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“At any moment, we must be willing to give up who we are for who we would become.”
Self-Victory Life Coaching holds a space for individuals to become more conscious and intentional in their lives starting from the inside out. By taking the time to become conscious of your thinking and your actions, you can engage in life as a process of training. A coach who works with an athlete or artist acts as a mirror that enables you to see yourself so that you can train your technique and refine your form. While a coach helps to support you and hold you accountable, it’s ultimately up to you to make the changes that feel right so that you can embody what you learn and develop your abilities so you are ready to dive into life, whether you think of life more as a game or more as an artistic performance. The coach blends the right amount of support and challenge based on what works for you, allowing you each session to reflect on what is working for you as well as what needs attention. Through the “training” process a powerful bond develops based on mutual trust, respect and freedom of expression, allowing you to discover insights that can completely transform your game.
The coaching process utilizes meaningful conversation, challenge and accountability, insight and empathy, self-awareness and self-inquiry, dynamic decision-making, gratitude, vision, humor and fun towards fulfillment and integration in all spheres of life - matter, body, mind, soul and spirit. Please see the FAQ for how a typical coaching session works.
Take practicing the piano as a metaphor for instance – there are actually no right or wrong notes – you simply learn what you repeat. If you play unconsciously, if you rush through difficult places or fail to involve yourself musically where it matters, you learn the “mistakes” you repeat and this in turn creates a certain experience in the artist and in the listener. But if you slow down enough to where you can be mindful not only of the notes or your form, but of how you would like to play the music as well, then you reinforce your technical mastery and soon are playing powerful, expressive music without even thinking about it. In this sense there is an art to living – are you aware of how you are playing?
As your coach, I help you reflect on what is going on in your life so that you can become aware of what is going on objectively. Self awareness is the first step towards acknowledging the things we would like to change in our life. Once you are able to be self aware, you begin to be conscious of what it is you truly want and that you have a choice about the kind of life you want to create and the kind of person you want to be. This empowers you to become more intentional with your actions, allowing you to orient yourself towards your perfect form – your ideal – and reorient yourself each time old habits and resistance kick in, attempting to pull you back into old, familiar ways of thinking, feeling or acting. Yet each time we return to consciously practicing how we want to be, it becomes reinforced and more deeply integrated as a spontaneous way of being. Self Victory is specifically this transformative capacity through practice to give up who you are for who you would become – to give up old, unconscious ways of functioning for those we choose consciously. So in coaching, practice involves choosing ongoing goals, awareness practices or reading assignments that you feel good about, and you feel will improve your life based on your reflections and insights in the coaching session. Through this integration of action and inquiry, experience and understanding, coaching can produce lasting and meaningful change not only in a particular area of your life, but the transformation of your self as a whole.
Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives. Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has. (From the International Coach Federation Website)
Self-Victory Life Coaching brings together my experiences as someone who has practiced meditation, self-awareness, self-inquiry, and trained in martial arts for many years. Core to all of these practices is the theme of looking within deeply – of looking in the mirror over and over again and practicing to refine what we see towards fulfillment and mastery. Self Victory means using every experience outside of ourselves as a mirror to refine what we see reflected within. Everything happens for a reason. As the founder of Aikido says: “There is no enemy….True victory is victory over one’s self!”
Somatic arts hold that the body and mind are an integrated interrelating whole where one is intimately tied to and expresses the other. As offered here, somatic coaching combines coaching and martial arts training, using the way the body moves on the mat as a metaphor for how we move off the mat in our lives. This involves first becoming aware of our individual body and what this tells us about our psychology – how we stand and move unconsciously, where we hold tension or stress in the body and how we can both align and open our posture yet relax areas of inner stress and tension with our breath. Second we use the metaphors that arise in context of how our body moves with others in martial arts training to talk about how we engage with life off the mat. The themes that arise in training are endless and operate around the notion that how we train with the body on the mat is the same as how we train our minds off the mat. Coaching is then utilized to help you reflect on what came up in training and what this implies as a metaphor so that you can then develop a parallel practice that you can carry with you off the mat and into your life.
Spiritual coaching provides an integrative coaching experience for those who would like to bring their experience in meditation (or other spiritual practice) and intellectual study into daily life. It helps clients establish and be held accountable to a regular meditation routine and develop mindfulness/awareness practices based on self-inquiry and study of spiritual texts. The approach will be co-created with the client based on his/or her spiritual practice and intellectual material of choice, be it from the tradition of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Yoga, Vedanta, Western Judeo-Christian-Sufi mysticism, new age teachers (such as Tolle, Katie or Wilber), archetypal/depth psychology, Integral psychology et al. This spiritual framework, combined with the coaching, allows the client to explore and self-discover – to combine inner experience and understanding as well as to integrate this consciousness into the way they live their life – spiritual practice and practical spirituality.
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