Coaching as Instrument: Follow the Energy

This Week's Attunement 

"When rain falls, it flows downhill. If desired, you can collect the rain in a bucket and carry it uphill, but the natural tendency of water is to flow toward the lowest point. Most situations in life have a tendency—a direction in which things want to flow. You can choose to go against the flow (just as you can choose to carry water uphill), but your results tend to be better when you find a way to work with the gradient of the situation. Position yourself to benefit from the external forces at hand and you will get more from the same unit of effort. Energy is conserved and results are multiplied."
- James Clear

Last fall, Learning in Action offered a beta 12-week course called Mindful Coach Certification. It was more of an idea than a course.

I made the decision not to craft or plan the course and instead let the course, the students, and the universe decide what it wanted to be and created space for that.

One of the ideas explored in the course (the same idea that shaped it) was “Follow the Energy.” We reflected in the course on how energy wants to flow and the various ways that a client's energy shows up during a coaching session.

With the simple instruction of “Follow The Energy,” coaches experimented attending closely to their client's energy. Instead of trying to create a contract or formulate a question, they allowed the first thought, intuition, or sensation "pop", allowing their own energy to flow with the intention of encouraging the client's organic process of moving energy through them.

Coaches said that simply by following their client's energy, they had remarkably more transformative coaching sessions and both client and coach felt more energized afterward.

Give it a try…Follow the Energy. Your clients’ and your own. Here’s a practice from our Mindful Coach Certification you can use.

What's Inspiring Me
So I can continue to do what I do and inspire my clients as well

Probably like you, I read a lot. And more and more, I allow synchronicity to determine what I read. A client mentions a book, I hear an interview of the author on NPR, the same book pops up somewhere else (like in the Little Library just off our driveway). That's how I came to read "Making Sense" by Sam Harris. In it Harris says:

“Consciousness is a prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I”, and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness – free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.” 

If I believe this (and I do as it meets with my own experience), then we are all Consciousness itself. Never-changing and witnessing the ever-changing.