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What image comes to mind when you think of the coaching industry?
Whether you’re a coach, client, practitioner, or random person on the street the general impression that tends to bubble up is concerned with Instagram celebrity status or a bit of a ‘woo-woo left of field’ ick factor.
I myself was very resistant to the idea of calling myself a coach, for a very long time.
This was mostly because I had never experienced *real* coaching, nor divided into what it really was, or how coaching is different from mentoring or facilitating.
Today on the podcast we’re exploring what coaching is NOT.
If you’re a practitioner in the field of transformation/personal development, or equally drawn/repulsed by the word, this is an excellent episode.
We’re diving into:
- What coaching IS & what it ISN’T – things people do they call coaching which is not in fact coaching
- What a great coach should be creating & the 🔑technology they use to create that outcome
- Why giving advice, fixing, solving & telling your story is not coaching & why we do these things to avoid vulnerability
- Coaching vs. Mentoring vs. Facilitating – we break apart the components, depths, directions & tools of these different types of practitionership
Get The Full 9 Part Series
This is the 6th installment of our 9-part series. Here’s what else we have planned:
- Ep1 – Passion, Purpose & Career
- Ep2 – Tolerating The Job (while we make a career change)
- Ep3 – Accidental Entrepreneurship. When following your passions means having a business
- Ep4 – Am I making the right move? The Career Change Stories of 3 Women
- Ep5 – Safety, Money & Starting Up a new career
- Ep6 – A Career in Coaching
- Ep7 – Return on Investment (in yourself)
- Ep8 – Career Change Stories: 4 Coaches Share Their Experience
- Ep9 – Embodied Ways of Working & Feminine Leadership in our career
This series is perfect for the woman who’s quietly seeking a career change, actively navigating the chaos of change, or just wants to become a more interesting person in the way you relate to your work.
To catch all the episodes & have them delivered to your inbox week, pop your details in here:
Resources
- Pursuing Your Passions Limited Podcast Series – sign up for all 9 episodes here →
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- Primal Feminine Flow – Embodied At Home Movement Practice
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect)
Speaker 1: What image do you think of when you imagine coaching? Given that it’s my career and as I’ve pursued my passion, I’ve found myself in a career in coaching, I’ve got a very detailed answer to that question, but for many people, myself included, if I rewind multiple years, the idea of, or the impression, the kind of taste in my mouth of what is coaching at that time. And for many people [00:00:30] we get this vague impression of something to do with Instagram popularity and a bit of an ick factor, which is such a shame because coaching is a phenomenal modality and for many people who are joining us for this, pursuing Your Passions podcast series, whether you’re attracted or repelled to the idea of coach coaching is a part of a spectrum of facilitation and mentoring and [00:01:00] supporting others that deep intimate work of personal development. And so it’s really useful, I feel, if you’re considering a career in this realm to have a good understanding about what coaching is and what it is not.
Speaker 1: So in today’s podcast episode, a warm welcome to it. I’m Jenna. We’re going to be clarifying all the things that coaching is not how people who call themselves a coach often avoid doing the coaching bits of coaching and what they do instead. [00:01:30] And I’ll be really teasing apart the differences between the role of coach, facilitator and mentor. Now, these are concepts that when I first started coaching, they were just really gray and nebulous for me. And over the course of my career in coaching, I’ve become a lot more versed in the subtle nuances between all these different points of supporting others and working in the realm of personal development [00:02:00] and transformation. So if you are also interested in working in that realm, then I have no doubt that there will be some really valuable gems that help you to really clarify where you want to stand in the spectrum of practitioners and how you can do your best work. So warm, welcome to the podcast,
Speaker 1: A warm welcome. I’m your host, Jen Ward, and I’m living, [00:02:30] creating and broadcasting to you from the Sunshine Coast in Australia, the traditional and beautiful lands of the Gubby Gubby people. I am a feminine embodiment coach, a teacher. I’m also a mother and a lover of chocolate and chai. And I write coach and teach in the art of embodiment for women, both personally and professionally for those who want to deepen their skills in the somatic arts and come home to their feeling, [00:03:00] sensing and magnetically alive body. The School Live Embodied Arts podcast is a place where we explore these themes. You can listen in to explore the art of embodied living as a woman, as a practitioner, or simply as a human who desires inspiration and resources for full spectrum living. So let’s dive in.
Speaker 1: Before I, myself was a coach, I was a practitioner [00:03:30] and as a practitioner in the wide range of healing and personal development arts, I was still figuring out who I was. And so I used to go and get a lot of sessions and see a lot of people. I used to see kinesiologists and acupuncturists and energy medicine mentors and all kinds of different psychics and intuitives and really tasting the smorgasbord of all the different amazing [00:04:00] options. I would go to workshops and retreats and really just exploring and getting a feel for what resonates with me. And what I really found was that there was one consistent thing that I really hated when it happened, and it was this. I would go and see a practitioner usually in a one-on-one setting, and they would be the expert on me. They would tell me how [00:04:30] it was.
Speaker 1: They would apply their framework or their diagnosis or their intuition to me. And for me, there was no self sourcing of my own. How do I feel about that? What’s my inner intuition? What’s my inner inner knowing? What’s my inner sense? It was more like, let me diagnose you, and I’m the practitioner was the person with the power and with the knowledge and they knew and here’s how it was. [00:05:00] And I just really didn’t like it. Perhaps it’s because of my personality typing, but I really, I can appreciate that many of these practitioners did have phenomenal gifts, some of them very skilled psychic gifts. And yet even when what they were saying made sense or what they were saying was valid or what they were saying came to be true, there was this little grain of sand within me [00:05:30] that felt really irritated that they were the power instead of the power existing or resting within me.
Speaker 1: And so when the career of coaching began to call to me, I personally was very anti the title of coach because I felt like I was going to become one of those people that had to have the answers and have the power and tell people how it was. And I knew how much that had been rubbing me the wrong way for a lot of years. And of course [00:06:00] I’d seen a lot of practitioners do it differently. I’d seen a lot of practitioners who supported their clients to create the conditions where they brought full their own awareness, brought forward their own answers. And the practitioner was without being overt, the practitioner was just creating the space for the power that already existed within me, within their clients to be able to be accessed. And to me, that felt so much [00:06:30] more empowering. So when it was time for me to answer the call, which was the call to coach, which was not necessarily a career that I consciously chose or thought, oh hey, this looks great, I’m going to go do that, I really had to interrogate what coaching was and what it wasn’t.
Speaker 1: And the first thing that I want to clarify, I’ve got three little pearls that I want to share with us on today’s podcast. The first one is what? Coaching is not. So coaching is [00:07:00] not giving advice, having the answers, it’s not having the power. It’s not the one being the solution. Coaching is not anything to do with you overtly impacting, guiding, or directing a client’s situation. Coaching is in fact the exact opposite. The job of a coach is to use questions to invoke [00:07:30] new awarenesses for their client. So lemme give this to you an example. I recently had a client who was sharing with me that she’s been procrastinating lots and lots on a core activity that she knows she needs to do. It’s very clear what the next action and what the next step is, and she’s just avoiding doing that thing. Now, we could go into a lot of narrative [00:08:00] around personality typing and all types of things to explore.
Speaker 1: Why are you avoiding, why are you procrastinating? And I think the question of why is a useful one, but it’s often not the first question that a coach should ask because the question of why often really brings us into our head. It brings us up into meaning making and it brings us up into using our mind to try and make sense of a situation instead [00:08:30] of actually just resting into, in this case, it was a pattern of procrastination, actually just resting into the somatics of that and seeing what wisdom the body has to speak in relationship to it. So as my client was telling me this narrative around her procrastination problem, my job as a coach is not to have the solution not to come up with a five-step plan or at least not immediately. Instead, I want to use questions [00:09:00] so that we can gather more data and more insights about this pattern.
Speaker 1: I like to think about my clients and myself also as this really extensive mansion, this mansion with millions upon millions of rooms. Now many of the rooms inside this mansion, this palace, this temple, many of these rooms are well-known and well explored. We live and we operate inside a certain comfortable number of these rooms. And [00:09:30] when we have made meaning or created a narrative around a situation in our life, we’ve explored the particular rooms relating to that narrative or to that explanation of why something is so. But always, always, always, there are more rooms that have not yet been explored in our clients in a mansion in their inner temple. Same for me. I still am constantly discovering uncomfortable new things about myself and deliciously fabulous new things as well. [00:10:00] So if I’m doing a good job as a coach, I’m not only inviting my client to reflect on the rooms that they have occupied and explored.
Speaker 1: I’m using questions to invite my client to discover new rooms, to go and explore a whole new wing in the palace that is them, so that we can genuinely create some new awareness of the dynamic. With this client I was speaking with, she [00:10:30] had been historically really looking at the rooms in her inner mansion that were associated with, well, when I go into procrastination, I’m doing it for these reasons and these reasons and those reasons and these reasons. So she had been descending into the basement of the palace and exploring all the deeper drivers, which I think is really valuable. I thought, well, what if instead of questions that invite her into the deeper drivers, what if we instead invite her into questions [00:11:00] of the possibility that would come next if she was to stop procrastinating? And so the questions that I used and that I asked this client were questions that almost ascended us towards the towers and the Torrance to say, well, what would the view be like from up here if we did stop procrastinating?
Speaker 1: Who would you have to become? What would you have to be ready to welcome? What could be a side effect [00:11:30] of not procrastinating and of actually doing this thing that you know need to do? And so when we think about what coaching is and what it is not, the very first pearl that I want to share is that coaching is not having the answers nor the power, nor the advice. Coaching is the art of wielding questions, questions that evoke new awareness, awareness that only your client knows because the one that’s living [00:12:00] in that mansion, in that temple and a skilled coach is able to consider which direction, which room might we not have explored, and where can we get to some new territory? And I have to tell you that I freaking love receiving coaching because when I’m sitting opposite a skilled coach and I’m able to find those answers for myself, they just land so [00:12:30] much more deeply in my body instead of somebody telling me the answer, I have felt the truth of it from the very deep core through the bones of me out. That makes such a big difference in then how I move forward because it’s not an intellectual knowing, it’s a bone deep knowing.
Speaker 1: The second thing, second pearl, we’re going to clarify today around coaching is all [00:13:00] the ways that we can avoid vulnerable coaching. Yeah, so the example that I’ve just described is an example whereby as a coach I’m willing to step into the unknown. I don’t know what these new rooms of awareness are going to reveal. I’ve got no freaking clue what old memory or impression, fear, doubt, chaos might arise. As a client goes exploring [00:13:30] that new question that we’ve asked, we’ve got no idea what will happen. And because the types of questions that I use as a coach are really body-based questions, their questions that are not only asking why is this happening and let’s use our mind to make meaning or to shift a mindset. I’m asking questions that invoke the deep somatic body and the full warehouse of frozen tension and flow and life force that exists within us.
Speaker 1: [00:14:00] I find that a lot of practitioners, whether they call themselves coaches or otherwise, tend to avoid the questions that invoke vulnerability. Because when we step towards vulnerability and when we step towards emotional risk, we step into something that is often very tender that is countercultural to feel so many of us avoid the things [00:14:30] that we don’t want to feel. And vulnerability is very high on the list of things that what most of us don’t want to feel. And yet, vulnerability is very often coupled with creating a new awareness. So we often can’t discover new rooms in the mansion unless we are willing to have the emotional risk of well, what discomfort, what edge, whether it’s an edge of pleasure or of pain, what might we encounter? And there’s a lot of disclaimers. [00:15:00] Of course, we have to titrate the intensity of sensation and move in trauma sensitive ways, like let’s not get too jammed up in all of those things at the moment.
Speaker 1: What I really just want to speak to is why so many? I feel like so many practitioners prefer to give advice rather than to use questions that might invoke the vulnerable because it keeps us in a safer zone. So many practitioners, coaches, whoever, [00:15:30] however you describe yourself, many practitioners prefer to have the answers or to give advice, which is a little bit more towards mentoring. We’ll speak about that later because it keeps them out of the realm of vulnerability. That’s probably the number one reason that I feel like so many people either they don’t know how to move into vulnerability, they’re not comfortable with the edge of vulnerability, they’re not comfortable [00:16:00] with their own vulnerability, and their personal mastery practice in that realm is not as well developed a muscle as it could or should be to support their clients. And so a lot of practitioners avoid vulnerability and instead give advice.
Speaker 1: If you don’t fall into that category, which is an easy category to fall into, then you might fall into the category of avoiding vulnerability because you like to come up with solutions. [00:16:30] Solutions look like, let’s make a plan. I tried this thing. Well, I read this book and it suggested that you do X, y, Z. Let’s hop on and Google it. What does Google say? Fixing problems and finding solutions is not a bad thing, not at all. I think the practical piece of how are we going to move this forward is very necessary, but only once we’ve had a deep experience of really coming to the heart to the [00:17:00] root, which means coming into the heart of vulnerability. So the second way that I see a lot of practitioners avoiding vulnerability is through prematurely coming to fixing and solving. And that is of course supported by the fact that most of us have a very dominant skill of our mental dimension and our thoughts. Most of us, our mind is concerned with fixing problems and finding solutions. And if we think about the ratio [00:17:30] of how much we’re in our head and our mind versus how much we’re in our body, most of us are in our mind more of the day, and our mind is a much more developed skill and muscle than the sensitivity of our body, which is where the heart of our vulnerability lives. So as a result, it becomes a natural extension of our well-developed mental muscle to go looking for solutions.
Speaker 1: It’s the strongest muscle in the room [00:18:00] and that habituation can often lead us to prematurely fixing and solving. And I really believe that when we think about, well, what is coaching, not coaching is not coming up immediately with a solution. I believe there’s time and space for a solution that often happens towards the end of a coaching session, but very first and particularly [00:18:30] for the flavor of feminine embodiment, coaching or anyone working with the embodied or the somatic or the feminine arts, there must be, and it is mandated that we deepen into vulnerability before we find solutions.
Speaker 1: The third way that we can avoid vulnerability, and I put my hand up and say, I’m sometimes guilty of all of these things. The third one, probably most of all, is that it’s sometimes easier just to share your story [00:19:00] and to try and find a common ground with somebody’s edge towards tenderness than it is to just pause and feel the tenderness. So I’ve experienced, and I notice that I do it myself, this one probably most of all, that if someone’s sharing a tender emotional experience and I’m sitting in the role of practitioner, one of the ways that I can avoid vulnerability is to nod along [00:19:30] instead of pause to allow the full gravity of that vulnerable and tender share to be felt. I can say, yeah, I know what that’s like. I have this and direct the narrative back towards me instead of leaving the tender and pregnant pause.
Speaker 1: So these are three ways that people, particularly practitioners can avoid vulnerability by giving advice, by fixing [00:20:00] and solving, and by sharing our story and not pausing for the tender. And what this does is it all diminishes the space and the potency of vulnerability during an experience. And this applies whether you’re a practitioner, it can apply in friendships, it can apply when speaking with your kid or your partner or your mother or whoever your significant people are in your life. [00:20:30] I think these practices I’ve developed and refined these practices as a professional and as professional skills, but I know that they overflow into every role that I wear in my life. So instead, this second pearl around how we avoid vulnerability asks us to instead consider, what if we just sat in the discomfort and allowed ourselves to feel it? [00:21:00] What if we swam a little deeper towards that tenderness and towards that emotional risk? That’s what I believe really deeply creates new awareness because that’s what cracks our heart open. And it’s not about making meaning or having a solution. It’s much more about reclaiming the part of your heart and the life force energy [00:21:30] that’s bound up in avoiding feeling that thing that you don’t want to contact.
Speaker 1: Having a little pauser to digest here before we move on to our third and final pearl, who would invite you just to take a breath with me and move your body, talking about the context and theory of vulnerability can sometimes activate a little bit of, oh, what’s here in my body? [00:22:00] I’m noticing a little bit of that right now. So I invite you just wherever you are as you join me, if it’s safe for you to do so, just come place your hands somewhere on your body, take a breath, maybe shut down your eyes and just let the whole weight of you rest down a little bit more fully into the chair that’s beneath you or the soles [00:22:30] of your feet or the place that you are contacting the earth. Before we are moving on, just arriving a little more and thank you for being here. So the third pearl to clarify around what coaching is and what it is not, is to tease apart the difference between coaching [00:23:00] and facilitating and mentoring. This took me a surprisingly long time to figure out, and you can see with the show notes on my website, which is@jenward.co, a little visual that helps to depict this. So if you’re a visual learner, it’s also over on our Instagram to match this podcast app, but you can find this@jennaward.co slash blog will be the uur L.
Speaker 1: So let’s chat [00:23:30] about these three different and distinct types of practitionership that exist along that spectrum, but which are distinct flavors on that spectrum. So we’ve already spoken first about coaching, and we know that coaching is about using questions to create new awareness. That’s the heart of coaching. Coaches are usually doing this in a one-to-one setting. [00:24:00] You can of course coach in a group setting, but you’re usually in a group coaching one person at a time, moving on to the next person. So as a result of this coaching, employing questions that create new awareness and doing it in a predominantly one-to-one setting, what happens is that the direction of the inquiry is determined by the client. The depth of the inquiry is determined by the client. [00:24:30] The pace of the inquiry is determined by the client. So let’s take my client who was working with procrastination.
Speaker 1: I didn’t show up for the session and say, okay, everyone, we’re going to have a guided embodied experience into our procrastination today. Everyone think of a recent situation and I’m now going to guide you into a process around it. That’s not what happened. The client came to me and said, here’s the thing. They’ve decided the direction. And then [00:25:00] as we’re unraveling the way that this person unravels their procrastination and the nuance and the specificity of it is 3000000% different to the next client, this client might have some, I don’t know, like internalized capitalism that they’re working with, and the next client might have some money issue and matrilineal line issue that they’re wanting to work through. And the next client [00:25:30] that is dealing with procrastination might have the heart of it, might be something to do with their upper limit or the fact that they’re at capacity because they’ve got way too much domestic load on their plate.
Speaker 1: Everybody’s narrative is so different. So even though we’re exploring one topic, the pace, the direction and what the rooms that we need to explore for that client going to be totally different client to client. And so this is coaching, [00:26:00] this is the heart of coaching, really highly personalized, very much determined by the client, and the coach is responsive. The coach is not setting the agenda, but supporting and creating the conditions for the space. Moving along the spectrum, we next have facilitating. So a facilitator, generally we’re speaking about facilitation in group settings, although it can happen one-to-one as well. [00:26:30] Facilitators determine the direction. So the facilitator shows up and today says, we’re going to have an exploration of embodied pleasure. That’s our focus for today. The facilitator will determine the group’s speed of exploration, their depth of exploration. They may use questions in their exploration, but predominantly when it’s happening in a group setting, there’s not necessarily a time [00:27:00] for a response and to adjust the explorations for every single person in the room.
Speaker 1: And so we end up with an experience which can be incredibly rich, but whereby the nuance of individual speeds and directions and influencing factors are a little less part of the equation because the facilitator is determining the final destination and where they want to get to. [00:27:30] So a great example of this is I was at a really beautiful embodied dance workshop recently, and the facilitator was deciding the pace of the explorations, how long we were in one particular exploration and song for the facilitator was determining. Then when that changed and somebody in the room might’ve been really ready for the change and somebodies in the room might not [00:28:00] quite have been ready yet, but we all needed to move at a common pace and the facilitator was determining what that pace was. So not better, not worse. There’s places for all of these types of practitioners, but we see that there is a difference between coaching and facilitation, not only in that coaching’s more predominantly one-to-one and facilitating is to a group, but the depth, the speed, the destination is determined in very different ways.
Speaker 1: [00:28:30] Moving further along the spectrum, we then have mentoring. Now I actually love mentoring. Mentoring is close to my heart. And mentoring is when you are, it’s close to coaching. So mentoring often happens in a one-to-one setting, though it can happen in a group setting as well. And when you’re in the role of a mentor, you’re sharing advice or sharing from common experience. [00:29:00] So mentoring involves a lot more storytelling, a lot more industry specific facts and data and experiences. In the feminine embodiment coaching certification, we offer the teaching team and I, we open our office doors and people can just book a mini mentoring session with us to check in how they’re going in the program and any questions. And in those sessions, I’m not in the role of coach, so [00:29:30] I’m not asking the client to find their own answers. I’m in the role of mentor, which means I’ll often respond with, oh, well, I hear you are procrastinating.
Speaker 1: Now three things to consider that I notice tend to come up a lot for people are A, B, and C. Do any of those relate for you? So in the role of mentor, I am one of the people with the facts or the data or [00:30:00] I don’t know what’s right for another person’s body and I’ll never tell them how it is. I don’t know what’s going on in their lived experience, but I can offer some resources, some common experiences, some common advice from a shared experience that I’m very well versed in. And so I can see there’s a very distinct difference between the role of mentor and the role of coach because the types of responses that I give are totally different. [00:30:30] Mentoring is in my mind a lot more about sharing common experiences, sharing advice, sharing personal experiences, and drawing on a deep well of experience in the realm that your client is wanting to move towards.
Speaker 1: So for me as a practitioner, when I’m working one-on-one with clients, I’m predominantly in the role of coach, though some mentoring and facilitating might very lightly be sprinkled in. But 75% plus the time I’m [00:31:00] using my core coaching framework and coaching because I just most enjoy when we have vulnerable deep rich conversations where the client is discovering more rooms in the mansion of them. And so I hope these three pearls around what coaching is and what coaching isn’t have been useful in maybe teasing apart some of the assumptions, but also some of the deep magic that [00:31:30] this way of working can be. And if you are interested in becoming a coach or you are a practitioner in the realm of personal transformation and development, then I hope that this has been insightful and maybe there’s a little piece here that you can take back to your own practice. As always, if you’re interested in becoming a feminine embodiment coach, you know where to come to. Our doors are open and you can find out more in chat with our team@feminineembodimentcoaching.com. Otherwise, thank you so much [00:32:00] for joining me for this episode. Until next time, bye.
Speaker 1: If you’ve enjoyed this episode, the most sincere way you can share your thanks and celebrate the conversations that we’ve been having is to leave us a review wherever it is that you listen to your podcast. Drop us some stars on Spotify, a comment on iTunes. I would be so grateful if you would share the love as it really [00:32:30] helps others to find these important conversations. And also, I get a little bit of a sweet sparkle in my heart when I read those reviews. For more information around feminine embodiment coaching and the School of Embodied Arts, you can always find us@jennaor.co. And as we wrap our podcast for today, I’m going to leave you with some words from some of our past graduates from the coaching certification who can share in their own words what the experience, [00:33:00] the training, and the outcomes were like. So I hope you enjoy hearing from some of our past graduates.
