Coaching for embodied transformation

Conventional coaching and leadership development focuses on leaders discovering insights for growth. That is useful but not adequate in a transformation context. Transformation requires attention to how leaders show up in their role, when the picture isn’t rosy.

Under pressure, we rarely rise to our intentions. We fall back on our embodied algorithms of perceiving, thinking and acting. Leaders are no different (they are, after all human).

Yet, we have seen leaders make substantial shifts when they gain leverage over the algorithms that are creating their experience and influencing others. They do this when they offer themselves the same level of compassion and empathy that they reserve for others. This helps them integrate repressed parts of themselves that the situation may actually require. 

With the right coach, leaders can safely share their experience, explore their beliefs and discover choices that are aligned with both the situation and their values. In other words, learn to authentically embody what is necessary, especially when it is difficult.

This is why our coaching approach isn't about adding more frameworks to an already full mind. It's about holding space for leaders in a way where they can extend acceptance to themselves first. 

The Shift From Awareness to Action

Creating insight is the baseline of good coaching. Transformation requires the awareness to be present as a constant source of light that is undisturbed by clouds of thought and habit.

If leadership is an embodied experience, then the approach to work with it must also involve something fundamental and embodied. The patterns we cannot see tend to run us. The patterns we can consciously access become available for change.

We rely on three embodied expressions we all share – voice, attention and movement. Together, they serve as the access points for any embodied algorithm; and we know that what can be accessed, can be transformed.

Voice:

Right now, as you read this, there's a voice in your head running alongside it — judging, agreeing, comparing, doubting. That inner voice is constantly narrating your experience, creating your reality. The story of your story is often the first thing that needs to shift.

Attention:

As that inner voice runs, your attention is already pointed somewhere as a sharply focused lens; towards a threat, an opportunity, a person, a concern and so on. Where attention goes, energy flows. When leaders shift what they pay attention to, they transform everything downstream of it.

Movement:

Voice and attention eventually culminate in movement, which could be physical, physiological and emotional – taking shape as patterns of thought and action. This is the leader the world actually encounters: the habits, the behaviours, the way you respond when it really matters.

Read more about finding flow with voice, attention and movement here.

Where is your leverage?

No two leaders unlock their potential in the same way. 

This is why we have three curated coaching pathways (read more →) based on what we have seen benefitting leaders. For some, the shift begins by changing the narrative in their head. For others, it begins by ruthlessly refocusing attention on what actually matters. For others still, it begins in the body — through action, through doing, through micro habits that shift decades of conditioning.

In summary, the essence of coaching through transformation is this:

• Organisational transformation is only possible when leaders evolve alongside it.

• Under pressure, parts of ourselves emerge that we don't fully understand.

• The more we resist or judge them, the more the algorithms influence unconsciously.

• When leaders can relate to them with awareness and compassion, they become available for integration and choice.

• Voice, attention and movement provide access to that process.

• A structured coaching engagement with the right coach puts leaders in charge of that process. 

  
  

Transformational Coaching is about reconnecting leaders to the wisdom that already lives in them.

The Somajna Coaching method doesn’t ‘fix’ anything. It’s only a mirror that shows nothing was ever broken.