Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back to the podcast.
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This is Joanna Lindenbaum, and thank you, thank you for being here with me today.
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Today’s episode is all about doing somatic work with clients.
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I’m going to break down a little bit what somatic work is, why you might want to use it, and then I’m also going to share a few key pieces that will make your somatic work even more effective.
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if somatic work is already in your toolbox.
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This is one of my most favorite topics and somatic work, as I’ll share in a little bit, is one of my favorite ways to work with clients.
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I can’t wait to dive into all of that.
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But first, real quick, before we do, I wanted to let you know that
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The Help Your Clients Off of the Wheel of Self-Sabotage Masterclass is coming up.
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And I wanted to tell you a little bit about it.
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And I’ll tell you in this way.
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Imagine this scenario.
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You’re in session with a client.
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They’re having breakthroughs, real insights.
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You can feel that something inspiring is happening in the session.
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Your client leaves committed, they’re ready to take some stretchy action, and you’re so excited to see the progress that they’re going to make by the time you meet next.
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But then nothing happens.
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Or your client does a little bit, but then slides right back into their old patterns, or
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They go and they do something on a lark that kind of blows things up for them.
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Things like showing up late to an important meeting or picking a fight with the very person that they were going to reach out to for a key partnership.
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And then when this happens, as the coach or the practitioner, you might be left wondering, what am I missing here?
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Why isn’t this working?
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for this client, and you may even end up asking yourself, am I not a good enough coach?
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When scenarios like this happen, you’re likely witnessing what I would call the wheel of self-sabotage, a powerful, predictable cycle that keeps clients stuck.
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and keeps us stuck, even when clients desperately want to change.
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And when your client is on that wheel of self-sabotage, you need a very specific approach to be able to break the cycle.
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This is why I’m super excited to tell you about the Help Your Clients Off the Wheel of Self-Sabotage masterclass.
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It is a live 90-minute deep dive workshop.
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And in those 90 minutes, we are going to cover a lot.
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We’re going to look at the complete four-stage self-sabotage cycle.
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We’re going to look at how to spot the cycle and the hidden patterns that keep clients stuck and in action.
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And then I’m going to share with you my framework to help clients off of the wheel, even if they’ve been stuck in the self-sabotage for years.
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We’re going to look at real examples and practical tools that you can use immediately.
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And the bonus in all of it is that we’re also going to do a deep dive into your own self-sabotage behaviors and how you get stuck on the wheel of self-sabotage.
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So
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This masterclass, it’s one of those signature masterclasses that I’ve taught to thousands of practitioners.
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And it’s also the one that the International Coaching Federation chapters all over the country continue to ask me to present to their groups.
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It’s really a good one.
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Plus in it, I share a story that is very personal about Bono from you too.
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So anyway, I’ll drop the links to that masterclass in the show notes.
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I hope you’ll be able to make it.
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So somatic work is a hot topic these days and with very good reason.
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And I’ll say right away, the fact that it’s a hot topic these days, it kind of makes my heart very happy.
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I’ve been working somatically with clients since the beginning, for nearly 25 years now.
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And my toolbox of dozens of somatic approaches is a big part of what allows the depth of transformation that I see in my client work.
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Those somatic approaches really impact.
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They make a big difference.
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And one of the reasons
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why it’s so amazing that finally more and more people and more and more coaches are interested in somatic work is because for a long time, the body was left out of so much personal growth work.
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And finally, finally, finally, we are remembering that transformation doesn’t just happen in the mind.
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It doesn’t just happen from the neck up.
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Now, at the same time, when something becomes popular, it can also sometimes get a little flattened or misused.
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And I’ll say that
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In so many ways, somatic work is simple, at least on the outside when you’re observing it.
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But there is a lot of skill.
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as well as understanding of human behavior and awareness about nervous system and regulation that really goes into doing safe and effective somatic work.
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And that’s whether the work is a smaller accent in a session or whether it’s a full process that takes up a good portion of the session.
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Now, it’s been shown over and over again that cognitive work on its own is sometimes and really often not enough to help clients overcome obstacles and truly embody new ways of being.
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So insight is very valuable and awareness is very valuable.
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But
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Understanding something intellectually, that insight, that awareness, that intellectual understanding, it doesn’t always lead to change.
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So a client can know why they procrastinate, and you may help them cognitively come to know and understand why they procrastinate.
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Or a client can understand, maybe with your support, where their fears come from.
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Or they can see the patterns really clearly.
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But even with all of that understanding, they still might do the same exact thing tomorrow.
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And you might know this for yourself.
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I definitely do.
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How many times have you had a cognitive breakthrough, one that is just like so amazing, so exciting, it feels so revelatory, but then you do nothing with the breakthrough.
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It doesn’t change your behavior at all.
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It really only kind of gathers dust in your coaching notebook or your journal.
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I can give you so many personal examples of this.
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I’ll give you one.
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I remember when I first became aware many, many years ago of my fear of being visible.
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And as soon as I became aware of that fear of visibility, I could see so clearly where it came from, why I was hiding.
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I could see so clearly all of the patterns.
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of the fear of visibility, how it was playing out in my business, all the things.
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And they were big.
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These things were revelatory for me.
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Because I hadn’t realized what a fear I had until that point.
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I hadn’t realized the specific patterns.
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I hadn’t realized even the depth of where the fear came from.
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It was
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It was really big and important to have that cognitive awareness.
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But the truth is that the cognitive awareness around the fear of visibility for me wasn’t enough to then just go and be bold and courageous and stretchy and take more visibility actions in my business.
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My mind totally understood.
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My mind totally got it.
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But my body, my nervous system, the awareness alone, it still didn’t prepare me, my body, my nervous system to take the action.
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It wasn’t until I worked somatically with the fear of visibility that things started to shift for me, that I was more willing to stretch myself and to take those visibility actions.
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So again,
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Cognitive awareness is so important.
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I definitely don’t want to throw it under the bus because it’s a big part of what makes coaching so valuable and so effective.
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It opens up so much.
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It gives so much insight.
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And I always like to say,
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Awareness leads to new empowered choices for our clients.
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It opens up pathways.
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It helps them see where they do have choice and places where before the awareness came, they didn’t realize they had choice.
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And of course, I love to train coaches and practitioners in
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so many skills that activate intellectual awareness, cognitive awareness, cognitive knowing, motivation, all of that.
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But that being said, again, it’s not always enough.
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And awareness or cognitive understanding can sometimes end up feeling like a booby prize.
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when it doesn’t help your clients move forward or when your awareness doesn’t help you move forward.
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So, much of what drives our behavior doesn’t only live in the thinking mind only.
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It lives in the nervous system and in the body.
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It lives in those protective strategies that were once really, truly needed.
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We needed those strategies in the nervous system.
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We needed maybe to be hypervigilant in order to survive.
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But a lot of those protective strategies, we don’t need them all the time anymore.
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They’re now outdated, but they’re still in the body, even if intellectually we understand that they’re outdated.
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So just to give a
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A brief example of this, I have had a lifelong fear of being accepted, being accepted and really loved and liked by others.
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And when I was younger, growing up in the environment that I grew up in, being accepted was a survival strategy.
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I needed to be accepted by adults that were taking care of me in order to know that they were going to take care of me, in order to not be neglected, et cetera.
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At that age, I wouldn’t be able to fend for myself if my parents didn’t accept me and thus didn’t take care of me.
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And so
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because of that early protective strategy, because of that early survival strategy, I grew up into a people pleaser.
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You might know this for yourself as well, right?
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I grew up into someone who feels, who felt like I need to please people so that they can accept me.
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so that I can survive.
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Now, of course, at first, before I started inspecting this, I didn’t even understand.
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I didn’t have words to it, right?
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I didn’t understand the pattern and how one thing led to the next.
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But then as I started working on it, I had the words.
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But what I want to share on this right now is that, yes, when I was younger,
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I needed to be a people pleaser to get that acceptance.
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But as an adult, I actually don’t need that, for the most part, as a survival strategy anymore.
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Because as an adult, as a 50 year old woman, I have different resources than I had when I was eight years old.
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I can survive
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if people don’t accept me for the most part, right?
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I can survive if I don’t please people.
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So I started to understand this intellectually, but my nervous system didn’t know this until I did the somatic work around it.
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So all of this is why I believe the somatic work matters so much, why it can be so, so helpful in certain situations.
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The cognitive understanding alone, oftentimes when we’re working with a client, isn’t enough to support them to break a habit, isn’t enough
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to help them befriend a fear or leverage a shadow or embody a new inspired idea, right?
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And that word embody really matters here.
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The body holds so much wisdom, so much intuition, so much clarity, and even more so
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the body holds so much by way of unlocking the keys that keep us in those outdated protective strategies that no longer serve us most of the time.
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But it’s only through working with the body that we can set different patterns in the nervous system, right?
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So
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Leaving all of this out of the mix is like only working with a fraction of your client as a whole.
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So when I have a client that’s navigating a fear, we’ll very often, most likely at one point or another, we’re going to work somatically.
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When I have a client that’s stuck in resistance, we will very often work somatically.
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If a client has trouble getting excited about a goal, oftentimes a somatic process, even just like a short one, can come in really, really handy.
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If a client is being booby trapped by an unrealized shadow, we’re almost always going to do some somatic work with it.
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If a client has trouble clarifying a vision,
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Somatics is one pathway that can help.
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When a client is blocked by limiting beliefs, even though beliefs in part, of course, live in the mind, we still bring in the body in one way or another to support shifting the beliefs.
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And
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Even when a client has come upon a new piece of important wisdom or insight, I’ll often work then with the body to anchor the new wisdom or insight into the system.
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So the somatic work is usually going to be accompanied
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by cognitive work and also by other types of work.
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So for those of you that have trained with me or have been in Sacred Depths, you know that we learn how to activate what I call the four levels of learning and processing in our coaching.
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The cognitive and the somatic, those are two.
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But sometimes we want to work with the emotional level of learning and processing.
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Sometimes we want to work with the spiritual level of learning and processing.
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So whether the somatic work that you do in any given session is four minutes or 34 minutes, the work needs a real container.
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One that can hold not just the somatic techniques, but also the presence.
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Presence is so important with somatic work.
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The pacing, the ethics, and also the energetics of the practitioner themselves.
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All of this is so important.
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So I say this because
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You really want to get trained on this type of work so that you can be effective in it, but also so that you can keep the work that you’re doing with clients safe and in the scope of coaching.
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I really want to emphasize this.
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When you work with a client on anything, and especially when you work somatically,
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Your client is placing a great deal of trust in you.
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you.
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And in somatic work, you’re inviting your client to be with their body and to listen to the wisdom of their body.
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You’re inviting them to hold space in that way.
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And our bodies are also where trauma is held.
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Now, whether you work somatically, spiritually,
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emotionally, or even, I’m using air quotes here, even just cognitively, you often cannot avoid trauma responses, especially if you’re working with clients on stretchy goals.
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Because it’s kind of part of being human, and trauma responses can come up
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in so many of the everyday habits and patterns that we work on with our clients.
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And it can also come up in the relationship sometimes itself, right?
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But for example, a habit like overworking or patterns of overworking, it may be a trauma response.
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Fear of visibility could be.
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having trouble setting aligned boundaries, et cetera, et cetera, right, just to name a few.
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So I share all of this to say that trauma-informed skills are not optional in any event in coaching, and especially in somatic work.
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You want to get trained on it.
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And inside of Sacred Depths, you do get trained on all of this step by step by step.
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Not just the techniques and the skills, but the presence and the ethics and the energetics required to do trauma-informed somatic work.
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And you learn how to do all of this with nuance and with mastery.
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So
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To be clear, today’s episode isn’t a try this at home episode if you haven’t been trained.
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I’m going to share three of many, many nuances that we learn inside of sacred depths and advanced depths that can immediately level up your somatic work if it’s already a part of your practice.
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So this is not meant to be a training.
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This is not meant to be comprehensive at all.
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I need to say that for safety purposes, right?
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For ethical purposes.
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There are many things about somatic work that you really want to learn and master.
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But
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For today, I like to think of what we’re looking at as inspiration and an invitation into much larger conversation and experience around all of this.
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So here are three really important keys, nuances that make such a difference, both in terms of
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of effectiveness and in terms of safety when it comes to somatic work.
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Number one, go slow.
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So the mind works quickly, so quickly, and
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Some of this is cultural, right?
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In our culture, we’ve placed an enormous, enormous emphasis on cognitive knowledge, on speed, on productivity, on quick figuring things out.
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And then on top of that, now with social media and scrolling and 10-second clips and reels and constant distraction and also artificial intelligence spitting
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things out, you know, in seconds.
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Our brains and our nervous systems are being trained by culture to go even faster.
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But the body is on its own timing, right?
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When we’re talking about somatics, we’re talking about the body.
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The body has its own sense of space and
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and spaciousness always.
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And thank goodness for that.
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We cannot rush the body.
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So when you’re working somatically, one of the most important things to remember is to go slow.
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And honestly, even when you’re not working somatically,
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My invitation to you is to see if you can go slower in your coaching sessions.
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When you go slower, it can help you connect dots with your clients.
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It can help you go deeper, take your client deeper into the exploration.
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It can support your clients to take in more deeply what’s coming through.
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I always say slow down to speed up.
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So in somatic work specifically, you’re not looking to be smarty pants.
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We’re actually going to talk a bit more about that in a little bit.
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I know, especially for my people, because if you’re listening to this, you’re already so smart, you’re smarty pants like I am.
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But in the somatic work, we’re not looking to be too smart, actually.
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We’re not looking for lots of new ideas to emerge, or tons of clever insights to emerge from the somatic work, or beautifully articulated stories and narratives.
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Not that those things aren’t amazing, or that there isn’t a place for all of that.
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There is.
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But that’s not the ultimate purpose of somatic work.
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What you’re looking for when working with the body is something much deeper than lots of new ideas and clever insights and narratives.
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What you’re looking for when you’re working with the body, it requires you to hold a slower and more spacious container.
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where your clients can actually stay with their body so that their body can speak, so that their body can pave different nervous system patterns, so that their body can maybe shift as it’s meant to shift in its own time.
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I’ll share that when I model
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different somatic techniques inside of either sacred depths or advanced depth, techniques like the befriend your fear technique or working with the resistance archetypes or memory reconsolidation techniques or shadow techniques, et cetera, et cetera.
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When I model those, my students are usually shocked.
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in the best of ways.
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But they’re shocked at how much spaciousness there is inside of those processes.
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They’re shocked at the pacing and at how much can happen on so many levels through going slow, through using fewer words.
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and through the spaciousness.
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Now, to be clear, slow doesn’t mean passive at all.
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It does mean being attuned, and it does mean being connected, where you and your clients are listening and noticing deeply.
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Depth and change emerge,
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when there’s enough time and safety for the body and the nervous system to reveal what’s actually there.
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Okay, so that is actually a great segue into the second key that I want to share today for doing better and safer somatic work.
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And that is to pay attention to your own nervous system.
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Okay, so we just looked at the importance of going slow in somatic work.
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And like we said, one of the reasons to go slow is because the biggest benefit of somatic work is actually not new insight.
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New insight will often come through and that’s great.
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But I’m always telling my students in sacred depths and advanced depth, that’s actually not the purpose of the somatic work.
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Although the insight will come and then you can use it and it’s great.
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But the biggest benefit, the biggest purpose of somatic work is that it supports clients in becoming regulated with things, with fears, with beliefs, with ideas,
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that they’re not normally comfortable with, that it supports clients in becoming regulated with things that usually dysregulate them.
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And the only way that this can happen, as I said earlier, is by slowing it all down.
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But it is hard to slow things down
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when you’re coaching, it is hard to slow things down inside of your client containers if you, the coach, the practitioner, if you yourself aren’t regulated.
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Because this is so much about co-regulation.
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Your nervous system and your client’s nervous system
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are always interacting.
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Always, always, always.
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That is an element of any coaching session.
00:32:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Your nervous system and your client’s nervous system are always interacting.
00:33:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
And by the way, that goes for somatic work or like purely cognitive work or strategic work or even consulting work.
00:33:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I want to invite you to think about this and to be really intentional about your nervous system.
00:33:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
When coaches, when practitioners move too quickly as they’re holding space or are reactive instead of responsive,
00:33:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
when they’re holding space, or when practitioners aren’t in the space with full presence, or they’re too much in their own heads and minds, and not enough in their bodies inside of session, because we need to be embodied when we’re in session.
00:33:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s often because
00:34:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
the practitioner is dysregulated in one way or another, right?
00:34:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re in their own fear, they’re in their own trauma response, they’re in their own unhelpful belief, or they haven’t taken the time to be in their body, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I’m not saying this, by the way, never, I’m not saying this as a, like if this happens to you, for you to criticize yourself at all,
00:34:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
This can happen to the best of us.
00:34:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
I still, I teach this stuff and I still, every now and again, I catch myself getting dysregulated inside of a session.
00:34:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes more than every now and again, if it’s a particularly like just stressful period in my life, right?
00:34:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
And there are ways for us to course correct.
00:34:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
even if it does come up in a session.
00:35:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
And there are also ways for us to prepare for this and to do the inner work on this.
00:35:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
So there are solutions to this.
00:35:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the first, we look at them inside of sacred depths, but really the first step is for you to be more aware.
00:35:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, last,
00:35:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Key for today, last key to doing better and safer somatic work with your clients, is don’t ask complicated questions.
00:35:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
Don’t be that smarty pants.
00:35:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
In other words, don’t tempt the mind to take over.
00:35:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
So when you are guiding a somatic process, it is very, very important to stay away from complicated or too smart questions.
00:36:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because complicated questions or smarty pants questions, those questions, they almost always pull clients out of their bodies and straight back into their heads.
00:36:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because only sophisticated thinking, right, from the thinking mind can answer sophisticated thinking mind questions.
00:36:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s just how it is.
00:36:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
And so often inside of somatic processes, you know, if you’re not trained in all of this work, you can end up
00:36:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
asking these more complicated, really great questions, but they’re just too, they just pull our clients back into their minds.
00:37:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
So in somatic work, the best questions are rooted in simplicity.
00:37:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
Very few questions, very few words, very simple.
00:37:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of the things that we really look at in sacred depths is how to trust simplicity and how to recognize when a question is serving the body versus when a question is activating the mind.
00:37:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
So keep your questions simple.
00:37:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
so that the body can lead, so that the client can stay with the body instead of the mind running the show.
00:37:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
And there is definitely a true art to crafting simple somatic questions.
00:38:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
But I’ll give you like one little trick right now.
00:38:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
Kind of like a quick rule of thumb, any question that starts with the word why or how come, those are basically jet fuel for the cognitive mind.
00:38:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
So definitely stay away from why questions or how come questions inside of cognitive work.
00:38:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sorry, inside of somatic work.
00:38:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
OK, so somatic work is some of the deepest, most sacred, and most transformational work that you can do with clients.
00:38:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
And honestly, it’s also so much fun.
00:39:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
I really– I just love it.
00:39:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s fun.
00:39:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s sacred.
00:39:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
It feels like–
00:39:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
This isn’t just me.
00:39:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
When I teach my clients how to do this, they say the same things.
00:39:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
It just– it feels like this sacred privilege to hold space for and witness another human being, like, being with themselves so honestly and so deeply.
00:39:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m really thrilled that somatic work is becoming more and more well known and that people are becoming more curious about it.
00:39:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
So as we looked at when somatic work is done slowly with simplicity, with real nervous system awareness and safety, it’s it’s
00:40:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Pure magic.
00:40:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it’s where some of the deepest change can happen.
00:40:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if this way of working with clients really calls to you, again, this is exactly the kind of depth that we explore and train on inside of Sacred Depths, among many other things.
00:40:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
We learn how to not rush.
00:40:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
We learn how to stop performing in our sessions.
00:40:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we also learn how to meet the body and how to meet our clients with real presence and real skills and very specific techniques.
00:41:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if this is something that is calling to you,
00:41:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
I want to invite you to really consider joining us for the next cohort.
00:41:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you want a little bit of a toe dip, I want to remind you to register for the upcoming How to Help Clients Off the Wheel of Self-Sabotage workshop.
00:41:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
You’re going to love it.
00:41:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I hope I see you there, as always.
00:41:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thank you, thank you for listening.
00:41:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
It means the world to me.
00:41:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I hope that this episode was valuable.
00:41:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
If it was, would you do me a favor?
00:41:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
Just take two minutes, two more minutes out of your day and actually shoot me an e-mail.
00:42:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
You can send it to info@applied.com.
00:42:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
depthinstitute.com.
00:42:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let me know that you’re listening to the podcast.
00:42:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let me know what you loved about today’s episode.
00:42:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let me know what topics you want me to bring here to the podcast.
00:42:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
I do this for you and knowing that
00:42:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s bringing value, gives me more inspiration to do more.
00:42:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
So please let me know if you’re valuing all of this, what you’re getting from all of this.
00:42:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
Share it with a friend who might love it.
00:42:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
Give us a five-star rating and a really good review.
00:42:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I will see you next time.
