SWIHA Blog

Apprehensive! Nervous! Excited! Empowered! This was the range of emotions I experienced as I did my first LIVE Facebook coaching session as a part of SWIHA’s 31 Days of 31 Minutes of Life Coaching. My topic was 5 Ways to Connect with Spirit, and my “ah-ha” was that the ways we connect with Spirit are the exact same ways we prepare to do a LIVE Facebook gig… and the same steps it takes to fully show up in life in a very “alive” way! In retrospect, going LIVE was just a metaphor! Let me explain…

To go L.I.V.E. you must first LEAN IN!

The title of Life Coach is about learning to “lean in” to your life in a very real and vulnerable way. To be a good coach, you must have a real life– one which goes through the full spectrum of emotions. There will be times when you are apprehensive, nervous, excited, and even empowered! As a coach, the more human, vulnerable, and real that you are willing to be, the more you can be of service to others. 

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For anyone older than about 18 to 20 years old, the mere mention of September 11, 2001, evokes visceral memories of the day the twin towers fell in New York City. Today marks the sixteenth anniversary of this heartbreaking event, and when asked to remember where they were on that day, most people have an almost automatic reflex, causing them to hold their breath and flit back to the memories buried within their emotional awareness. What is this universal emotion we are experiencing in recalling tragedy? Vulnerability!

No matter how old you were, the crack in the cosmic egg which occurred that day caused an entire nation to feel vulnerable. Something shifted in all of us, and that shift may still be affecting how we show up in the world today.

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Shortly after SWIHA was founded, a guest massage instructor came to our modest campus to offer training on a technique known as “positional release therapy.” In this type of therapy, the body is positioned in strategic ways so as to release the muscles and tension stored from past injuries, accidents, and traumas. Within the first few hours of the workshop, one of the students had a reaction to the position in which her body had been placed. She began to cry and then shake; finally, her left hand involuntarily contorted into a claw-like cramp. The guest instructor (who had over 20 years of experience) stood by in confusion, looking as if he had never seen an emotional release before. Immediately stepping up to the table, I offered the student a guided visualization, taking her to a “safe place” and instructing her to concentrate on slowing her breath to calm her mind.

As the guest instructor look on incredulously, he commented, “In all my years, I have never had THAT happen on my table!” Luckily, I had the grace to not say what I was thinking, which was: “And you never will… because you don’t know how to ‘hold space’ for others!” Even if I had shared what I was thinking, this instructor probably wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about.

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There is an old adage which states, "If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it's yours forever. If it doesn't, then it was never meant to be." 

There is no truer definition of surrender than freely letting something go forever with no attachment to it (whatever “it” is) coming back— while still being open to the miracle that it might. Surrender is not giving up; it’s releasing control or attachment to what you want, fully believing there is a higher, greater purpose for whatever happens. This process can be considered a walk in faith!

As strange and trite as it might sound, my recent stay in “Facebook jail” truly taught me valuable life coaching lessons in the art of surrender. As shared in a previous blog, Facebook disabled my personal account with no explanation other than to say that my account had been deemed a security risk and that no further explanation could (or would) be given. Now I realize that it is truly a “first-world problem” to have a Facebook account disabled. You might be thinking, “Come on, KC, there are much more important things to think about, let alone spend precious time praying about!” This is true, and the experience has been humbling and illuminating. In fact, as a result of being in “Facebook jail,” I truly have experienced a walk in faith. The following are the life coaching steps I took and will continue to take in the future:

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