or at my website themindfulcoach.com. Happy to engage with you. Blessings to you.

:: 23:50

Stay present. And that's a wrap for this edition of The Mindful Coach Association Association. We hope you enjoyed this presentation, and if you did, follow us and leave us a review. If you're a coach or helping professional that values mindfulness in your work, browse over to The Mindful Coach Association Association and create a free community profile describing your services so the world can find you. And you'll be invited to exclusive community meetings where you can meet your colleague.

:: 24:18

I'm your host, Brett Hill, founder of The Mindful Coach Association Association. Coach and coach trainer. Teaching the Mindful Coach Association method. You can find out more about me@theminfulcoach.com. Until next time, stay present.