Life Coach Training
Lesson 26
Unfreeze Your Clients
When you name or label someone or something, you affirm its reality in your experience. Since all labels exist in the world of form, or opposites, and our true nature is spiritual, no name or label you utter does a person or thing justice. As spiritual beings, we exist beyond any category the mind can conjure.
When a client comes to you with a negatively-labeled identity, one of the greatest gifts you can give him is to release him from that identity by not agreeing with it. It’s as if he is trapped in a big block of ice. You can either pick the ice away, as some therapies do, or you can melt the ice with love. Either way, when you release your client from the bondage of his label/ice block, he is free to be who he was before he was encased, and become who he is now, and can ultimately be.
At the beginning of a weekend retreat a man came to me with his 19-year-old son. “Tom is a manic-depressive,” the father told me. “He has no self-esteem and he cries every day.” The father went on to describe a half-dozen other diagnoses and negative traits about the young man, and told me, “Maybe this seminar can help him.”
I looked at the young man and he seemed like a pleasant guy. I did not recognize any of the negative labels his father had ascribed to him. (I wondered if the father needed the seminar more than the son.) “Let’s see if we can give your son some new names this weekend,” I told the father.
As the weekend progressed, Tom really came forth. He participated, shared his feelings, and ended up as the “star” of the program. Everyone fell in love with him, and by the time the program concluded, he was shining so brightly that we practically needed sunglasses to look at him.
Not once during the weekend did I or Tom mention anything to the group about any of the dire labels or diagnoses his father had described. We let him be fresh and new and free. If I had told the group about any of the labels his father had mentioned, they would have wondered who I was talking about. Sure, Tom had his ups and downs in life, but in the presence of our group he was not confined to any of the smallnesses with which others had regarded him. During the last session of the seminar he offered one of the most eloquent sharings I have ever heard. Practically everyone was in tears. Tom had been unfrozen.
You can effect the same transformation with your clients by refusing to name, see, or treat them in the limiting way that others have named, seen, and treated them. Instead, see them as they would like to be seen, or as the unlimited person they can be. Dale Carnegie advised, “Give that person a fine reputation to live up to!”
A woman named Linda came to my mentor Hilda’s class with a cast on her arm. “This cast has been on for months because the broken bone has not healed,” Linda reported, and went on to cite doctors’ explanations of why the bone did not heal. Hilda told her, “Then let’s give you a new name. Your new name is ‘Perfect Arm Linda.’ Hilda turned to the class and told us, “Every time you talk to Linda, address her as ‘Perfect Arm Linda.’” Of course we all complied. Several weeks later Linda came to the class without her cast. Her doctor could not explain why the arm had healed all of a sudden, but it had.
Coaching or healing is more about undoing than doing. It’s about allowing the deepest nature of your clients to be the truth about them rather than the false nature that has been laid over them. Guide your client from fear to love, from worldly identity to spiritual reality, from labels to freedom.
Exercise:
1. What limiting labels have been laid over you? (Consider nicknames, gender/racial/cultural associations, intelligence or school performance judgments, looks, athletic performance, medical/psychological diagnoses, sexual acts or preferences, harping on past errors, etc.)
2. Have you been able to see yourself beyond those labels?
If so, what have been the results of your shift in vision?
3. What client or friend suffers under self-labeled limits or labels imposed by others?
How might you see or treat this person as free of the ascribed labels?
4. What positive labels have you received or chosen?
5. What positive labels can you give to clients and friends that can shift their experience and results?
Affirm:
I am a spiritual being, and so are my clients.
I see myself and them not as the world sees us, but as God created us.
I help my clients move beyond limits and into freedom.