In our first two blogs, we talked about how the services that we offer at Forward Emotion are not your stereotypical “lay on the sofa and talk to an emotionless stranger” type of therapy. This is not your mother’s – or your grandmother’s – type of counseling. So, it only seemed fitting to remain on that topic and dive into another of our modalities for helping you find better mental health and overall wellbeing. Today it’s time to take a look at Holistic Life Coaching and what that means for our clients.
What is a Holistic Life Coach?
Holistic.
It’s a word that gets thrown out there a lot. I mean A LOT. But what the hell does it mean?
While it is often applied to certain types of medicine or treatments, the word holistic really refers to the practice of looking at something as a whole unit. A holistic approach means looking at all of the different systems and how they work together. A holistic life coach is going to help you function in a way that promotes emotional wellness throughout your entire life, including your body, mind, and spirit.
Coaching is a booming field right now. It is not regulated and governed by licensing like therapy. There are so many types of coaching approaches that it is important to know what specific techniques a particular coach uses. As a client, you should also know whether or not a life coach is certified, or have gone through a training program of some kind like our own Sabrina Washington has. In fact, we are absolutely thrilled that Sabrina is with us at Forward Emotion because of her experiences, certifications, and the unique options she offers our clients.
Essentially, a holistic life coach will offer a heart-centered, solution-focused approach to shifting and transforming difficult issues in your life. These issues might be professional, personal, spiritual, or emotional – they might be a mix of some or all of them. But coaching is goal-oriented in a very concrete way. Holistic life coaching is meant to provide you with a partner (your coach) and tools to help you overcome a struggle or block in your life. Coaching helps you make big shifts in your life using a very specific plan.
Each different certification program has specific techniques, including worksheets, activities and other very specific ways of helping you get the results in your life that you want to achieve. Coaching programs range from very simple ways to determine and achieve your goals to others that are developed in a very specific way.
What Should I Expect from a Holistic Life Coach?
Sabrina Washington, our Holistic Life Coach, is certified through Global Association for Holistic Psychotherapy and Coaching. This particular holistic life coach program is comprised of a variety of specific therapeutic techniques and approaches, all designed by an experienced therapist, to offer simple and efficient ways to support clients in finding transformation in their lives. Sabrina also includes holistic healing methods of Reiki, crystals, sound healing music, and techniques from her experience as a dance movement therapist when appropriate and when the client is open to these methods.
Sabrina guides clients to strengthen their relationship with themselves and their sense of belonging and purpose in the world as well as with their families and in their relationships. There is a spiritual component to this form of holistic life coaching, but that spirituality is created and developed entirely by the individual based on what spiritual beliefs they have. It is based on connecting the person back to themselves and loving themselves.
A big foundation of the Holistic Life Coaching that Sabrina offers is based on the Holistic Breakthrough Method. It is a specific joint process of the coach helping the client connect to and identify difficult emotions, align with their own authentic self and wisdom, and to resolve deep issues in a safe environment. The client is able to come back into alignment with their truth, instead of believing false, and limiting beliefs that we so often believe are the basis of anxiety, depression, guilt, and shame.
As part of this Holistic Life Coaching program, there are modules that focus on certain things like spiritual development, learning to love yourself more, anxiety and depression. The goal is to keep track of what your goals are, what your dreams are, what is stopping you from achieving those dreams, what false beliefs are coming up, how you are getting in your own way that keeps delaying your vision, and finally, how we can send love to that place and support you moving forward.
Not all coaching programs are this emotionally or spiritually focused, but this particular program illuminates where healing and clarity could be in other areas of the client’s life. Just like we are complicated and dynamic humans, with every layer that is healed, there is a new discovery and a motivation to heal more. People see results and didn’t realize that they were thinking a certain way. They often realize that they can never go back to their old way of thinking again. This method of holistic life coaching is one of progressive healing and transformation. The client evolves and often cannot believe the person they were before.
How Does Holistic Life Coaching Compare to Therapy?
In therapy, there is less of a defined endpoint in terms of how long you will attend therapy sessions. Therapy is more ongoing in the sense that you are committed to going until it feels like you do not need it anymore. The work that you do is primarily during your session with your therapist. Therapy is focused on a mental health diagnosis and designs the therapeutic plan around relieving symptoms and helping clients to explore their struggles in order to come to insights about themselves on their own. Therapy can be a slower process, often directed by client needs, and depending on the style of the therapist, can be less direct.
With Holistic Life Coaching, you commit to an established program with a definite start and endpoint, whether it is a number of sessions or a period of time. Coaching programs also offer meditations, classes and typically require homework for you to do between coaching sessions. When you work with a holistic life coach, you will get to the root of what is bothering you pretty quickly and receive tools to start implementing changes in your life. There is a more dramatic jumping-in point for people who are ready to make an immediate and big change.
Both therapy and life coaching allow you to work through some of the same concerns and feelings. The differences apply more to the method of making positive changes in your life rather than the areas of your life that you want to work on improving.
Choosing the best option for you really depends on what you are feeling and how you want to work on improving your own emotional wellness. Of course, we are also here to help you determine which option you might prefer.
Are you part of the Forward Emotion email list? Sign up using the form below, and watch for our next blog in which we will take a deeper dive into more of Sabrina and her Reiki energy offerings.
