Life Coaching – Changing Lives

Here at the-Coaching Blog-run by Gerard O’Donovan, our aim is to constantly bring value to those seeking to improve their lives. Therefore we have a policy of publishing articles and materials by guest authors whom we value and appreciate. Today’s guest author is Tim Levy (USA).

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born… -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There is a moment, a powerful moment, in which, as a life coach, you can actually see and feel a person changing for the better in front of you. It’s this moment, I believe, that drives every life coach, every coach for that matter and plenty of humans who are not coaches, to continue in the work of changing people’s lives in a positive way and for their own greatest good.

For me, it goes back to a distinction that I’d like to elucidate here. It’s called the ‘Awakener’.

Asleep, Awake, Awakeners

In my opinion, there are currently three groups of humans in the world. We have the Asleep, the Awake and the Awakeners.

The Asleep

Those we’ll call the Asleep can be found everywhere. These are people who seem to go through life on some kind of automatic pilot. They wake up, they go to work, they possibly hate their job or their boss, and at the end of the day they head home to sleep in order to go to work again. The weekends are a much needed recovery place for this type of people. The Asleep are people who are caught in some kind of rat race, spending their time, energy and life in pursuit of, well, not very much.

The Awake

The group we recognize as the Awake is a much smaller group. A general estimation is that more than half of the population – around two-thirds or even as much as ninety percent – is more or less ‘asleep’. So, that leaves us with around about ten percent of the population who is more so awake or in the process of awakening. These are people who are actively investigating their identity, their selves. They are people who are in the pursuit of personal development; asking questions like: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And those are people who look around for help.

The Awakeners

Fortunately, there is a group of people – a subset of the Awake – who can be described as Awakeners. Now, these people are very much a self-selected group. They are strong-willed people who have decided – and no one has told them to do so – that it is their life’s purpose to contribute to the awakening of others. These are the people who find a deep, heartfelt satisfaction when they assist others in the process of their own awakening. These are people who emerge from the group of artists, scientists, parents, innovators and, of course, life coaches, who make it their life’s work to wake up and stimulate others. Hence, the Awakeners.

What can an Awakener do?

The question naturally arises: What can an Awakener do? How can an awakener actually make that active contribution to someone else’s awakening? It turns out that the process of awakening others is not something that can be forced. You can’t grab someone by the shoulders, shake them a little bit and say aloud: “Wake up!” with any expectation of success. The process of awakening – especially to your own life’s purpose and to the truth of your essential nature as a spiritual being – is a process that cannot be forced. So, how do you go about it?

The Awakener’s Handbook

When I was in the process of writing my book ‘The Awakener’s Handbook’, I had an essential epiphany, a realization if you will, that the process of awakening is often attached to the idea of energy. In other words, if your energy is constantly low, you’re depressed, upset, feeling stuck and lost. That’s the opposite of the awakening space. However, if your energy is consistently high, you find clarity, you find ease and flow, you find easy relationships, work opportunities and financial rewards. You find it all when you have terrific, consistent energy.

Techniques to Get to High Energy

There are a variety of techniques to get to high energy. Among them are:

Eating terrific food, which is to say, paying attention to what goes in your body

Going to high-energy places – places that bring you to a high-energy state

Connecting with and working with high-energy people who lead you in a consistently positive space

Having high-energy sound and colour around you

Those are some of the important things that are, personally for you, energy-raising. But, among those, the major and most effective way of raising your energy is to be spending time with the high-energy people. In other words, the function of life coaching is to give energy to those you coach. You do that consistently through your interactions and your consistent assistance to those people, whether they are physical or virtual, in terms of where you help them focus.

An Alliance between Coach and Client

There’s nothing that changes a life as effectively as having a consistent focus in a positive direction. This, in fact, is the heart of the mission of a life coach. Life coaching is a designed alliance between coach and client. It is a means for the coach to figure out what their clients’ picture of ‘perfect’ might be and then keep them consistently focused in that space. The life coach consistently helps people maintain a high-energy focus on the things they love, because when people do that, those things tend to manifest better for them. So, the life coach is an Awakener and their function is to contribute energetically to their clients by keeping them focused in a positive space.

The Awakening Moment

The awakening moment can be exceptionally fascinating. For this, I’ll have to tell you a little story about what happened to me as recently as yesterday. It happened that I was talking to someone who might become a potential client of mine. After a couple of minutes during that very first meeting, it became clear to me that this potential client of mine (let’s call her Ms. Mysterious X) was not really presenting her true self to me. She was imparting to me a version of herself that was, to some extent, calculated to impress. Maybe that’s a New York thing or maybe it’s a people thing. Either way, it didn’t feel genuine; it was not grounded and I was not convinced. So, after completing our conversation, we decided to come back for more talk. In the second hour, I began to ask questions. Those questions were designed to delve into her truth. The further we went into her truth, the more her walls fell away. Her masks began to fall apart and dissolve until her true self was revealed. That self was sweet, graceful, grounded, and had a real purpose. The energy in her words gave credence to her purpose. In other words, when she was discussing things that were actually fake, she was wearing a mask, saying what she felt the world needed to hear. They didn’t have good energy, didn’t feel positive. But, when she gradually let all that go, letting the ego recede and coming back to the position of truth, her words’ energy changed and became more passionate. Her words had more depth and there was a feeling that was easy to sense, even though we were only speaking over Skype. Those words were authentic and so, her true mission began to reveal itself. She became more gentle and more favourably inclined. His face changed and she looked more relaxed. I saw her begin to transform in front of me.

And by the end of the call, as we’d investigated this true self and brought that to the foreground of her consciousness, and to the beginnings of a consistent focus, she thanked me and she said that she felt changed, even by this one call.

And it’s that hour spent in the service of others, spent with a focus on awakening others by a contribution of energy that is life-changing. It’s those moments spent in helping this client focus in a positive direction that she didn’t even know existed until we began our process that were decisive for her and so rewarding for people like me, life coaches of the world, Awakeners of the people. It has been so much the better yet.

So, for those who are considering life coaching, all I say is this. If you identify with the Awakener’s role, if for you the most satisfying thing is to change the lives of others, then there’s every chance that you have the power to do so. So I’d advocate, do everything you can to get into the position where you begin to be of assistance to people in this way. And as they give you the feedback, that feedback will in turn feed you. You will realize that you have found your own purpose.

About Tim Levy

Tim Levy is an author, speaker, consultant and coach working with CEOs and entrepreneurs on clarity, strategy and mindset. He runs a strategic marketing agency out of Austin, Texas. He routinely speaks for leading organizations like Vistage International, CEOSpace International and Secret Knock. Tim’s intention is to radically accelerate and enable highly purposeful CEOs and entrepreneurs in their business and personal lives.

Read more here and don’t forget to subscribe to get free coaching reports to my coaching blog site: https://www.coaching-blog.com/life-coaching-changing-lives/

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