How are your (career) choices, transitions, and decisions related to your mind-body connection?

Choices, decisions, and transitions are common themes that clients bring to the embodiment coaching sessions with me. These moments can be stressful and may bring up our old fears, blocks, hopes, dreams, and grief.

I know this from my experience with several transitions over the years - I am right now on my third career in the last 13ish years. Here's my short story.

My story of career choices, decisions, and transitions

For around 8 years, I worked at Philips as a usability engineer, my first heart-aligned career. Somewhere over these years, I started longing for something different. I didn't quite know what that "something" was. But an idea that kept showing up repeatedly was the desire to start a business.

It took me many years to make the move. Here's the article I wrote around six-ish years ago which describes my process of making a decision. Daily meditation helped me a lot during this time. Another thing that helped was acknowledging and accepting that I could not move forward because of fear.

I now know that acceptance and meditation calmed down my nervous system, and that calm helped me decide. I started my business as a freelance Sr. user researcher and usability engineer around six years ago.

Like all new things and transitions, my new business needed energy so that I could make choices and decisions that were aligned with my heart.

I needed support to show up with energy and enthusiasm every day - so I went for embodied coaching. I also asked my yoga teacher to teach me yoga sequences for openness and courage. And slowly and steadily I grew my business. Here's the article describing the beginning of my first business.

When I moved to start my second business as an embodiment coach, I saw similar fears and doubts come up. This time too meditation, embodied coaching, and working with a mentor helped me decide.

What does the mind-body connection have to do with choices?

What I have seen happen within myself or my clients' lives is that moments of transition, choices, and decisions can create stress within us - perhaps because we perceive the stakes to be too high, or fear the unfamiliar/failure, feel uncertain, doubt ourselves, etc.

Unprocessed moments of such (any) stress can get stored in our bodies. Over time, this buildup may create anxiety, anger, sadness, lack of energy, constrictions in the body, etc. All these feelings and sensations can feel heavy, and burdensome and may occlude our thinking - making us go around in loops trying to "think through" a problem and creating more stress instead of solutions.

Sometimes we may even take the next step but feel like we are struggling to climb uphill because our system is weighed by unprocessed and "unfelt" stress.

How can embodiment (coaching) help?

When we take the time to be present with the sensations within ourselves, often I see two things happen:

Completing "unprocessed" stress cycles and going into a state of flow

We complete "open" stress loops which might be stored in our body - unprocessed because of lack of time, shock, politeness, fear, etc. This is also known as dissolving frozen tension. This may show up as yawning, stretching, deep breathing, etc.

As we slowly and safely process this frozen tension and let go, it creates spaciousness and flow within our body. Our body moves from a state of "trying to feel safe" to a state of flow and calm. This may happen within a session or across multiple sessions.

From this calm state, we start asking better questions, can be creative, and see more possibilities and opportunities, instead of looping doomsday scenarios ??. And we make decisions and choices while feeling centered, instead of running around like a headless chicken.

For example, instead of asking, "Oh my God, what if this fails?" we may ask, "How do I arrange things to enable this transition in my life?"

Insights or images or metaphors or words bubbling up

In addition, another thing that might happen is that images, thoughts, or words come up as we lean into the inner sensations - this might happen after the session too. And this process brings insights into the situations we are dealing with and gives us a clear way forward.

For example, during one of the sessions, a client saw themselves as a gentle giant who steps over hurdles gently instead of feeling small and helpless. And embodying this image that her body had shown her, she could view her challenge from a place of grounded confidence. And make better decisions.

How does your body react in times of choices, decisions, and transitions?

Want to see if embodiment life and career coaching can help you? Schedule a call here: https://calendly.com/beant-ux/discovery-call