Your Authority to Coach
We have stated often that you do your best coaching when you serve as an open vessel for Higher Power to heal through you. We have put a great deal of emphasis on The Healer’s Prayer, which declares your willingness to let Great Spirit work through you to achieve the healing your clients seek. Many of you have affirmed how powerful is this prayer, and reported miraculous results you have attained by putting it into action. Assuming the role of vessel rather than expert has relieved you of anxiety and generated genuine transformation for your clients. “I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, for He who sent me will direct me . . . I will be healed as I allow Him to teach me to heal.”
Yet there is another element of superlative coaching that you can—and must—use to maximize your effectiveness. This is the personal and spiritual growth you achieve by using healing principles to strengthen your own life. The more you live what you teach, and you edify your understanding of how healing occurs by healing yourself, the more effective you will be to generate extraordinary changes in the lives of your clients. A Course in Miracles tells us that “miracles are everyone’s right, but purification is necessary first.” Such purification is the elevation of your own consciousness.
This is why this program has placed such a significant emphasis on your personal awakening. While we have offered you many tools and techniques to use with your clients in your coaching sessions, we have also offered you many invitations and opportunities to assess where you stand on the continuum of your own healing, and the manifestation of your valued intentions. As you look back on the life coach training retreat, you probably recall your moment of sitting in the chair of illumination as one of your significant turning points, as well as when you served as client during your practice coaching sessions, and your inner experiences during the guided meditations. Excellent coaching embodies two elements: helping others and helping yourself. These two elements operate via a reciprocal healing cycle: When you help others, you help yourself; and when you help yourself, you help others.
The process of self-mastery builds muscles you would not have built if you sidestepped your own inner training. This occurs, for example, when you transform a difficult relationship by taking back the power you have attributed to another person. Or when you choose to remember the wholeness of another’s spirit as well as your own, rather than focusing on a skewed version or disjoined dysfunctional fragments. Or when you set healthy boundaries in situations that have previously depleted you. Or when you speak your truth to someone from whom you have been withholding it. Or when you quit trying to prove yourself, and choose to love and accept yourself as you are. Or when you nurture yourself rather than sacrificing yourself. Or when you stay with your spiritual practice on a daily basis.
Such spiritual achievements bestow upon you the authority to coach. Then, when you are sitting in a coaching session and you guide your client, for example, to remember her value even while other people are criticizing her, you are transmitting not just your words and your ideas, but your experience. Remember that the greater part of coaching is energetic or vibrational. Words are the least part of healing. As you overcome your own fears and self-judgments, your clients receive the benefit of your inner strengthening. When you trample down the weeds that block your own path, you clear a way for your clients to walk the same path.
Whenever appropriate, do a hypocrisy check. Not to judge yourself, but to use the results of your self-inventory as leverage to grow. Occasionally I find myself telling clients to do things I am not doing. Or I will hear a client report an act of honesty or a leap of faith that demonstrates courage I have not activated. When I recognize this disparity, I know it’s time to go back to the drawing board and take care of business from the inside out. While you may find the initial moment of realizing, “I’m not really living that” to be disconcerting, it is ultimately liberating and joyful, for in that realization you have clear guidance as to what your next step is.
No coach is perfect. Spiritually, yes, but on the material plane we each have our path to walk and our steps take. Discovering what you need to do next to master your life and your coaching is an exciting and positive journey. Anything you do in your own life that makes you stronger, clearer, more alive, and more awake, becomes a huge blessing to your clients and the world.
Exercise:
1. In what areas of your life are you living the spiritual and coaching principles you value, so that those who look upon you can learn and be inspired by your model?
2. In what areas is there a discrepancy between what you say or teach, and how are you living?
3. What in particular can you do differently to bring your actions and energy into alignment with your values?
4. How might your clients benefit from you stepping into greater mastery?
Can you think of any particular client(s) who would specifically benefit from you walking your talk more fully? How might he/she/they benefit?
Affirm:
I am honest about where I am and where I am not.
I now practice what the values I hold dear.
I gain authority to coach as I master my own path.