Becoming A Transformational Coach

Join Dr. Rosie on a journey through becoming a Transformational Coach. Becoming a Transformational Coach is a series of 60 to 90-second videos providing essential skills and tools of the coaching model and approach of Dr. Rosie Kuhn, Transformational Coach and author of several books, including Self-Empowerment 101.

Becoming a Transformational Coach requires that you have a solid footing in what you believe to be true about Spirituality, Life and Being You. Without this solid footing its challenging to allow others to discover their own foundational truths and to empower themselves to live into these Truths.

This is something we as Transformational Coaches want for others, and so, it’s imperative that we require it of ourselves, first and foremost.

People love to talk about themselves. How we ask questions as transformational coaches allows people to engage with their own thinking and perception-making in a way they’ve never done before. 

We become THINKING PARTNERS for them, and through this relationship, they become curious about how they’ve created their reality thus far, and how they can create the reality they really want. 

Ask questions that generate thinking and discernment. These types of questions generate intelligence. This is a good thing, indeed.

How you see your clients, how you perceive them, is the single most important influence as a Transformational Coach. Your presence, your thinking, the way you interpret them and their circumstance will either limit or expand their fullest potential.

What it has taken to get any of us to this present moment takes nothing less than brilliance, courage and willingness to stay the course. When we as transformational coaches focus our intention on this truth, we empower our clients to utilize all of that in service of creating the life they are wanting.

Our clients occur in our listening and our speaking. Being mindful of this brings about an enormous shift in the possibility of being effective as a transformational coach. We also gift our clients with the experience of being seen in their fullest potentiality.

The great think about transformational coaching is its capacity to empower individuals to empower themselves to create the lives they want. We are not solving problems, giving advice, or handing out diagnosis and medication. We ask questions in a way that reflects our trust in people to have the answers for themselves. We ask the questions that cultivates the active engagement of thinking, or intelligent thought. We are passionate about bringing people to their highest truth and highest contribution. We know what they are capable of. And we are a stand for optimal living in every human being on the planet. And our questions fuel the fire!

There are four basic questions in Transformational Coaching. What is it that the client is wanting; What’s in the way of having what is wanted; What needs to shift in service to having what they want; and, What will the client practice in order to have what they want?

Each question seeks to uncover the truth and interpretations that disguise the truth as something intangible, unreal, or not worth the effort.

For fulfillment on any level of life, it is essential to know what is wanted. Too often therapists and psychologists and coaches assume what the client wants and never asks the question directly. Quite often it is a surprise to the individual at the other end of the question.

Rarely are our wants and desires taken seriously. We ignore them, so we assume they will be ignored by others. So when a coach asks the question, “What is it you are wanting,” we are not always sure what the answer is.

As a transformational coach, we know that we cannot empower our clients to have their desired outcome until that outcome is clearly described in tangible and measurable terms.

And, knowing the quality of experience that is wanted by having this tangible and measurable outcome is also extremely important to know.

The questions: “What’s the quality of experience of having what you say you want?” It’s much like asking, “What is it like on Christmas morning, when you open up the present and it’s exactly what you wanted? “

This is important to bring into this exploration of what is wanted, for it is the experience that is wanted far more than the material outcome we believe we desire. Both are essential to the transformational coaching process.

What obstacles are in the way of having what you say you want? Asking this question allows for consideration. It allows for one to list all the difficulties and challenges that contribute to life being what it is and not to what is truly desired.

Obstacles can be other people and their wants and needs, circumstances, beliefs, emotions — anything that interferes with having that which we say we want is an obstacle.

As a coach, we are wanting our clients to own their situation, their circumstance; to see what, for them, is an obstacle to their desires. This conversation often reveals specific interpretations about life, about themselves and about what is wanted, which limits the possibility of actually having what is wanted.

Its easy to disappear obstacle interfering with what we want, once we know what those obstacles are. We just need to ask the question: What needs to shift in order for the obstacle to go away? It becomes clear in a matter of minutes that the client can empower themselves to list what needs to shift, and, at the same time, come to understand that they have what it takes to make those shifts happen. Asking the right question allows clients to think for themselves. Its our job as transformational coaching to keep our clients on track, remaining logical and reasonable in understanding what’s required to have what it is they are wanting.

Transformational Coaching empowers people to actualize their dreams. In order to actualize they must act in alignment with what is wanted. They have to shift what needs shifting. This is where it becomes crystal clear that insights and realizations are not enough to create and to manifest. We have to do something – even if that something is to think differently, feel differently, or to choose to stop doing what isn’t in alignment with what is wanted.

Asking this question – What Will You Practice – gets to the degree to which an individual is committed to what they say they want. Is there enough commitment that they are willing to take action, shifting what needs to be shifted? If not, another question arises: What else are you committed to, that stops you from taking action and moving toward what you say you want? This provide a clearer perspective, which includes an underlying or conflicting commitment. More on that later.

Coaching requires individuals to create practice areas, which exercise, strengthen and stretch muscles of commitment and follow through. Clients know what they want, they list the obstacle in the way, they see what needs to shift, and now put it into practice. No big huge undertaking — mostly, at first, its noticing how they choose what they choose. When they are ready they begin to choose differently – only in service to what they say they want. Accountability for follow through is key!!
This video introduces a model of coaching that facilitate the engagement of the WHOLE Being in a coaching relationship. It speaks to the Universal Being we are, the Human Experience we are having, and the way we use personal empowerment to create the reality we want, while attempting to avoid creating the reality we don’t want. It provides a foundation upon which transformational coaches can ask their client to be accountable in every aspect of their being. Its fun work!

We are vibrational resonance of universal consciousness. Because this is so, we are the potentiality of the Universe. We are Creation, Creator and Created. We are spirit beings of light and love, and we are already enlightened. Deciding to come into humanness, we choose to add another dimension to our being.

We are spiritual beings who have chosen to come into a human experience. The human experience includes ALL of the potentiality of being – emotional, physical, and mental.

We have a choice-maker who resides in the Domain of Self-Empowerment. This choice-maker chooses to choose what it chooses based upon which human states of being it desires to experience and which are undesirable. 

This chooser creates strategies that will increase the likelihood of what it wants. However more often than not, to avoid and distract itself from undesirable consequences, it chooses other, perhaps conflicting strategies too. Until we are clear how our choice-maker is choosing to choose, we are caught in a spiraling recurring dilemma, the outcome of which is slow or no change, whatsoever.

The reality we see before our very eyes is the world we’ve created within the Domain of Self-Empowerment. Our reality is the consequences of all of the choice-making we’ve done over lifetimes. By seeing this as so, we become clear of our capacity to create any reality we want. We can continue to choose the way we’ve been choosing, or we can create a different reality just by choosing differently.

A Transformational Coach attends to the whole person that is their client. They listen to what their client desires in the Domain of Circumstances, the choices made within the Domain of Personal Power/Self-Empowerment, the state of being human, within the Domain of Humanness, and the Spirit Self, which is always present. 

You will be listening for how the client desire their reality to be – in the Domain of Circumstances and support them to utilize all of themselves in service to what they are wanting. Listening is the key tool at this level of coaching.

70% of are thoughts are negative in nature. What that says about our choice-making is that we are likely to choose to remain safe and secure in our fear-based orientation. If we see the world through negative lenses, it doesn’t give us much courage to take chances or orient ourselves in a more positive reality. How do we do that? How do we empower others to orient themselves toward what is possible rather than impossible or not likely? It takes clarity of intention and clarity of what is absolute truth to shift our current paradigm. Are you up for that?

Our dilemmas, choice-points and fence-sitting indicates that there is more than one desire attracting our attention, our thoughts and behaviors. While we desire what is desirable, we are committed to avoiding the undesirable. This can lead to an experience of pushing and pulling ourselves and our clients, which appears as stuck, stopped, lack of momentum and again, the proverbial fence-sitting.

When conflicting commitments are distinguished at these choice-points, it becomes obvious that there is a conflicting commitment holding us back from what we say we want. This isn’t bad or wrong; its just the way it is.

Getting clear with what these conflicting commitments are and the degree to which we are committed to them gives us freedom to consider what we really want to choose, how we are going to choose and how quickly or to what degree we will move in the direction we really want to go.

You will find that this one conversation can be the most liberating and empowering for you and your clients. Its an opportunity to begin to explore the edge of your/their comfort zones, taking small, incremental and experimental steps toward the desired outcome. This way there isn’t much to lose while gaining courage and self-empowerment.

 

It doesn’t occur to us that we are choosing to choose what we choose. So, HOW we choose what we choose is an extremely important question that transformational coaches need to ask their clients. We want to be invulnerable, so most of our choosing is in alignment with that desire. However, to have what we say we want usually requires vulnerability. This puts us in a dilemma.

We come back to this choice-point – this dilemma, over and over again in coaching, until our clients get how they are choosing what they choose is giving them the outcome they are currently in, within the Domain of Circumstance. 

Notice how you choose what you choose and you will be amazed at how much more power you have to choose differently.

You know what you want. Are your beliefs and interpretations allowing you to have what you want? If not, you are free to choose to chose an interpretation that is in alignment with what you want and is alignment with your absolute truth. You only have to be willing to empower yourself to choose differently.

It is our interpretations, our beliefs and our memories of how we remember things to be that are the true obstacles to having what we want. Bringing awareness to what we think, what we belief, what we assume and expect will reveal why our reality looks the way it does. Shift these perceptions and interpretations and our reality shifts effortlessly. There is no doubt about that!

Our perceptions arise out of our beliefs and interpretations, which in some circumstance have been with us since prior to our birth. They arise from our cultural and consensus reality, and from the collective unconscious. Most of these perceptions and interpretations we do not question, and choose to live as if it is all true.

Change and transformation can only occur when we can see and acknowledge the truth upon which we have been living. At this point only are we free to choose to choose differently. And, we will only choose differently when we are committed enough to the outcome we are wanting.

Through our strength, courage and our presence, we empower our clients to enter into a dialog of discernment with themselves. Through inquiry, we stand for our clients willingness and capacity to explore for themselves what is their full potentiality; what is their fullest expression of their essential nature. We stand as their witness and their champion. In this standing, we create a safe and open space within which they are free to explore and experiment, experiencing directly the truth of who they are. This is what transformational Coaching is all about.

Choosing to accept what cannot be changed is probably the most empowering moment of one’s lifetime. It stops the dreaming, the hoping and the pretending that this moment is somehow not what it is, but what I want it to be. In this moment, wisdom and maturity take the stage, supporting the ability to humbly reveal what is, surrender the desire for what I believe I lack, and look freshly at what I’ve not been willing to see before. This is the moment I have been waiting for.

In this moment, when we, or our clients, realize that this may be as good as it gets, we come face to face with the fact that we’ve been living as if life will inevitably turn out the way we expect, handing us our dreams on a platter – someday.

When we come into the realization that this may be as good as it gets, we come to “What Was I Thinking?” We meet a reality we have been ignoring for a lifetime. We meet the unknown and unknowing. We meet ourselves as perhaps powerless, helpless and lost. This is where we begin to get real with ourselves and desire to know what it is I truly desire in this life. This is where transformation begins. This is where the real work as a transformational coach begins.

As coach and client, we have to meet this moment, otherwise we continue to live in the illusion of our past and the fantasies of our future.

Most of us live our lives bemoaning the past and hoping for a better tomorrow. What if we ask the question: What if this is as good as it gets? What would we face? What would we see staring us in the eyes?

Asking yourself and your client this question can open up a whole new reality – the one that is occurring now, here in this moment. With this one question individuals can begin to assess… “Well, if this is as good as it gets, then I’d….” Perhaps they would be shocked, that it never occurred to them to consider this possibility. Maybe they’d grieve the dreams that never came true, or quit living in the dreams they aren’t that committed to. Perhaps they’d say: “Okay. I don’t want this to be as good as it gets. What do I have to lose in stepping in the direction of making my life worth living and worth living for.

Just ask the question and see what shows up!

Sitting with your client, in the midst of their dilemma, in the midst of this choice-point, ask the question: What have you got to lose by experimenting with small incremental shifts or changes? This question reveals most often, an individual’s worst fear, the worst outcome imaginable. And, at the same time, when they are confronted with the question, quite often they can stay in reality and see the evidence that, by practicing taking small baby steps, they never lose control of the situation or the outcome. They are empowering themselves to exercise muscles of choosing, then choosing again to choose based on the outcome of the initial choosing. It’s one big experiment, one moment at a time. Again, the outcome is empowered choosing, strengthening the ability to live more fearlessly and more self-confident, assured and appreciated of what they are bringing to fruition in their lives.

Quite often we lack enough commitment to our desires that we put off today what we can do tomorrow or the next day. By hiring a coach, an individual is declaring that they are invested enough in their commitment to be accountable and in integrity. They follow through, because they said they would; and, if they don’t, they are willing to acknowledge that they chose to act in alignment with a conflicting commitment. This level of honesty and clarity makes a huge difference in the quality of life a person lives and the degree to which they are fulfilled.

A transformational coach requires accountability of their clients. They are able to establish a relationship with open revealing of practices and their outcome is certain. The client feels safe and trusts their coach to be a valuable thinking partner.

It is not uncommon to experience resistance, stuckness, or just plain fence-sitting when moving in the direction of your desired outcome. When things slow down or stop, its usually due to the fact that there is an underlying or conflicting commitments that has enough weight to it that it pulls you away from what you say you want.

As a transformational coach, understanding this dynamic of two or more commitments pulling your client in opposing directions, allows you to sit with them, in this choice point. You are empowering them to see how they are choosing to choose to either a) Stay stuck, b) Choose based on how they’ve chosen in the past, c) Choose to follow their desired outcome – incrementally moving forward, beyond their comfort zone. Knowing that this choice-point is the place where the real work lays for you and your client, where the rubber meets the road, allows you access to the interpretations that interfere with a client acting in their highest knowing and their highest truth.

Everyone – and I do mean everyone faces these choice-points and dilemmas. Without a coach or thinking partner they rarely choose to move beyond their fear-based context. They remain stuck and generally cycle around to almost doing something different, or thinking different, then getting caught in the old perspectives that keep them from really moving forward.

More important than the tools of coaching is who you be and how you be you in a coaching session.

Clients want a thinking partner, someone who they trust to explore their essential truth, expose the underbelly of their thinking and being; someone they feel safe with, who won’t judge them or tell them that what they are doing is wrong, bad, stupid or silly. Is this you?

Being clear of your intention in doing this work as a transformational coach will do you a lot of good in aligning you with your best work and highest contribution to your clients and to the world.

List to yourself. Listen for what you are attempting to get from your clients or from the sessions. You are you in these sessions? Would you want you as a coach? This are great questions to ask yourself.

Consider hiring a coach yourself or a supervisor or mentor if you want to up your caliber as a coach. You will be giving yourself a huge gift by continuing to work on your own personal and professional development.

As Einstein pointed out so succinctly we cannot solve problems with the same level of wisdom that created them. We have to think differently. To think differently we have to willingly release any thought and belief patterns which maintain the problematic circumstances. We have to shift the paradigm. This takes faith. And what is faith but the voluntary suspension of the belief system currently in place.

What is left when we release these old patterns of thinking and believing? This is the threshold where possibility and potentiality become fully accessible. This is when we take a leap of faith from the paradigm of beliefs that is no longer useful. We are in the world of pure imagination, while at the same time grounded in evidence of those who have gone before. We are in good company when we take the leap of faith!

Sometimes in life there is nothing that can be done to fix, heal or improve the current situation. Sometimes it’s just a BIG FAT BE-WITH!

Big Fat Be-Withs are not bad at all. They give us a moment to take a breath, see what is true in this moment, experience the fullness of the current human condition and give ourselves some compassionate support. With nothing to do, nowhere to go, all there is to do is be. Be you and be present to you in as nurturing a way as possible.

No need to be judgmental, critical or self-deprecating; this is a human experience that cannot be anything but what it is now, in the moment. This is a time to listen and be present to who it is that is having this human experience. Encourage yourself to feel all the feelings present within this situation. Breathe, rest, drink water, and be mindful to you – all of you, being with all of you, fully and completely. Surrender any thoughts that you could or can make this different. That is all there is to do.

Empowering people to empower themselves takes a certain amount of conviction and commitment on your part as a coach to walk your talk. More so than therapists, psychiatrists, and spiritual guides, Life Coaches have to be a model of practicing what they preach, of walking their talk, of taking leaps of faith and courage, of strengthening the muscles required to live on purpose.

Acting in alignment with your highest good and your highest truth yields the direct experience of the very same process you are empowering your clients to partake in. When you empower yourself to walk your talk you are empowering everyone to do the same – one step at a time.

One of the biggest challenge all of us have is that we attempt to get something we want by playing both sides of the game, manipulating the sides against the middle. 

The key to living a fulfilled life and empowering people to do the same, coaches begin to distinguish for whole truth of what they are wanting. They want something material, in the Domain of Circumstances, and they are wanting a quality of BEING, which lives within the Domain of Humanness. As transformational coaches, we must address that which is desired, within this Domain as well as that which is wanting to be avoided – that is undesirable.

Thank you for your interest in Becoming a Transformational Coach. Please contact me for more information about upcoming Series.

By for now!

Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Thank you for signing up! Please enjoy my Pre-Flight Checklist for Success in Life!
Read daily to check in with yourself & stay on track.