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After having received my certification in transpersonal coaching and coaching my first clients, I have repeatedly experienced the effortlessness behind this approach to coaching. And this is not only true for my role as the coach but also for the client who is unexpectedly overcome by a transformative force.
This may sound extraordinary, but often this is profound in its ordinariness. It’s like looking for your wallet while it has been in your pocket all along.
The external seeking and searching for answers moves us further away from where the answers are really found—inside. And this is what my approach to transpersonal coaching aims to accomplish—point toward the only authority in your life, which is you.
Why Hire a Coach?
The first thing you might wonder is why you should hire a coach in the first place. Good question.
In general, a coach offers you unconditional support. Coaching helps you overcome problems, achieve desires, and assist you in finding strategies to deal with your unique challenges and develop creative solutions.
Coaching can enable you to deal more effectively with challenges and provide you with new perspectives and more resourceful attitudes. Furthermore, coaching can enhance intrinsic motivation, creative thinking, decisiveness, and confidence. It’s also nice to know that there is a person you can turn to for help and guidance who doesn’t have preconceived notions about who you are.
Although not all coaching is created equal, the coaching process generally builds character and celebrates progress.
What is Transpersonal Coaching?
Transpersonal coaching builds upon the lesser-known fourth force of psychology called transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology doesn’t exclude the previous forces of psychology but builds upon them.
It integrates aspects of the body, mind, and spirit into a broader and more holistic view of the human experience.
What makes transpersonal psychology so unique is that alongside the traditional neurological and cognitive approaches to understanding mind and consciousness it embraces insights and approaches from Eastern wisdom traditions as well as peak, mystical, near-death, and awakening experiences, which include altered states of consciousness and states beyond the self.
Instead of staying solely on the mental/cognitive plane, transpersonal coaching leverages expanded states of awareness and peak human experiences to initiate lasting personal transformation.
And yet, transpersonal psychology is not about specific tools or methods. It’s more about the intention behind the intervention. Also, the transpersonal coach or therapist isn’t viewed as the expert of your experience, but rather acts, to quote Ken Wilber, as an “assistant in this extraordinary voyage that is both discovery and creation”
A transpersonal coach or therapist is essentially a facilitator who assists the client in finding their own truth and process. And in my experience, positive change doesn’t only happen for the client but for the coach as well.
The Difference Between Conventional Coaching And Transpersonal Coaching
Conventional coaching methods typically involve dialogue between a coach and a client and address issues from a cognitive-behavioral perspective. This means that only issues in conscious awareness are addressed while their unconscious causes remain unknown and/or unresolved.
Conventional coaching relies on conscious processing through questioning, analysis, and tasking, which is usually not very effective, especially not in the long run.
Transpersonal coaching, by contrast, works with unconscious processes that are at the root of most of our problems. Yet it does so in a natural and conversational way which makes this methodology effective and versatile.
This unique approach to coaching assists you in identifying unconscious triggers and patterns that give rise to your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and their resulting circumstances.
What is important to note is that from a transpersonal perspective you’re not broken and you don’t need to be fixed. So transpersonal coaching is not about “improving” yourself but about connecting with the infinite resourcefulness that you are.
Another unique quality of transpersonal coaching is that the coach is trained to identify and make constructive use of transpersonal phenomena (e.g., peak experiences, altered states of consciousness, etc.), which may influence your problems, or which may spontaneously arise in coaching sessions.
Transpersonal coaching takes a holistic and integrated approach to supporting your development and personal transformation. Also, it is fully client-centered, which means everything you bring into a coaching session is valuable and is the steppingstone for your further growth.
Each session is an individually tailored process that emerges in the co-creative space between coach and client.
The Difference Between Coaching And Therapy
Many might wonder whether coaching or therapy is the right choice and how they differ. So let’s briefly address this.
The one main difference between coaching and therapy is that therapists are allowed to work with clients who have either been diagnosed with a mental disease or seem to have a mental disease. So whenever a coach suspects that a client might be better suited for therapy, the coach should refer the client to a psychotherapist.
This should work in theory but the reality often looks very different. Some might say that the line between coaching and therapy is thin, but if we’re honest the line is non-existent. If anything, it’s more of a blurry patch.
The problem with psychotherapy is that everyone can be pathologized. Let a therapist dig for long enough and he’ll find some kind of anxiety disorder or seasonal depression. In fact, therapists are trained to find problems in humans.
I don’t mean to bash psychotherapy here or say that there aren’t good therapists. This also doesn’t mean that coaching is better than therapy. Rather I’m questioning a concept that has been built upon pathologizing the human experience.
The problem is not mental diseases about which we know so little, but the idea that everything that deviates from the norm is somehow wrong and needs to get fixed. This is also the reason why many people are never done with psychotherapy. If you’re looking for things that are wrong, you’ll always find something that’s wrong.
Coaching usually doesn’t deal with mental health diagnoses. So, generally speaking, while therapy focuses on working through problems, coaching focuses on goals and solutions (which, again, is not to say that one is better than the other). Yet, traditional coaching is still very much focused on improving the person.
Transpersonal coaching, on the other hand, is less about improving the person and more about recognizing that what you really are is beyond personhood. Reducing the grip on the problems of the person, paradoxically, solves many problems of the person, as you recognize that every problem has the solution inherent.
Often, all that’s needed for a solution to arise is to open your awareness.
How Does Transpersonal Coaching Work?
Transpersonal coaching leverages an expanded/open state of awareness to move beyond an egocentric worldview. In my work with clients, I have frequently experienced how simply by establishing open awareness problems suddenly ceased to be problems.
Most of the time, problems remain because we are in a fixated mode of attention (tunnel awareness) where we can see nothing but the problem and hence remain in the problem state. Open awareness is often enough to solve the problem as the solution is usually self-evident when we are in an expanded state of awareness.
The transpersonal approach to coaching goes beyond the techniques that this profession commonly employs. As a transpersonal coach, I won’t trick you into changing yourself nor will I motivate you with empty platitudes that subside as quickly as they arise.
The primary “intervention” of a transpersonal coach involves holding the liminal space and walking you through transformative questions and expansions, while assisting you to reintegrate new, widened, and resourceful perspectives into your life. My approach usually involves a combination of guided awareness expansion, looking deeply at your emotions, and transpersonal (beyond the egoic self) psychological inquiry. The emphasis is on working with the immanence of your current experience.
Again, it builds upon the important premise that you’re not broken, and you don’t need to be fixed. So, the best transpersonal coach is not someone who knows the most or gives the smartest answers but someone who can unconditionally hold the space so that the right questions and answers emerge spontaneously.
All you need to embody whoever you want to be is a little shift in Awareness and transpersonal coaching can help you with that.
How Transpersonal Coaching Can Help You
Although transpersonal implies going beyond the person, transpersonal coaching can help you not just with transcendental spiritual matters but also with “down-to-earth” challenges and problems.
In fact, the more “mundane” stuff is often a gateway into the more “spiritual” stuff.
And in my experience, to contradict myself a little, there is no difference between mundane and spiritual stuff, as it’s all human stuff. So transpersonal coaching is not about making you more spiritual or leaving the material world behind, but about getting deeply in touch with your own human experience, in whatever form it may arise for you.
In my personal approach to transpersonal coaching, I’ll meet you where you are and we’ll go as far as you’re willing to go. With attentive listening and questioning that slice through delusion, you’ll not only be able to get to the roots of your problems and have transformative insights but get in touch with who or what you really are.
Transpersonal coaching can be deeply empowering. It’s not a cookie-cutter approach that serves second or third-hand solutions to your problems.
Let’s be honest, most of us don’t just want any solutions, no matter how good they sound. We want our own solutions. And the truth is that only your own answers will have any lasting effect. So instead of getting prechewed answers, you’ll find your own answers.
As someone who’s been on both ends of transpersonal coaching—coach and client—I’ve had enough first-hand experience to know that this stuff works. It doesn’t work because there are some smart techniques or processes behind it. It works because it’s built upon a fundamentally different view of the human experience.
Instead of pathologizing your experience and pointing out what’s wrong, transpersonal coaching assists you in recognizing that whatever is, is allowed to be. It helps you see that whatever you want right now, you already have the resources to move in that direction.
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If you feel trapped by your mind and want to reveal your true nature, please feel free to check out my offers: Transpersonal Coaching
Luka
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