What is coaching? A true analogy
About a year ago, my shoulder completely locked up after a stressful business trip. In an effort to restore mobility and strength (not to mention alleviate the crippling pain) I started working with a transformative bodyworker. She is brilliant.
I have always had rounded shoulders, despite years of ballet class and my mother’s constant admonition to “stand up straight!” My body just. Won’t. Do. It. But then, there I was, at a breaking point where I had to find my way past this thing that has been with my literally my entire life. I wasn’t very hopeful, but Cathy came highly recommended so I decided to put my trust in the process.
In our first meeting, she got to know my body—my history as a dancer, my premature birth that set me up to have a sensitive nervous system, my journey as a mother who nursed on only one side due to some scar tissue. With her training, wisdom and intuition, it was like she could see into my skeleton, with the muscles, tendons and nerves laid on top of it and how my history had shaped them.
Then, she began to pull and push and stretch me. A “massage,” I guess, but not like a massage I have ever had before. She wasn’t always gentle, but she never hurt me. I felt pain, but she supported me to breathe into it and therefore move through it. Sometimes we talked as we moved and the words coming out of my mouth were reflections of what was stored in my flesh.
At the end of the session, I felt renewed somehow. My energy was more grounded and my muscles were firing in new ways. Driving home was like driving with new legs and arms. Did me shoulder still hurt? Yeah, it did a little, but it also felt taken care of and supported by my muscles and bones in ways I had never felt before. I felt relief, even though there was still tenderness.
I’ve been working with Cathy for a little more than a year now and the pain in my shoulder is gone. There are still positions I can’t quite reach but my relationship to my body has been altered fundamentally. My default stance is, “You’re not right. I’ve got to fix you. Do what I tell you, body.” This process of listening, breathing into the pain and stretching other parts so that I can support my body as a wholistic system has softened me. My new stance has more of a “I’m listening. Tell me. Show me what you need. I’ll give it to you if I can.” kind of vibe. I am still fixing myself, but from a place of love rather than rejection.
My close friends have heard me marvel about Cathy and her brilliance all year (and several have noted that I’m actually standing up taller). Then, last week, one of them said to me, “Isn’t that what you do? You just do it with the mind.” Well, snap! It is! The parallel to the coaching process is so clear.
Coaching is the process of unwinding the defaults of the mind so that energy can flow through the whole of who you are. In the process, your goals and dreams get the support they need to come to life. A skilled coach is someone who can see the structures of your thinking layered on top of one another, even though they are unseen to you. She can push and pull and stretch you in order to re-fit the structure so it is strong and flexible.
The re-fitting can have moments of pain, but you know she would never actually hurt you and that once the thinking is rearranged, you will feel more alive and capable. Of course, you will go on living life so the process is never truly complete. It’s a relationship with yourself that you are cultivating in coaching, and your coach is one part of that life-long journey.
You may need different coaches along the way, and that’s okay. The key, though, is to ask for support when your thinking gets painful, rigid or limiting. There is a way through it and coaching can help you find it.