Peeling Back to the Core
This month we will deepen our skills in getting to the core of our clients’ issues and visions, as well as our own.
Before we get into the subject matter, I want to post the film I want you to see this month: Wake Up is a documentary about a young man who, out of the blue, starts to see spirits, angels, and entities. This stunning experience sets him on a healing journey—truly the hero’s adventure—that challenges him to the core and leads him to illuminations he never would have reached if his life were easier. We will discuss the film in a later lesson. For now, please find the film and watch it before we meet for our next teleseminar on March 26.
In your basic life coach training we highlighted the difference between a presenting issue and a core issue. As you advance in coaching, you are becoming more and more sensitive to recognize that the issue the client presents is simply the surface manifestation of the issue that needs to be addressed. Because we live from inside out, and our thoughts and beliefs create our results, we need to understand and heal our thoughts and beliefs before we can change our results.
In our last teleseminar I recounted a coaching session with a coach-in-training who was stuck in the process of putting her website up. The hardest piece for her was the “About Me” page. She wondered if she was truly qualified to become a coach, hindered by self-doubts and self-judgments. I asked her where she had learned these doubts, and she explained that her father was a critical editor, and as a child she learned to feel hesitant to make any statements about herself, since he might put her down for not being perfect or presenting herself perfectly. During our coaching session she realized that she needed to communicate with her father and heal their relationship. After making significant progress in our session, her last words were, “It wasn’t about the website at all, was it?”
It never is. It’s always about your thoughts, fears, and visions about presenting yourself to the world. A website is an excellent projective test representing where your consciousness lives at the moment.
Dee and I watched a movie that we thought would be simply fun entertainment. But it was much more. Ghost Graduation is a Spanish film about a high school that is haunted by the spirits of five students who died in a fire twenty years earlier. A teacher with paranormal abilities comes to the school and interacts with them. His intuition guides him that these spirits are earth bound—actually school bound—because they need to graduate from the curriculum. So he goes about tutoring and testing them so they can finally graduate. Yet when they all pass the exam, they are still stuck. So he begins to probe the ghosts about their feelings about being trapped. Four of them are angry, and the other one reveals that he feels guilty because he had accidentally caused the fire that killed them all. The teacher does forgiveness work with them, which enables them to all ascend. They did indeed need to graduate—but not from high school. They needed to master the life lesson before them.
The film is a lot lighter than the trailer represents, quite clever and funny. This film is not required for our course, but I am offering it for your entertainment and edification.
Like the teacher and ghosts in the movie, clients usually attempt to solve their problems at a logistical or surface level. Yet that level is simply the outpicturing of inner dynamics. The entire world is the outpicturing of inner dynamics. To truly heal, we need to look within. Since we are spiritual beings, our solutions are ultimately spiritual.
There is a scene in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that pierces beyond surface communication and gets to the heart of authentic connection. An aging playboy meets a lady in a bar, and lays a bunch of banal lines on her. Although she is initially interested in him, after a while his slick but empty banter turns her off, and she gets up to leave. He stops her and tells her, “Wait. . . what I really wanted to say is that I‘m lonely.” The woman recognizes this as the first sincere statement the fellow has made, so she rejoins him and the two develop a loving relationship. But the relationship had to be built on genuine communication, not silly chatter.
Also not required for our course, but highly recommended as a quality film with a point.
When coaching your clients (or yourself), keep piercing beyond the outer expression until you find the core truth the client needs to recognize. You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to do this. You just have to set your antenna on “real” and go there. Sincere clients will meet you there, and your coaching will be deeply rewarding for both of you.
We are all like the ghosts who need to graduate, as well as the couple seeking real connection. In your coaching and in your life, don’t settle to be earthbound or stuck in thin communication. To pierce to your core, and help your clients do the same, is why you are coaching and, ultimately, living.