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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Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.
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I am so glad you’re here, especially because today we’re diving into a topic that is very close to my heart.
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It’s the topic of how to truly co-create change with your one-on-one clients.
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And just off the bat, first of all, I use that word, co-create, very intentionally.
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because in really powerful coaching and transformational work, change doesn’t happen to our clients.
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It happens with them.
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So we as practitioners are not creating change.
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We are co-creating change with our clients.
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It’s a dance.
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a partnership, a collaboration between their wisdom, creativity, their sense of self, and our skill, our intuition, our presence, and the sacred container that we create together with our clients.
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When I think about the clients I’ve had the honor of working with over the years, there have been many.
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And also when I think about the thousands of coaches that I’ve trained, the transformation always comes from that space of co-creation.
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When I am guiding and listening, leading and following.
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when there’s an equal playing field and your client is invited to participate in their own unfolding.
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Nothing is being done to them.
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They are an active participant.
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It also feels really important as we step into this topic
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to share that it has really been one of the greatest honors of my life to be able to hold space for and witness other human beings reclaim who they are, find courage and resilience that they realize they never had,
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It’s been one of the greatest honors of my life to hold space and witness other human beings learn to love even their most unsavory parts and to speak out loud their most hidden truths.
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And I don’t use the word holy very often, and I don’t mean it necessarily in a religious sense.
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But I’ll tell you, those moments with clients where there is deep vulnerability, that comes through, where there is a profound breakthrough that surfaces, or when a client finally sees a part of themself that they’ve never seen before, come face to face with a truth
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Those moments are truly holy, and they are holy to witness.
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And like I said earlier, I don’t take it lightly or for granted.
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I know I am lucky to be a practitioner, and it is such an honor to witness it.
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being able to be that space holder and that witness, it has been and it continues to be a sacred and life-changing experience for me as the holder, as the witness to what I see my clients move through and come to.
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And
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This is one of the many reasons why I am so deeply committed to holding this type of space for my clients and also to teaching other practitioners how to hold this kind of space.
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And I will also say this is
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also why I’m a little different from some other coaches out there who’ve reached the level of business growth that I’ve reached.
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So this is neither good nor bad.
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I’m not judging at all, but it is about knowing who you are.
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So a lot of business owners out there who own coaching businesses,
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Once they hit a certain income level, they kind of remove themselves a little bit from their clients, from their students, and instead they spend more time as the CEO of the business.
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guiding the business to massive expansion, doing, spending most of their time on strategy and really big marketing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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And because of their role as this expanded CEO, there is that choice, like I said,
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to spend less time as a practitioner, to spend less time actually being with clients, to spend less time teaching their own clients.
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And there is nothing wrong with this at all.
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I want to be really, really clear.
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That being said, I’m kind of the opposite of that.
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So of course, I always somehow seem to be out-of-the-box, but maybe you are too.
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Maybe you can resonate with this.
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For me, even though I’ve reached that level of business growth, I know
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I am in it for all of the reasons that I already shared in this episode.
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I am in it to be with my clients, to be with my students.
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I am in it for that honor, that privilege, and that thrill and satisfaction of witnessing others transform as I hold space for them.
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I am in it also for having real deep relationships with my clients.
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This is why I still show up to teach the training calls in my programs versus asking team members to teach the training calls.
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This is why I still show up to Q&A calls in my group programs.
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This is why I still work with a roster of private clients, and I will never give up my teaching, my holding space, my working with clients.
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And I’m going to be honest, because of this choice that I’ve made, it might be that I’m never going to be that boss girl who takes my business to an empire.
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But the good news
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is that for me personally, I don’t want an empire.
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That’s never been my goal.
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My goal has always been to be with my clients and to hold the space.
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So getting back to different
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ways to co-create more transformation and change with clients.
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There are a lot of things that you want to have in place in order to be really effective in your coaching and in order to support your clients to achieve the results they deeply desire.
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And in today’s episode, I am going to share with you five of those ways.
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Five ways that you can consciously co-create change with your one-on-one clients.
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Five practices that deepen the transformation and help breakthroughs truly take root.
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And everything that I’m going to share with you today
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is all part of the practices and tools and components that I use in my own private client work.
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And everything I’m going to share with you are foundational to what I teach inside of the Sacred Depths Transformational Practitioner training and also to the Advanced Depth Shadow training.
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All of the shadow techniques I teach in advanced depth, they still require everything that I’m going to be sharing about today.
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What we are looking at today, these five practices, they are some of the tools that really make the difference between surface level change and real embodied sustainable transformation.
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And of
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course, when we are doing this level of work with our clients, and when true transformation is happening and real results are being achieved, not only is it an honor to do this work, and not only are we then in our deepest, most sacred purpose, making incredible impact,
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But also doing this level of work is the best marketing strategy in the world.
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Creating massive fans from clients who are over the moon delighted and satisfied with the work that they’ve done with us, who are so happy with the work
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that they’ve done with us, that they renew with us over and over again, as is appropriate for them.
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And they also send many referrals our way.
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So let’s get into it and look at these five practices.
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So the first one is to assign
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and really to co-design specific homework after sessions.
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Assign specific homework to bridge breakthroughs into transformation.
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So here’s the thing.
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When clients have a big breakthrough in session, it feels amazing.
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Their heart opens.
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They see something new.
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They feel the shift in their body.
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But without a bridge between that moment inside the session and real life, the old patterns are pretty likely to creep back in after the session.
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Homework is the bridge.
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or it’s part of the bridge, I should say.
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And it’s part of really what helps the new awareness become lived experience.
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And the key here, one of the keys here, again, is co-creation.
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Don’t just tell your clients what to do next after session.
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Collaborate with them.
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Ask them something like,
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What feels like the next small step that would help this insight take root?
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Or what would stress you just enough without overwhelming you?
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Keep the homework assignments simple and doable.
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And also, I almost always, when it comes to homework and work that clients do in between sessions, I almost always
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help them strategize on outer work assignments as well as what I call inner work assignments.
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So for example, on the outer, maybe it’s reaching out to a friend to practice a new boundary or writing the outline for the video script to help with visibility.
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On the inner,
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It might be to continue to work with the shadow that we uncovered in the session in a very specific way.
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Or the inner homework might be to track each time the fear comes up, the fear that we worked with in the session comes up.
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Or the inner homework might be to create a specific piece of art or do ritual.
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around the breakthrough.
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Sky’s the limit in terms of what the inner work can be.
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But what’s important here, and part of what I really want you to take from this, is that when we do deep work with a client in a session and these breakthroughs happen, if there isn’t homework, if they are not now practicing,
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the breakthrough in the inner and outer ways outside of the session, it becomes very hard for the true change to take root and it becomes harder to achieve goals.
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The inner work helps, the inner homework helps continue to loosen up
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the fears, to help leverage the shadows more, to help rewire around beliefs, et cetera, et cetera.
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But the outer homework actually does the same thing.
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It’s lived experience to help practice the breakthroughs.
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So I’ll give you an example.
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A couple of months ago,
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I worked with one of my clients on a pattern that she had for years of really wanting speaking opportunities, but never pursuing speaking opportunities.
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You might know this one for yourself.
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And in our session, when we started working about it, we ended up doing a memory reconsolidation technique.
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We used
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as the memory, a time when this client was in the 4th grade and she was in the musical and she had one of the lead roles.
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And as soon as she got on stage, she forgot her lines and she stood there like a deer in headlights on the stage.
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And some people, some other kids in the crowd
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started laughing, et cetera.
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So this memory reconsolidation technique is something that I teach in advanced depth to practitioners.
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And it’s a tool that I often use with my own clients.
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And it just, it knocks people’s socks off every time.
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It is so, powerful.
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And in this session with this client,
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what came through for her as we worked with this memory, it was so profound.
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And it allowed my client to go beneath the rubbles of her personal history, this history of what happened on stage, and also what happened afterwards with her parents.
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It helped her get beneath that rubble of history, also the fear of
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not being perfect.
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It helped her get beneath that inability to stand up for herself.
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And in a very deep and visceral way, through the work in the session, we together helped my client connect her to her desire to be big.
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and to be in the spotlight.
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And we connected her to viscerally, to her courage around all of that.
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So that was big work in the session.
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But of course we didn’t end there.
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So to this point around homework, we created very specific inner homework assignments based on that session.
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and outer homework assignments based on that session.
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She went and she did that homework in between sessions.
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And of course, we circled back to all of this in our following session.
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We didn’t just kind of work on it once and then leave it behind.
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And anyway, over the course of a couple of sessions and doing this homework,
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in between sessions, by the end of the month, a little longer, like 5 weeks later, my client was so utterly changed.
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She was reaching out for speaking gigs regularly.
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And in that outreach for speaking gigs, she was being bold in her description of herself
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and her work.
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And then after that, when it came to start to do the speaking, she rocked the house.
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So homework, when approached in this way, it’s not busy work at all.
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It’s sacred action that bridges between the aha
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the aha moments that happen inside of sessions and the actual transformation.
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Okay, so much more I can say on that, but let’s move on to the second practice that I want to just give a bird’s eye view of today, which is take time to work with fears.
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So the 2nd way to co-create change with clients and co-create more change is to take time, real time, to work with your clients’ fears.
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Because almost always, when someone is working towards a good and stretchy goal, for as much as they really want to achieve the goal, there’s going to be fear.
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that’s present as well.
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Fear of being seen, or fear of outgrowing a loved one, or fear of failing again, or fear of rejection, or fear of abandonment, et cetera, et cetera.
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The fear is the psyche’s way of saying, wait, hold up a moment.
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Is it actually safe to change?
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I don’t know if it’s safe to change.
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So we need to work with fear or else it is very difficult for the change to happen, for the goals to be achieved.
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And if we skip this step, if we skip working with fear, then our clients might unconsciously or consciously sabotage their progress.
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But when we work with fear, rather than trying to push past it or deny it or avoid it, when we really take the time to work with it, we help clients build a new kind of safety inside of themselves.
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So
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When fear is met with compassion, when it’s met with curiosity, when we give it space, when we work with it somatically, it softens.
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And through that process, our clients start to internalize the deep knowing of, I can feel afraid,
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and still move forward.
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This, my friends, is what empowerment is all about.
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I can feel afraid and still move forward.
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And this is where real change can start to happen.
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So I really want to recommend or invite you, I should say, to
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not rush in your sessions right away to action plans or even to rush to mindset reframes too quickly.
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There’s a time and space for all of that.
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But oftentimes, first, it can be so much more valuable to make space for the fear and to work with it.
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So, when…
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When I work with my clients privately, this is, I mean, it always is part of the work.
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In one way or another, we work on fear.
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And of course, through the process of working on fear, we work on self-sabotage, we work on resistance, we work on shifting patterns that are holding clients back.
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from what they really want, we take the time.
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And it’s because if you don’t, it’s just way too easy for the fear to get in the way of taking action and moving forward.
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The other reason why I love working with fear is because then your clients
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can apply the work you do on a specific fear to any fear that comes up in their lives.
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And over time, they’re able to sit with any fear that shows up for them and to be with it.
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And when you can do this,
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you can see your world in a whole new way.
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Like I said before, this is a big piece of empowerment.
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All right, so let’s talk about the third practice that I want us to kind of get an intro to today.
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And the third practice is to create high touch type containers.
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Now,
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When I say high touch, just to be clear, I don’t mean for you to overextend yourself.
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But what I do mean is, number one, intentional presence.
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And #2, to consider creating the type of space and container for your client where
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They know without a doubt that they and their goals and their evolution are being held by you and by the container, not just during sessions, but in between sessions.
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The point here is so that your client feels held.
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Not in a controlling way, not in a micromanaging way, but in a we’re in this together kind of way.
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One of the many, many things that my private clients love and appreciate about our work together, and one of the many reasons why so many of my private clients keep on coming back to work with me,
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again and again, is that they know I am there for them 110%.
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I’m there 110% in our sessions energetically, and I am also there for them to support them in between our sessions.
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And of course, this is with boundaries in place.
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I’m not available 24-7, et cetera.
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But in between sessions, I hold that high touch container.
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I e-mail with my clients.
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I Voxer with my clients.
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I support them in between sessions.
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I answer their questions.
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I encourage them.
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If they get stuck, they reach out and I support them through it.
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And I even also sometimes hop on a quick call with a client in between sessions if that’s something that’s needed.
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And I can tell you without a doubt that my client’s forward movement gets accelerated because when I hold high touch containers,
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the work that we do together becomes so much more and also more all-encompassing than our sessions alone.
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So I’ll give you one example of this.
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I have a client right now who, she’s on fire.
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She is taking incredible and bold action steps.
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every single week in between our sessions.
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Like I said, she’s on fire and she’s surprising even herself with all of the ways that she’s showing up to take action in her work.
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And while of course all of this is happening, not because of me, it’s happening because my client is amazing.
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I’m not going to take any credit at all.
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What I can say is that the high touch container that I provide for my client, of course along with all of the other things that we’re talking about in today’s episode,
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This is helping her immensely with being able to take such bold, such stretchy, such consistent actions.
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So she is letting me know when she does something big and bold, and I am cheering her on.
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She is reaching out to me when she has a question about an action step she’s taking, and I’m supporting her through it.
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She is sometimes if she goes into fear or anxiety or whatever it is, she’s reaching out and I’m responding.
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And that holding, that knowing that she has that container of support in between sessions is so big.
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It is so helpful.
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All right.
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Let’s talk about the 4th way to co-create more change with your one-on-one clients.
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And this is acknowledge your client’s strengths and then strategize from those strengths.
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All right, so let’s talk about this a little bit more because on the outset, it’s like a no-brainer, but there is a lot to this one.
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So it is so tempting as coaches, first of all, to focus on what we think or what our clients think need fixing.
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But
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Our job isn’t to fix.
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It’s to help our clients remember who they are.
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Not to mention your clients, I can tell you without even knowing your clients, your clients don’t need fixing in the 1st place.
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I pinky promise you they are whole and complete, already exactly as they are.
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Yes, of course, they have obstacles or unhelpful patterns or fears to work on.
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But they are still for sure whole and complete.
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There is no fixing necessary.
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One of our most sacred jobs as coaches
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and as practitioners, is to support our clients to know, to own, and then to use their strengths, to leverage their strengths.
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When we can support a client to do this, to know their strengths, and then own their strengths, and then really leverage and put to good use
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their strengths.
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This is one of the biggest gifts we can give another human being a space to learn all of that.
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This in and of itself can be life-changing.
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Now, all that being said, I will tell you, and you may already know this for yourself, it’s not always easy work to
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support a client to know and own and use their strengths, their brilliances, their resources.
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It’s not always easy work.
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It takes skill.
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And this is because of the ways that our clients have been socialized to criticize themselves, to focus on their deficits,
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to believe they’re not good enough, to believe that it’s bad luck to really own and name all the things that are amazing, et cetera, et cetera.
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Because so many people have been socialized to look for the gaps and to criticize
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versus celebrate themselves.
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We need masterful skills around celebrations and around acknowledging strengths.
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Now, sometimes it can be really easy.
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It can be an easy, a really easy reflection to help someone acknowledge a strength, but it is often
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more involved, sometimes trickier than that, right?
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So we really want to work our skills on this.
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Now, here’s the second part to this.
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We want to, when it’s time, when it comes to make a plan or a strategy with our clients,
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We also want to help our clients build from those strengths that we have helped them acknowledge and own.
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So for example, if your client is very detail oriented, as you create their plan or strategy with them,
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take their detail-oriented strength into consideration.
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Help them leverage it, help them lean into it.
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If your client, for example, is highly relational, they’re really good at being with other people, they’re very social, help them make use of that for whatever strategy they’re working on for whatever goal.
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I can tell you after working for many decades with thousands of people that when people feel seen by you for their gifts, they access courage and creativity.
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And working from strengths
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absolutely helps clients feel more empowered.
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And over time, the more you work with client strengths, the more you help them inside of your container own their strengths.
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It will over time rewire their self-concept and they will shift to a place of
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I am capable.
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I have what it takes.
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And I’ll tell you, when I work with my own private clients, yes, they reach incredible goals that they set, but through the work that we do together,
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they also learn to love themselves and to value themselves more than they ever thought possible.
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And one of the big factors behind this, in addition to everything we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, is the work they do inside the container with me to own their strengths and their brilliances.
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That leads
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to more self-worth and more self-love and more self-value.
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All right, we’re almost at the end here.
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There’s one more practice for today that I want to briefly mention.
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If you’ve been hanging around me for a while, you probably know what it’s going to be.
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Go deep.
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and work somatically to get to the root and then stretch your client from there.
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So as you know, especially if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, and we even spoke about this a little earlier in the podcast, lasting change doesn’t come from insight alone.
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It comes when the nervous system, emotions, and the body integrate the shifts of the insights.
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And as practitioners, we can help our clients slow down, feel what’s happening beneath the story, and then masterfully work
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usually on the somatic level, to shift over time the reactions and the responses to the story.
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Now, this kind of work requires presence, patience, attunement, and it’s also where so much of the magic happens.
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When I work with my private, my clients privately, first of all, it’s all about the depth.
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And that’s why so many of my programs have the word depth in the title, like sacred depths, advanced depth, into the depth, et cetera.
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When I work with my private client, my clients privately, we work with shadows.
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We work with compulsions.
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We work with impulses and so much more.
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And we don’t shy away from the unsavory.
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We don’t shy away from those things that are hard to look at, those things that are uncomfortable to look at.
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we get under the hood and it can sometimes feel very stretchy.
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But my goodness, it is so, worthwhile to go to those uncomfortable places.
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That’s often where so much of the gold is.
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It’s where a lot of the alchemy for transformation is.
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And, you know, I joke with my clients and my students.
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I often
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when an uncomfortable truth comes up, et cetera, I often say, or, a breakthrough that it’s like, that’s a toughie.
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I often say with a very, very loving and validating smile, sorry, not sorry.
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And they know what I mean by that.
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What I mean by that is I’m so sorry.
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It’s uncomfortable right now.
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But my gosh, I’m so happy that you’re uncomfortable right now because it means we have gone to the important place.
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Right?
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Now, to be clear, this is important, an important distinction.
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There’s a difference between discomfort and pain.
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I’m not sorry, not sorry around pain.
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We don’t want to lead our clients into pain.
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But into some discomfort,
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Yeah, we do want to do that.
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And I’ll tell you, I’ve said it already in this episode, and I’m going to say it again.
00:43:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is always such an honor to witness another human being come face to face with themselves and their truth and their story in such courageous ways.
00:44:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so we’ve covered a lot today.
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We’ve covered five of the many practices or ways that you want to co-create change with in your one-on-one sessions.
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We spoke around co-creating homework to bridge insight into action.
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We spoke about working with fear, really giving it time instead of bypassing it.
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We spoke about creating high-touch containers.
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We spoke about the importance of owning, acknowledging, and building from strengths.
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And we also spoke about the importance of going deep, working somatically, getting to that root, and being in the stretch zone, that uncomfortable zone with clients.
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And before we wrap for today’s episode, I want to leave you with one more piece that
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for me is another important component of my client work.
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And that is I am committed to holding my client’s vision even in the moments when they may waver.
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So there are going to be moments when your clients momentarily
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forget.
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They forget who they are.
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There are going to be moments when they doubt themselves or feel lost.
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And in those moments, it is your job to become the mirror that reflects their wholeness back to them.
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You remember their vision, their essence,
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their potential, even in those moments when they can’t, right?
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And we all have, I mean, even for myself, after all of these years, I still have moments where I forget who I am, where I forget my potential, where I forget my brilliance, right?
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And it is such a gift
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as a practitioner to give, to be that mirror.
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And not talking here about forcing or cheerleading, talking about being devoted, devoted to the truth of who our clients are.
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Again, it’s really one of the most sacred things that we can do as coaches.
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So
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As we wrap, if you take anything from this episode, let it be this.
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Co-creating change is about walking with your clients, not ahead of them.
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It’s about trusting their inner wisdom and building a container together where the sacred work of transformation can unfold.
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And maybe the most important thing, and this is, I think, the third time already I’m saying in this episode, I feel so strongly, it is really such an honor and a privilege to work with clients in the ways that we’ve been exploring on today’s episode.
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It is such an honor and a privilege to witness vulnerability
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to witness another human being remember themselves, to hold space for another human being to find courage and so much more.
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I honestly am in awe in every single one of my private client sessions and group sessions for all of this and more.
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So if you’re already coaching this way,
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keep on going, keep on going.
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And if you want to learn how to work at this level with depth, mastery, humanity, all of it, this is exactly what I teach inside of the Sacred Depth Transformational Practitioner training and also inside of the Advanced Depth Shadow training.
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So reach out, get in touch if you want to learn more, and if you want to step in.
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Of course, I also model all of this inside of my one-on-one client work.
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Thank you so much for listening today.
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I hope that you got exactly what you needed today from all that I’ve shared.
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As always, please let me know what’s resonating for you, what you’re really taking for yourself.
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And as always, if someone who would really value this episode, please share it with them.
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It is my best way of getting the word out, getting this work out to those who need it.
00:49:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you really love today’s episode, I would also just be so appreciative if you took a moment to give us a five-star rating, leave a review.
00:49:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
It really helps.
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All right, I’ll see you next time.
