The Power in the Subtle: 3 Ways To Use Mindfulness In Coaching

Because mindfulness is more accessible and more impactful than you might think.

While the world is becoming more turbulent and our systems are getting disrupted, it’s easy to forget that we are living in an exciting age in which new knowledge and ancient wisdom are colliding. The findings of the emerging disciplines of neuroscience and Embodied Cognition are reshaping what we understand about human potential and how we achieve personal change. Even more interestingly, these new findings are proving to be surprisingly consistent with the age old principles of the Wisdom traditions from the East.

Mindfulness, of course, has taken the Western world by storm. It is ubiquitous as a recommended tool and technique for bringing increased peace and presence into our lives; a balm against the agents of the attention economy who seek to pull us into our mobile phones and a life buoy for the tidal waves of information that sweep towards us on a daily basis.

And yet, despite this fanfare, very little has been said about how it can become an essential tool in the coaching process.

Why is this the case?

Perhaps it is that coaching has been associated with “big” results, while mindfulness itself is seen as subtle and nuanced.

At The Somatic School, we would say that this is an error!

Our experience in Body-oriented Coaching is that the reality is actually entirely paradoxical: the more clients are able to pay quiet and subtle attention to their present moment experience, the more they can create the magnitude of results that they want in their lives.

The Power in the Subtle

From the perspective of the Wisdom traditions, this understanding is nothing new. As the founder of Hakomi, Ron Kurtz said:

“Buddhism and Taoism both teach us that the only reality is in the present. The past is a dream. The future is a dream. Only in the present moment can we experience what is real. This realisation is wisdom.”

While this idea has now been significantly popularised — thanks to the likes of Eckhart Tolle and his brand of spiritual self-help set out in such books as The Power Of Now — it is one thing to reach this understanding, and it is quite another to be able to routinely use it as the very stepping stone to impactful coaching results.

One way to “operationalise” this wisdom is to embed mindfulness in the coaching process as a matter of course. This is what we do at The Somatic School. In Body-oriented Coaching, most of a session may be spent in this state.

As coaches train in this approach, they often realise that mindfulness is the “secret sauce” which enables clients to break through existing loops, embody new behaviours and to move forward towards their goals.

However, this approach is available to all coaches. We believe all coaching encounters can be improved by introducing mindfulness. Here are three excellent ways to start…

1. Bringing awareness to core beliefs

Neuroscience has shown that, as humans, we can only hold a small amount of information in our awareness. This happens for reasons of efficiency. Our unconscious is a set of “pervasive, adaptive, sophisticated mental processes that occur largely out of view” (Stephen Wilson). This includes many higher-order psychological processes and states.

However, as coaches, it is precisely the more unconscious sophisticated mental processes in which we are interested.

These automatic processes and the beliefs associated with them are often the very material keeping clients stuck in loops and cyclical patterns. In order for these processes to be revised, we need to bring awareness to them. Mindfulness is one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

“We are only now beginning to grasp what the contemplative and meditative traditions have always known: we are largely automatic and unaware. Without meditation and mindfulness practice, the truth of our automaticity is difficult to realise.” (Ron Kurtz)

Mindfulness brings what was previously unconscious and unknown into conscious awareness. This is because neuroscience has now revealed that mindfulness facilitates a “bottom-up” process. When we are in a mindful state, information is able to flow upwards from our unconscious and our bodies, in order to be filtered and processed by our conscious mind.

So, how can you bring this into your coaching?

Quite simply: when clients experience aha moments, make a point of slowing things down.

At this point, you can support them to track the way in which these immediately take expression in their sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, attitudes, relational ways of being, posture, breathing, or movements. In this way, the insight becomes encoded in the client’s implicit memory.

Certain approaches like Hakomi are particularly useful for this. They shine a light on core beliefs that are otherwise out of view. This awareness is the first, essential step to change.

2. Developing embodied self-awareness

While mindfulness is the key tool for increasing our awareness of what’s really going on for us and which memories and beliefs are really driving us, the fields of Interpersonal Neurobiology and Embodied Cognition are now adding a further piece to the jigsaw.

They indicate that the critical aspect in facilitating personal change requires developing embodied self-awareness in addition to conceptual self-awareness (for more on this, see Alan Fogel’s book Body Sense).

Conceptual self-awareness is the ‘idea’ of who we are. It is the answer to the question “Who am I?”. Embodied self-awareness, on the other hand, is the direct felt experience of what is happening in our bodies. It is the answer to the question “What is arising in me right now?”. From this perspective, embodied self-awareness is not as abstract as conceptual self-awareness.…in fact it is not an abstraction at all.

When we bring attention to our sensorial experience in the present moment, we often discover something different to what we imagined we would find: something that is perhaps more ‘true’, something rooted in the here-and-now.

The science indicates that embodied self-awareness offers greater access to the “subjective emotional present”, in which one is able to feel one’s sadness, pain or joy without judgment and without trying to escape it. The more we are able to attend to our present moment experiences and let them pass naturally, the less we are beholden to our emotions and sensations. In this state of present-moment awareness the body is more spontaneous, creative, and open to change.

This is an important new understanding to integrate into the field of coaching, which has

long focused on conceptual self-awareness, digging into the stories that clients hold about themselves.

This approach has only been half the story.

So, how can this be introduced into your coaching?

One way is to support clients to track what is happening in their body in the present moment using Clean Language. Clean Language was initially developed by David J. Grove in the 1980s and 1990s, and was later adapted by Nick Pole in his book Words That Touch to directly support clients to connect to their embodied experience.

Rather than asking the somewhat tired coaching question “where do you feel that in your body?”, at the appropriate point, you might say something like “….maybe you sense that in your body now” or “…maybe sense how that feels in your body now”. This serves as an invitation to see what might be there already — instead of being a question that assumes (or even implies) there is something there (even if there wasn’t before).

From this place, you can guide the client deeper into embodied self-awareness with Clean Questions to locate, describe and focus on their experience.

a. LOCATE

“And where is…?” ​e.g. And where is “tense”?

b. DESCRIBE

“And what kind of…?” ​e.g. And what kind of “tense back” is that?

“And is there anything else about…?” e.g. And is there anything else about that “tense back” and “rolling shoulders”?

c. FOCUS

“And when you…what are you drawn to most?” ​e.g. And when you “feel like a charging bull”, “tense back”, “rolling shoulders” what are you drawn to most?

These questions rely on reflecting clients’ exact words back to them. They invite clients to give voice to what is not already known conceptually and can elicit extraordinary insight!

3. Taking In The Good

Modern neuroscience has revealed that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain’s firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself. This is neuroplasticity. This understanding confirms the inspiring outlook that we are able to change and rewire ourselves through the power of our own focus.

Every time we take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, for example, we stimulate responsive circuits in our brains. When we stimulate neural circuits, we strengthen them. In this way, we are able to deliberately internalise positive experiences into implicit memory.

As coaches, this means we are able to support clients to activate resourceful mental states and then to install them as neural traits. This is a technique known as ‘Taking In The Good’ developed by the neuropsychologist Rick Hanson.

To help your clients integrate resourceful states, guide them to enrich their positive experience in the moment by staying with it, expanding it inside, and then absorbing it into the bodymind. This is summarised below in the three steps of staying, sensing and savouring.

1. STAY

Stay with the positive experience or resourceful state for a breath or longer.

b. SENSE

Feel it in the body.

c. SAVOUR

Focus on what’s enjoyable or rewarding (or meaningful) about it.

Over time, practice in turning the volume up or down on particular channels of our awareness — including our bottom-up stream which is available to us through our bodily sensations, as well as our top-down stream of thought and mental chatter — increases the capacity for us to choose how to respond to what is arising in our experience.

This is very important, as it sets the stage for far greater freedom in the our lives. As the Existentialist Rollo May said, “Freedom is the capacity to pause between stimulus and response.”

In summary, then, mindfulness is a powerful addition to the coach’s toolkit — one which has been somewhat overlooked. It facilitates clients accessing bottom-up information that is outside their awareness. It shines a light on core beliefs and on automatic processes. It develops embodied self-awareness. It increases the range of options between stimulus and response. It ensures the release of neurochemicals so that behaviours can be changed, new neural pathways developed, and resourceful states to be turned into enduring neural traits.

What is not to like? The Wisdom traditions had it right from the beginning, and the new fields of Neuroscience and Embodied Cognition is now providing the evidence why.

From this perspective it is really not an overstatement to say: the more we develop mindfulness, the more options we have in life! The Power in the Subtle is here, in operational form, for the coaching encounter.

The Somatic School helps coaches, counsellors, therapists and facilitators incorporate somatic approaches to work with the body’s intelligence both online and in-person. To learn more visit www.thesomaticschool.com.

Join us at one of our free online ‘Introduction to Body-oriented Coaching’ events by booking here.