Every body can be successful
What do coaches do? Help you to perform better, to move better – in soccer, baseball, in leadership, as entrepreneurs – to help you improve how you perform whatever field you play on.
Isn’t somatic coaching basically the same thing? It can be. To respond to how it is different, I need to take you on a little journey. It starts simply. With nouns and verbs.
What nouns do you know yourself to be? Son or daughter. Wife, husband, mother, father. Department manager, business owner. Collector. Cyclist. Citizen. Neighbor. What is the rate of change in the nouns you know apply to you? Do they change daily? Monthly?
Are you more or less a wife or a neighbor between January and March? Maybe you are a cyclist between April and November but not December to March. We rely on nouns as the foundation for our stories about who we are, the building blocks of our identity.
To be or not to be….what verb am I?
What verbs do you know yourself to be? Notice if this question doesn’t make sense. As a teacher, I do several verbs regularly. Explain. Ask. Listen. Question. Search. Demonstrate. Gesture. We tend not to associate as easily with the verbs we do. I am a teacher and a coach. I tend not to say, I question, listen, lead, allow struggle, support learning, offer feedback.
How does this relate to somatic coaching and improving performance? Where do you think improvement happens – in the nouns or in the verbs?
Karlene’s verb is burst
Let’s work through this question with an individual. Let’s call her Karlene. Karlene is several nouns, a leader, a mother, a change-maker. And one of the verbs that Karlene does is bursting through – traditions that no longer serve, outdated policies, inequities. She is able to both have people feel she cares about them and she can burst their balloon, so that the changes that are called to happen have the space to happen. Her body is organized around bursting barriers. So parts of her are in pain – one shoulder, side of neck, hip – the side of her most often applied to bursting barriers.
So as a somatic coach, I could just work with her physical pain and that would help. I could just work with her biomechanical movement and help her to move better so she can function better. But without changing her verbs, in this case, the way she is organize to burst in, to burst through, any new change will fall under the weight of this verb, this bursting way of being.
As a somatic coach, I help people like Karlene discover their personal verbs, the way they do what they do, to feel it in their tissues. And create a way of moving that makes it more likely they will stop verbing towards pain and start verbing towards more wellness. Towards more wholeness. To simply being successfully them – complete. Capable. Less striving to be and more being.
Somatic Coaching is what and how you move as you
So simply put, somatic coaching is concerned with both what you move and how you move. And supporting you to decode your own mysterious black box of “Me” so you can become functional in your body as you. Less about the nouns. More about the verbs.
Interested in learning more? You can:
Sign up for a free 15-minute call to talk about your human condition. No sales pressure, just a caring conversation about what you are looking for and what I can offer. Book now https://www.kindpower.ca/book/
If you are ready to start, we begin with a 45-minute assessment (in person or online). Then based on what we discover together, I make a recommendation for what can support you. https://www.kindpower.ca/book/
While individual somatic coaching programs vary – this is not a one and done change effort. Depending on what a client wants and needs, I tend to recommend 6-10 sessions so we can do more than just identify a personal pattern; we can anchor securely the changes that support my clients to hold their goal with their own hands and know they can achieve it. If you are already working for your success – it can be good to have someone to give you a hand up.