Coaching Quote of the Day 18th March 2015
“First, to be able to love, then to learn that body and spirit are one.”
(Hugo von Hofmannsthal)
body
Let your body do the talking 1
Coach Charlotte Green shares some of her expertise and knowledge in today’s guest post:
Let your body do the talking
By Charlotte Green, founder of Inner Confidence for Women
I am often asked whether ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ are the same or different – are they interchangeable words or do they mean different things?
Feelings and emotions are certainly related concepts and that is why they are often confused and treated as the same thing, and in many cases that works well. But when we, as coaches, are helping clients to really know and understand themselves, it can be really useful to differentiate between the two.
So what is the difference?
Feelings are in the moment. They are what we experience physically within our bodies and through our 5 senses. It’s useful to refer to them as physical feelings. Unlike our emotions, they do not involve the mind. Emotions on the other hand are a mental interpretation of the feelings we are experiencing mixed in with our thoughts.
When asked how they feel, I notice that people respond on one of three levels. Some respond with a thought – “I’ve got so much going on” – others give an emotion – “I’m finding it hard to cope” – or they go inside and describe exactly what their body is telling them – “I feel so tense and exhausted. Everything aches.”
Here is a table to show examples of the 3 levels:
[table width=”600″ colwidth=”75|175|75|275″ colalign=”centre|left|left|left|”]
,,,,
Level 1:,’no one will help me’,Thought ,An idea or opinion produced by thinking / a mental picture – imagined and contemplated in the mind influenced by life experiences
Level 2:,’I feel anxious’,emotion,A combination of thoughts and physical feelings – an interpretation
Level 3:,’My shoulders feel really tense and my stomach is in knots’,feeling,Physical experiences within the body and information received through one of the bodies 5 senses (touch/ taste/ smell/ sound/ sight)
[/table]
So, which level do we want to be working with?
We are a holistic system and need information from each of the 3 levels to be fully resourceful and yet, in the western society we overemphasise the importance of the mind. This means that thoughts can dominate and hijack the system resulting in stress and overwhelm.
By paying attention to all the messages we receive from our thoughts, emotions and feelings we maintain a balanced and informed system, each giving us feedback that helps us be safe as well as to develop and grow. Imbalance occurs when one level dominates or hijacks another or we shut one down. There is no hero or villain in this situation – each part of the emotional system is equally valid and essential and deserves attention.
EXAMPLE – Inviting client to connect to themselves at a deeper level
Here is an excerpt from a recent coaching session (I have client’s permission to share this) where I was inviting my client to connect to themselves more deeply. They move down through all three levels shown in the table above. For those of you who use NLP, this can be a great tool for accessing positive states to anchor.
Coach: How are you feeling today?
Client: I’ve had a good day (thought)
Coach: I know you said that you have had a difficult few weeks so that’s really good to hear. How are you feeling?
Client: I’m happy (emotion)
Coach: How do you know you are happy?
Client: work went OK, got time with my partner tonight and looking forward to getting together with friends tomorrow (thoughts)
Coach: they sound like a lot of good reasons (thoughts) why you might feel happy. Let’s go inside more and find out how you experience that within your body. How does your body let you know it’s happy? What do you notice about your body right now? How do you feel?
Client: I feel a bit tingly all over and I have a big smile on my face (feelings)
Coach: Just sit with that feeling for a moment. You can turn up the volume if you want …
Client: (smiling) Wow! I feel lovely. My breathing has really slowed down and deepened. I feel really calm and relaxed.
How to apply this to your coaching
- Introduce the emotional system to your clients and encourage them to check in with themselves regularly throughout the day:
- Simply ask yourself “how do I feel right now”
- Then notice at which level you answer
- Practice moving up and down the levels, particularly going down if you tend to start from thoughts
- Moving from thoughts to emotions “how am I feeling right now”
- Moving from emotions to thoughts “what am I thinking about right now”
- Moving from emotions to feelings “what am I physically feeling in my body”
- As a coach, remember to walk your talk and check your own emotional system is flowing and that all 3 areas have your attention. It will improve your intuitive abilities to coach and help you build rapport with your clients.
- You can shift physical feelings simply by being present with your breath (mindfulness) so this is a very effective method of managing stress. Give your breath your full attention – it takes practice but in my experience the calm comes quickly and feels really good.
Although I have been a coach since 2006, I have specialised in working with women for the last 4 years, and more recently with young adults, both of which are hugely rewarding. In my experience, developing a complete emotional language has been a massively influential part of my client’s successful transformations.
Women in particular, who are often so tuned into and committed to the wellbeing of other people’s emotions, have found that having the permission and skills to tune into themselves has enabled them to break free of limiting behaviours, thoughts and habits and be able to create a much more balanced and satisfying life.
I hope you and your clients enjoy exploring your emotional systems.
About Charlotte Green
Charlotte founded Inner Confidence for Women in 2006 after a fascinating corporate career managing an international training team for a global electronic publisher where she and her team ran workshops within Universities and Government organisations across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Although she gained invaluable experience and skills from the corporate world, her real passion lay within personal development.
Inner Confidence for Women specialises in self confidence, self esteem and emotional wellbeing for women and young people. Charlotte is incredibly passionate about her work and reaches her clients through running courses, workshops and through 121 coaching.
Charlotte was inspired to focus on working with women after the birth of her daughter in 2010. “Being around so many women who put their own needs to the bottom of the pile while they made sure everyone else was OK really spoke to me. I love helping women find themselves again, or for the first time. It is a joy to encourage women to raise their self esteem and self confidence so they can embrace their lives”
As a professional trainer as well as a coach, Charlotte is able to reach a wider audience creating and delivering workshops to inspire young adult carers in Suffolk. “When an 18 year stays behind after the workshop to tell me excitedly about how they used the new tools and techniques to improve a situation that normally spirals out of control, it is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world”.
Charlotte believes that unexpressed emotions are like a drunk relative at a wedding – they corner you and won’t leave you alone! As an accredited Peer Support Network trainer she co-runs courses on behalf of a local Mind charity, Suffolk Mind, helping people to learn how to notice, accept, express and understand their own emotions so they can increase their confidence and wellbeing.
Charlotte is passionate about helping people to believe in themselves “when you believe in yourself, anything is possible”
Find out more, get in touch, like, follow, tweet (!) …
Twitter : @ICforWomen
Blog: http://innerconfidenceforwomen.wordpress.com/
Website : www.innerconfidenceforwomen.co.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Innerconfidenceforwomen
Coaching Quote of the Day 10th April 2013
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
(Gautama Buddha)
Coaching Quote of the Day 20th September 2012
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
(C.S. Lewis)
Coaching Quote of the Day 8th February 2012
“The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.”
(George Santayana)
What Shape is your Confidence: taking these simple steps can boost your confidence
In this weeks guest post, coach and psychologist, Colin Clerkin shares some thoughts about confidence. Could these be steps you use personally or with clients?
What Shape is your Confidence: taking these simple steps can boost your confidence
by Colin Clerkin
What Shape is your Confidence: taking these simple steps can boost your confidence
When you think about confidence, what does it mean to you? It is an attitude, a belief, a sense of assuredness that permeates your being and allows you to feel that you can achieve anything. A confident you can nail that presentation, make that sale, ask for that raise.
But an un-confident you… now, that is a very different story, is it not? Self-doubt, uncertainty, anxiety; an inability to function that often makes little sense to you because you know you have the ability, but the self-belief is just not there when you need it.
There are many things that we can learn to try to address our lack of confidence. Coaches and psychologists can help with psycho-educational training that looks at assertiveness, stress management courses, social skills training, etc. All of these can make a positive difference to how you perceive a situation and your response to it, but I would like to introduce another, simple idea, one that approaches the problem at a physical level.
I would like you to consider how your body shape reflects your inner state — and then recognise how you can start to overcome problems with confidence by actively, physically, making the changes I will introduce to you in this article.
Lack of confidence has a “shape”
When we are NOT confident, we all know that it shows. The people around us can tell. For example, the un-confident me will tend to close in on myself: my shoulders droop; my head drops; my eye contact becomes poor. I might rub my hands, or chew my lip, or yawn even though I am not tired. All of this occurs unconsciously in response to some perceived threatening situation. This is not threatening in the sense that my physical well-being is at risk, but threatening to my self-esteem and my sense of competence as a person.
So, let’s begin to address this by looking at how adjusting the frame of the body can lead us to positive change in how we feel in certain situations, and we can learn to use body posture as a priming cue for confidence.
Body posture creates the scaffolding upon which we can hang positive imagery to help shift our perceptions of ourselves — if we can learn to project our confident shape onto our body framework, we can use this to start altering our response to challenges to our confidence.
By paying attention to and altering our body posture in line with our desired functioning, and building onto this scaffold, we can cue associated desired, confident responses.
But where do we find “our confident shape”?
The first place to look is in our own experience. Think back to a time when you did feel confident. Spend a minute or two recalling that experience; what it felt like and, importantly, how you held yourself at the time. Notice how your shoulders were set strongly, your head up. Felt good, didn’t it? This is the core of the confident image that I want you to project onto the body scaffold I described above.
If your life experience has not been of confidence previously, then take some time to think about someone that you admire whom you consider to be supremely and positively confident. They can be a real person or someone from fiction; it does not matter. But notice what it is about their physical presentation that causes you to perceive them as confident. Notice how they hold themselves, the way they meet the gaze of the person they are speaking to, or their voice tone when they speak. Imagine this confident posture projected onto your own frame and pay attention to where in your body you first notice the spark of that feeling as it takes hold.
Breath in deeply and focus on that part of your body where you feel that confidence once again. With each deep breathe in, allow yourself to experience that confidence growing. Physically allow your body to mirror the posture of that confident you of old or that admired role model. Feel the shape of confidence as it takes hold of your frame and inhabit it.
Now realise what you have just achieved
With a few simple deep breaths and the application of a memory from another time or an impression of another’s poise to your current body posture, you have boosted your own confidence. It may only be by a matter of degrees this first time, but imagine how, by practicing this technique regularly, you can enhance this experience and learn to apply it readily at those times in your day-to-day life where previously you have felt your confidence escape you.
Learn to do this and you will soon see how your confidence can take on this new and exciting positive shape.
About the author
Dr Colin Clerkin is a psychologist and coach based in Chester, in the North West of England. Colin has been involved in helping people tackle challenges in their lives for 20 years, initially as a clinical psychologist and, over the past three years, as both a personal and a parent coach.After his own experiences with cancer in recent years, he has also been inspired to coach cancer survivors as they look to adjust to life after cancer.
He launched Mirror Coaching in 2010, and provides face-to-face or Skype-based coaching to parents, individuals and small business owners. He is currently creating an on-line coaching programme to help people in the early stages of setting up their coaching and therapy practices.