The Benefits of Professional Coaching: Learn how coaching helps enable a more productive and happier life, says Zen Benefiel.

Change is inevitable. With respect to the old adage, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” personal belief systems and unconscious behavior patterns make a huge difference. Coaching practices, personal and professional, have been around for decades. Some folks are better than others, and many offer specific areas of expertise. While there are many that have created new lexicons to describe their style or type of coaching, others take a more traditional route. Finding a coach that offers safety and challenges us to grow may take time, so be tenacious and vet them well. The fact we have made the choice to even consider coaching leads us forward.

Look for differentiators that stimulate the senses. A decade ago after doing some work with a great thought leader, Dudley Lynch, of Brain Technologies, Inc., an unexpected and quite delightful label emerged for this type of coach: possibilities coagulator. Right away, it felt perfect, as the nature of past and present work is focused on creating strategic alliances bringing people, places and things to facilitate action plans and goal achievement. The term strikes up conversation and questions. It’s what we want.

The idea and implementation of assembling people, places and things for our greater good is pretty much the focus of all coaching. It is a two-phase production from concept to creation. First, we peer inward to become more aware of how we are feeling and thinking. As the inner view brings more clarity, awareness usually facilitates a built-in auto-response system and change happens. We get better daily.

Secondly is the look outward to reflect upon what has appeared in our lives to date. It gives evidence to our new awareness of how we feel and think. It is like a self-correcting mirror that allows us to monitor the changes we make as a result of the coach’s inquiry, our continued contemplation and shifting how we behave on a moment-to-moment basis.

Inherently, coaching of any kind gets us to pay more attention to our gut feeling; our intuition. Most of us don’t feel much at all, or if we do, the fleeting glimpses of how or why often get overridden by a tenacious mind that wants to deliver answers based on what it knows. That’s where we get stuck. Freeing our mind or taking part in mindfulness meditation can do wonders for changing life for the better; so consider coaching; personal and/or professional growth and beyond to achieve our plan.

Zen Benefiel, MBA, is the owner of Be The Dream transformational personal and business coaching. For more information, phone 480-633-7179 or visit BeTheDream.com.

 

 

Losing Your Mind

Here is a simple exercise. Put your fingertips together like a steeple and make sure they are all touching a bit firmly. Now take a few deep breaths, and then focus on feeling your heartbeat in your fingertips. When you can feel your heartbeat, you’ve left your “thinking” behind and one might even by right to say you are officially out of your mind. Just feel for a bit. Do it regularly, especially in stressful situations.