Facing our fears.

How we relate to the things that hold fear for us will have a significant impact on how we experience life. Whether we are living from a place of joy and possibility or if we feel stuck and limited in our outlook.

The further leaders progress on their journeys the more likely they are to come face to face with unfamiliar situations that challenge them to leverage their courage in the pursuit of their goals. Facing and overcoming these fears can have transformative effects on how we see ourselves as leaders and the likelihood of taking on more challenges in the future.

My coaching approach looks to work with my clients fears in a sensitive and compassionate way, looking for the most appropriate next steps that will help them take action and keep moving forward. I work with somatic approaches that aim to get my clients out of their thinking minds (the source of all our anxiety and fear) and into their bodies, looking for the locations that enable them to relax and access more of their innate wisdom.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”

Joseph Campbell

How does coaching help?

Most of us have goals or an idea of what our life could be like but for some reason we just haven’t found a way of making any meaningful progress.

Until we have identified and addressed the underlying emotions that are keeping us stuck, all the latest time management and life hacking techniques won’t give us the results we seek.

The job of the coach is to create the conditions for the leader to explore what it is that is holding them back. This can be sensitive work and the skill of the coach is to hold a space in which the client feels safe enough to reflect on how their current patterns of thinking and mindset are preventing progress.

The nature of these conversations is very different from the those that would happen in a standard manager/direct report interaction. It requires empathy, patience and the ability to judge when to challenge the client to push beyond their comfort zone and when to offer support. Unsurprisingly, many people feel reluctant to show too much vulnerability to a manager or peer, not knowing if that information will be used against them in the future. This is where the confidentiality of the coaching relationship comes in. This enables trust to be built which is an essential ingredient if any transformation is going to happen.