(integrate this into EVERY coaching session, workshop, retreat and curriculum you create)
If you’re keyed in to the self-development and transformation industries, you know that a lot of folks right now are pretty pissed off at the services they’re receiving:
They are complaining that they’re not shifting,
they’re not learning,
they’re not transforming,
and they’re not growing.
Now of course, some of the complaints are total BS (excuse my language).
Often times when a client doesn’t fully commit or step up to the plate, and then falls into the Victim Archetype, she can tend to blame others instead of shifting something inside herself.
But many of the complaints are actually very warranted.
There are a lot of coaches, healers, and teachers (some of them industry gurus) out there doing sub-par work. Or OK work. Or work that maybe gives a lot of great “How to” information, but no real transformation or results.
But none of this work is “Wow-you-rocked-my-world-and-I-am-truly-transforming” kind of work.
That’s why I’m on a mission to help talented and intuitive leaders raise the industry bar and raise their own bars on how amazing your work is.
One of the most important things I’ve learned through 17 years of coaching, mentoring, teaching, training, event facilitating and ritual leading is this:
In order to create TRUE TRANSFORMATION for your clients and audiences, you must move them through 4 levels of learning and processing.
Without these 4 levels, your events, teaching, curriculum and coaching will:
- Fall flat
- Leave audiences feeling incomplete and unsatisfied
- Neglect to nip obstacles, fears and blocks in the bud, leaving clients stuck
The 4 levels of learning and processing are:
1) Mental Learning and Processing:
When you don’t move your audience through the mental level, they leave confused or misinformed. That’s why you must speak to your audience’s intellectual understanding and reasoning. There are very specific protocols you want to follow here to unlock your audience’s mental learning portals, and have them cognitively receive, understand and master what you are teaching them so that they can create results.
(This is the element of air).
2) Emotional Learning and Processing:
When you don’t move your audience through the emotional level, they may leave your event with good information, but they don’t feel or have access to the passion in their hearts to follow through on what they’ve learned.
That’s because it’s not enough for audiences to simply learn through their intellect. Learning facts or coming to mental understandings is a good foundation. But in order to begin to create true and long-lasting transformation for your clients, you must then take your facilitation and coaching to the level of the Emotional so that the real healing and learning permeates their feelings and their hearts.
(This is the element of fire).
3) Spiritual Learning and Processing:
Once you’ve activated the Mental and Emotional levels of transformation, for the next step on Transformation Journey, you want to activate Spiritual Learning and Processing. Because when you don’t move your audience through the spiritual level, they can’t fully receive everything they have learned, and they aren’t truly really moved and motivated to change.
(This is the element of water).
4) Body-based Learning and Processing:
The last level of learning and processing you want to activate is the BODY level. When you don’t move your audience or clients through a body-based learning, they lose out on the opportunity to really seal all they’ve learned into their physical self. And the truth is that when we have a body memory – of a feeling, or a learning, of a truth, of a pattern…we are more likely to access it and to leverage it.
Whether or not you are a “spiritual” teacher, practitioner or coach, this step is essential for the deepest levels of learning, shifting, changing pattern, and creating results to happen. That’s because this part of the transformation process engages your audience’s spirits and souls, and their connection to something (could be Spirit, could be Higher Power, could be Inner Wisdom, etc.) that is bigger than they are. When an individual can connect to something that is bigger than her ego or her mind, that’s where real trust comes in, that’s where higher truths become revealed, and that’s where deep commitment to goals gets born.
One of the biggest mistakes I see practitioners make (particularly in front of groups) is to focus on only one or two of these very important transformational levels.
No matter what your content and subject matter is, a master facilitator and coach knows how to skillfully teach all four levels, and knows the most effective balance between the four.
(Because it’s also not enough to just throw the 4 levels in – you must find the right balance of the 4 to successfully guide your clients).
With love,
Joanna
