What is Holistic Coaching? Many might say that it's working with the whole person rather than just the mind. Pam Lidford shares more about the key ideas behind holistic coaching and some tips to get you started on working holistically. Read on!
Traditional coaching is often focused around what a client thinks they want from a logical, practical and action-focused perspective and is perfect for ‘the ideal’ client who Peter Bluckert describes as:
“An ‘excellent client’ demonstrates low interpersonal problem, has an excellent perception of others, career, current life is secure, has no performance or commitment issues and is highly motivated towards coaching.”
Compared to a ‘poor’ coaching client “who may have problems with interpersonal relationships, low or no perception of others, career/life may be under threat, may have performance issues and have little or no commitment towards changing their behaviour or attitudes.”
Though we would all love to have ‘the ideal client’ from my experience in coaching of over 18 years, a high percentage of my clients fall into the ‘average’ category, by that I mean they are committed to change but have difficulty in achieving their goals because of emotional or unconscious energetic challenges that are out of sync with the desires of their conscious mind.
Though traditional coaching training includes listening out for limiting beliefs, values, how a client feels, sees and thinks, it doesn’t equip the newly trained coach to handle the emotional, energetic and spiritual aspects of who a person is and can cause a coach to ignore it when it arises simply because they don’t know what to do with it.
When people ask me what a holistic coach does, I always ask what it means to them before I answer; most people have a definition that is pretty close to what it means to me which is it’s working with the whole person, it’s a mind, body and energy field approach and we pay attention to all the parts a person presents in a session.
A holistic coach works with clients who want to achieve more flow and balance and allow their goal to come to them with greater ease. When we need to achieve a goal or are desperate to have it, it’s as if we hold on so tightly we aren’t truly sure we will get it. This needy approach sets up a negative energy vibration around the goal and even though we are consciously stating the goal in a positive way, our subconscious self is battling to allow us to have it. The energy becomes heavy, stuck, disbelieving.
Unlike more traditional approaches to coaching, holistic coaching allows for a deeper exploration and understanding of the inner interferences that prevent the client from achieving their goals and how to move on from them.
A client might bring a GOAL to a session they have previously tried and failed at and have developed a habit of failure around, unaware their subconscious is moving them in the direction IT believes is best in order to keep them safe. This in turn creates negative energy states and feelings when they think about the goal and can set up a cycle of failure. A holistic coach will be able to identify the subconscious driving state, bring it to the attention of the client and help them change the negative state using old familiar tools such as the wheel of life as well as new ones introduced on the holistic training day, to assist the client in having less conflict around their goal.
In summary, when clients bring goals to a session the holistic coach, as well as listening out for everything traditional coaching has taught them, will also know how to pay attention to the mental and emotional energy states that accompany the clients thinking.
They will have the know-how to challenge it verbally, as well as via introducing tools and models to help move their client towards greater self-awareness and intentional success.
A holistic coach is not a counsellor. Like an NLP Practitioner, they will feel empowered to help clients notice what’s going on at a much deeper level and know how to handle it.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
