Life Coaching Explained
“Oh, you’re a life coach?! Cool, so you do counseling with people?”
“Oh, wow, my cousin was in therapeutic riding as a kid, such great work, really cool you do that.”
“So you tell people what to do with their lives; seems like a big responsibility?”
... are the most common responses when I share what I do professionally, life coaching.
So, what is life coaching you ask?
Life Coaching or Relationship Coaching, is a co-active, collaborative relationship between the coach and the client(s), built on the belief that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole; capable of making choices, finding answers, recovering from adversity, learning, and taking appropriate action to contribute towards creating a more rewarding experience of life for themselves. The coaching relationship is about the client’s discovery, awareness, and choice, it is an inclusive and empowering relationship with unlimited possibility. It is an exciting, challenging, adventure we embark on together. You are not alone. We are working together, in connection, I am rigorously holding you accountable to learning and moving forward towards your vision and goals, towards your why. Championing you through challenges, celebrating your successes, and helping you navigate the myriad blocks (self-limiting beliefs, behaviors, and setbacks) which inevitably, at some point, will, and do, get in the way of every courageous, wholehearted, life well lived. The coaching process is designed to help you achieve your personal, interpersonal, and professional goals with guidance and support. Through reflection, further questioning, perspective shifting, and exercises designed to stretch you, we work to clarify values, work through blocks, make plans, and get you moving forward towards whatever goals you have set for yourself.
Expectations:
Your life is a reflection of your thoughts. In order to change your life, you must change your perception. Change is, by its very nature, challenging. Our natural default, as humans, is to conserve energy, reducing the amount of energy we need to replenish. Change takes time and energy; it takes a shift in how you are seeing and engaging with yourself and your environment. True too “nothing remains idle and thrives. Life needs a moving force to prevent the devastating effects of stagnancy. That is why life employs change.” -Richelle E. Doodrich. If you wish to thrive in life, you must put in the work it requires to change; change the way you are seeing, thinking, speaking, and doing in order to live your life in alignment with your life blueprint, synchronized with who you are meant to be, in order to act in the interest of your own greatest version of You. True too living systems do not allow for voids. Meaning, it is not enough simply to say “I don’t want to do “this”” You must have what you seek specifically to replace that which you wish to extinguish. Example: declaring that you will no longer yell at your child or your dog will not result in successfully ceasing that behavior. To achieve success with that, you must have a clear idea as to why that is important to you and what you will specifically do instead. So, instead, ‘”it is important to me to live my values for kindness and curiosity, therefore I will seek to better understand the needs driving other’s behaviors, speak in a calm, clear, kind way with genuine compassionate curiosity at heart in my communication practices with others”.
Throughout the entirety of our coaching relationship together, I endeavor to be fully present, open to hearing the entirety of your message, getting to the root of the work you are embarking on for yourself, and helping you to achieve your best version of life. The extent that I am able to help you on your journey is in large part dependent on you. The more openly, honestly, candidly you show up, share what is real and alive inside you, the better idea I have of what is in play and what is at stake. Living small does not serve you or the World. “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” Brene Brown. Furthermore “our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same [stay in our comfort zones] but get better.” Sydney J. Harris. I’m here to help you do the challenging work of changing, I expect that you are too, and together we will successfully leap forward with your life.
How Coaching works:
Everything we discuss is confidential. Coaching meetings are through Google meet, by phone, or in person, at a mutually agreeable time. Sessions run about an hour; if you have a specific time requirement, firm end time needs, please let me know at the beginning of the meeting so I can intentionally hold to that time requirement. If you can not make your appointment, for any reason, please give as much notice as you can, you do not need to give a reason. I expect that this work is a commitment, an investment, you are making in yourself, if you can be here, you will be, if you can’t, just let me know as soon as you know. If you are more than ten minutes late to a meeting, without any contact, it will be assumed that you are not making it, and the meeting will be closed. We can reschedule, but please make every effort to attend or communicate ahead of time if you will not be able to attend our coaching session. I understand life happens sometimes, I’m flexible, really. This is your life we’re working on together; if at any time you feel a question or exercise does not serve you, please speak up, ask to clarify, or even outright reject it. “No” is always an acceptable response. Again, this is your life, I am here to help you, to guide, reflect, ask questions, offer you stretches and exercises. At no time am I taking responsibility for your choices, thoughts, words, or actions. Your life is entirely 100% your responsibility to do with, or not, as you will. I expect you to take full responsibility for the choices you make, and yes, not choosing is a choice, you own it.
A note about therapy:
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates. Coaching and counseling are fundamentally different practices, they could be complementary, but they are distinctly different approaches to well-being. Counseling is looking to the past and attempting to heal old wounds, fixing a perceived brokenness, fighting the old. Coaching is looking to the future, goals to the forefront, learning new ways of being in the world, making value based plans of action, and working on those goals to better align a person's beliefs and values with their daily experiences. Coaching is shifting blocks to enable flowing, "getting unstuck" and as a whole person working towards a more aligned life, building the new, change based in a belief in the capacity of all human beings to live full, creative, whole, meaningful lives. Coaching could and most certainly frequently is therapeutic, but it is not therapy. Coaching can, and frequently does, look to the past, but to better understand the present and change how the individual is operating to achieve a more rewarding result. Healing vs learning, broken vs whole but held up, past vs future, therapist as separate vs coach as equal collaborator; these are but a few distinctions between the two modalities. If you are looking to the past to try and heal old wounds, I can refer you. If you are looking to the future to transform your life, you’ve come to the right place.
Why Horses:
I have always loved horses, had a deep affinity for them, experienced zen like inner peace in their company, lost in time and space, breathing in their breath, soaking in their warmth, reveling in their power, their peace, their nonjudgement, and acceptance. Over the decades of my relationships with horses, I found many insights into life as a human. Understanding on so many topics I hadn't even known to question, let alone find an entirely different way. It was the horses in my life who helped guide me, informed me, gave insights into the mysteries and myriad facets of my life. From how I show up in relationships, to how I chose to go through each of my pregnancies and subsequent births, to how I parent, to the power dynamics of my relationships, to my educational and professional choices, to my health care, to my own personal emotional regulation and understanding of the importance of emotions, to my stress management, to who I chose to marry, all came from my relationships with horses, they have profoundly impacted and guided every important decision of my life. Challenged what I thought I knew to be true, shown me alternative ways of being and what could be possible, demonstrated secure attachment, unconditional love, the importance of secure attachments and unconditional loving relationships, and what the real meaning of any living organism's life is, no happiness, but harmonious existence, and ways to achieve that way of being. Noticing, processing, acting accordingly, letting go, and "getting back to grazing" aka to a peaceful state.
We get where we are in relationship, we get where we are going in relationship as well. Horses, like humans, are a social species, they evolved dependent on the relationships they share with other horses. Horses, unlike humans, do not have verbal language, specifically rationalizing, value judgements, or lying. Horses rely on honest, energetic, emotional, relationship dynamics to convey meaning and to experience success. To notice any potential threats, avoid them, find needed resources, raise the next generation, and resume a harmonious existence. In working with horses client's patterns of behaviors, their personal boundaries, communication style, conflict management, personal beliefs and strategies to get through any number of situations come up and are more readily able to be examined and shifted to better suit the individual's goals for their lives. Horses are unabashedly honest in their assessment of the internal happenings of the individual before them, they are powerful facilitators in transformational awareness and growth potential. Horses offer insights to the individual, relationships, beliefs, behaviors, and strategies helping the individual learn more about themself, their environment, their relationships, and shifting through challenge by choice and intention to achieve more harmonious, meaningful, personally gratifying life and relationships. Horses offer humans opportunities to get to know their own selves, change their understandings, beliefs, behaviors, and stories they tell themselves to guide their own lives to effectively facilitate applicable change in the individual's personal life, regardless of personal experience or participation with horses otherwise, it's all about the beliefs and behaviors in relationship, not so much the species.
My background:
In May of 2004 I read “Tao of Equus: A Woman’s Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse” while attending The Evergreen State College (TESC), trying to better understand myself, other humans, and how I could utilize my unique set of experience, understanding, and lens on life to positively contribute to the lives of others. I knew then that I too wanted to facilitate lasting transformational change in others' lives leading to more rewarding experience of life, through experiential learning and coaching. I graduated from TESC, in 2008; the integrated education I immersed myself in while at TESC helped set me on a path to weave my past, present, research, and experience into manifesting my own best life. From TESC I went onto Prescott College, where I graduated with my M.A. in Education, emphasis on Equine Assisted Learning and Coaching, in the Spring of 2015. While my undergraduate education focused on communication, systems theory, personal development, social justice, organizational change, and evolutionary biology (how did we get to be this way as a species?). My graduate degree focused on building horse centered learning experiences, most effective learning practices, emotions as information, and the facilitation of transformative experiences (with or without horses). I also completed Crisis Intervention Training (2011), “Enhancing Therapeutic Relationships through Equine Facilitated Mental Health” from The Browne Center training (2014), Nonviolent Communication training (2020), and ongoing personal life coaching.
I met my now husband, Zak, in the summer of 2010, our relationship has been a fertile ground for both of us pushing our comfort zones, shifting our awareness, learning, changing, nurturing, and bolstering each other in really getting to the root of what matters to us in this life, getting clear about our goals, and helping each other achieve a more balanced and wonderful life we feel incredibly fortunate to be living. We are currently raising our three sons (Torleif '13, Lucian '16, and Sylvan '21), home birthed, unschooled, following their leads amidst fields and forests, herding sheep, cuddling ponies, propagating willows, crafting and creating, dancing and imagining, loving, revisiting goals and shaping our lives to achieve those, all the while championing each other to all live authentic, empowered, harmonious, well attached, rewarding lives.
In 2016 Zak and I started Salix Solutions LLC, which specializes in providing willow live stakes for ecological restoration projects, deeply rewarding life work for us.
In 2020 I began my own life coaching practice, now Centauress Life Coaching, and in so doing have been able to participate in some very rewarding, majorly life changing life coaching relationships.
Recommended related work:
Brene Brown (Vulnerability and Shame researcher & story teller), Anthony Robbins (life coach), John and Julie Gottman (relationship health researchers & educators), Gabor Mate (ADD and addictions, healthy brain development researcher & educator), Ina May Gaskin (home birth worker/educator), Marshall Rosenburg (Nonviolent Communication designer & educator), and countless others, I’m learning and integrating all the time.
The time is ripe for collaborating with you to set goals, solve problems, shift obstacles, and champion you in crafting your own authentic, daring, wholehearted, well connected, successful, goal achieving life!
Please contact me with any thoughts, questions, comments you may have. I am very much looking forward to learning more about you and working together to actualize your own best life.
In power, peace, and so much possibility, ~Heather R. Smith M.A. Life Coach.
https://CentauressLifeCoaching.com/ CentauressLifeCoaching@gmail.com 360-349-8045