WAYS TO GROW

Podcast trailer

In this episode of Ways to Grow, Michelle Kempton talks about what Coaching really is and more specifically, she explain the Co-Active model. Apart from this, we also talk about corporate coaching, stress and burnout.

Here the highlights:

[coaching] When it first started, it really was a program. It is a model. It is a way of being in the world. It was originally a model to train professional coaches. And then it evolved into a model really for leadership and for just interacting with people. I think the best way to explain it is that, ‘co’ is kind of the being and ‘active’ is the doing. And the philosophy of co active coaching is that, I mean first of all, it is for really tapping into human potential. And we believe that the doing should flow from the being. So very often and especially now, we get busy in life. And we just want to get the job done, right? And we get to a point where it becomes very superficial. It is almost like we become human doings instead of human beings. And co-active puts the ‘being’ back in the human being. So, it is like everything you do, ideally is infused with being. It comes from a place of honoring values or being connected to a sense of purpose with what you are doing. And it is about consciously choosing what you do rather than being on autopilot in life, which is just what happens, right? Or the hamster wheel, you just replace… you are ticking boxes and getting the job done but it is almost like, you have lost your soul or you have lost your heart.

We have probably trained 65,000 to 70,000 people in the world, probably in 30 different countries. And it is probably one of the most highly respected in-person coach trainings in the world, because of the integrity and the quality around how we train people. 

you are present, I am present, and there is this kind of third entity or magic that enters into the space, when there is I think intense focus and presence. Suddenly, it is like where attention goes, energy flows, and we magically discover and find answers, and there is improvement and creativity that brings kind of an unexpected process of discovery in service of your growth and your evolution, and it is hard to explain. But it is like, in this bubble, magic happens. And it has to do with you and me, our connection, presence, and the focus on doing whatever it takes for your growth, your learning and your evolution. So to me, I am fascinated by this kind of third thing that happens between the two of us; that feels like magic. 

You step into this bubble. And you have like the kind of the luxury of attention and focus on your life. You know, who you are, who you want to be, what is working, what is not working… 

One of the beauties of this kind of coaching is the improvising in the moment based on what is needed. And the greater range a coach has creativity, the more exciting and different things can happen. So, you have your very basic conversation where you and I are sitting in a chair, we are talking. And then you have things like what you just mentioned where you might close your eyes and visualize something, we might put music on in the background to impact your emotional state, we might use props, you know, sometimes I use Playmobil figures, and I might put a Playmobil figure right up to the camera on zoom, and say, “Mireia, this is you, what advice do you have for this?” 

I think powerful coaching is not talking about something, it is experiencing something. And it is like, the bigger or the greater range the coach has and the sort of bigger toolbox, the more you can come up with creative ways to take a person into an experience, where transformation can happen. It is not intellectual, it is experiential.

In this episode Sandra Reivik, the youngest Wim Hof Method instructor talks to us about the benefits of this method. Sandra explains how the Wim Hof Method can help us with stress management learning to master 3 pillars: Breathwork, Cold exposure and mindset training. 

Here the highlights of the session:

So let’s start maybe off with who's Wim Hoff. So Wim Hoff is a crazy Dutch man in his sixties. Now over 30 years ago, he started to develop this method, which entails Breathwork Cold exposure and Mindset training. So 3 pillars.

He actually came from a really hard point in his life where he was in severe depression because he lost his wife, due to suicide and he was left alone with four children. So that's actually when he started to do different breath work practices, as well as going and diving into cold waters and, started to develop these human capabilities that were taught not to be possible.

He was actually the first person in the Western world that showed that we can actually influence our autonomic nervous system because this was never done before. You know, we have all the yogic people in the Himalayas from places all over the world who have done amazing things, but it never has been  scientifically tracked. And Wim was the first person who showed that the autonomic nervous system can be influenced. So things like the heart rate, body temperature…  That actually led the scientific books to be changed. Now he's on a mission to share that everyone can actually practice the breath work, the cold exposure and the mindset training, and have that understanding of  the innate capabilities that we actually have. The power within us and that we can adapt to any kind of environment. Is it a stressful one? Or not? This is his mission now to share this. And there are so many people from all over the world who have benefited from the method. Um, if they have any kind of diseases, mental health issues, there is a track record. It's growing, it's coming slowly bit by bit too mainstream as well, which I'm really happy about.

“Conquering the fear”.  Because actually our bodies are so intelligent, and as well more capable of what we think. So conquering the fear… it's also something which is, you know, a little bit counter-intuitive. You think you're going into the cold exposure aspect, right? Ice bath, uh, or cold shower, however, it happens for you, right? Um, you think sometimes that you need to be fighting with the feeling. But it's actually the opposite. We have to be flowing.

You find comfort in discomfort and, and that’s the thing that we're kind of aiming for and understanding we're not fighting. We're surrendering to the process and coming from a place of relaxation, into a place of “I can, you know, I can do this. I can do this and I can go through the experience in a calm state”. So it's all connected to stress management in essence. How we can, down-regulate how we can influence our mind-body states, from a practical point of view.

I guess one of the things is connecting to the power within us. It's a big one. What does it actually mean? We have been conditioned by the environment we have around us. In the past, we would be able to adapt easily. And now, going through this experience of the breath work or the cold, it actually brings us back to the innate capabilities that our body has to adapt and to feel alive through it.

If you ever wondered what is the philosophy of Yoga, tune in, because in this episode, we go deep in the magic of yoga. We talk about the basics of Yoga but reaching deep on those basics. Ajith Shankara talks about the Union and the Ego, the Yin and the Yang, Shiva and Shakti... We wonder about anxiety and stress, about men's suffering and much more. 

Here are some highlights of this deep-dive on Yoga:

Yoga means UNION. Individual consciousness merging with the Universal consciousness. It's never been separated, it will never be separated. It is not possible to separate it. It's like a wave thinking is different from the Ocean. It's impossible to separate the wave from the Ocean. But the wave has an individuality, an ego, a quality, a name... I'm born in this country, my name is this, my job is this, my passion is this... it looks very different but it can't be separated. Being in that state of awareness, that I'm one with everything, that is the state of yoga. Yoga is not possible to do, it is what it is. 

The physical practice helps a person to be comfortably sit for meditation without any feeling, aches and pains. So you can separate yourself completely from your body. So if you're feeling eggs after 10 minutes, you need her to backwards. Then the mind cannot go anywhere else. It's just stuck in the pain. 

The goal of Yoga is living with the highest experience of the Unity. To live in that estate of mind where you don't feel separated from the surrounding: the trees, the animals, rivers, mountains, birds, animals... you are one of that living being... We tend to get insecure, fearful of the projections of the ego. That makes us feel separated from everything. The goal of yoga is to be happy.  

You require an effort to be in the pose.  So you are making an effort to be in the pose then in the pose you bring the relaxation. So when the bar of effort is up to 10 and you relaxation was zero because there was no relaxation at the beginning. And then you start relaxing in the pose. Your relaxation comes up up, up to the level of 10. Then, both go to zero. So your effort and your resting are equal, it's balanced so that it becomes effortless because your effort and rest become equal. In the most challenging pose, you can be effortless if you learn to relax.

The mind is our experience of life

My existence now, who I am, is my memory and my past and my idea of the future. In between I forget to live

Breath is an extension of your mind. So when you are focused on the breath, you cannot think you can only think of the breath

Breath is such a healing practice:

Your thought becomes the Breath

The Breath becomes the Thought

You become one with the Breath

Mind becomes one with the Breath

You become one with the Mind

Mind, Body, Breath become together

Body and Mind are two different sides of the same coin

When you are losing control of the spinning wheel, you know you need to come out

Well, if you're not flexible, that is exactly the reason why you should do yoga; I like to correct. When we say yoga, we often misunderstand what we do on the mat with what yoga is. So we can start using the word Asanas or postures. So when we do the Asanas, the physical practice, yes, then it is exactly the reason why you must step into the mat If you're not flexible. Because we accumulate a lot of stress and tension. This stress is not just the physical muscular tension that causing the stiffness. It's also emotional. This emotional tension accumulates in different parts of the body.

In this episode Flo Akinbiyi talks about how improving our communication skills can help us  not only with our career, but with our relationships and with everything in our lives.

Flo defines communication coaching as helping people to make an impact through communication. And he works on three areas very specifically: presentation skills, public speaking and virtual communication.

Here are some highlights of this episode:

I don't think there's one specific need or there's one specific problem. Every individual is different. I always like to speak about communication superpowers; everybody has their own communication superpowers. And therefore, I don't think there's this one common problem. I think, one of the most obvious problems would be bad PowerPoint presentations. That is definitely the number one problem. But then of course, there's a few common things that I see.

I don't believe that there's one approach to communication, or that you have to train people in order to speak in one specific way. Every person should find their own way of speaking and their authentic way of speaking.

We look first at the content. What is the content that you're communicating? Who are the audiences? And how can we structure this content better? How can we make it more engaging? How can we turn it into winning content by finding out what's the ‘wow effect’? So, we've got a few tools that we need to look at here. Then, we look at the delivery. So that's really the personal level. That's about your voice, your body language, how do you create a connection with the audience? Also, the ‘wow factor’ for delivering. There's so much that you can do. And then, the third part is always the format. So, what is the format? Are you going to record a podcast? Are you going to be on a stage, in a meeting room? Are you talking to investors? What is it?

Everybody can train their voice, everybody, because it's a muscle. So, you can train it. There's no excuses. If you're not happy with your voice, go out and learn singing or do work with a voice coach. Looking at your body language and your voice, if you work on these aspects, your communication improves massively.

If you speak monotone and that's what many people in the corporate world would do, if you speak like this and you speak with low energy then basically, just raise the energy. There's this very simple rule that I’ve learned years ago is do 20% more and that can work for anything. 

Once you improve yourself on one area of your life, it will trickle into other areas of your life as well and you have no idea what can happen.

In this second episode, Rana Kalo Jaroudi presents to us EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) technique. Rana is a licensed Psychotherapist, a certified EMDR therapist, and a trained CBT therapist.

Here are the highlights of this session:

EMDR is an approach, a specific approach to psychotherapy, and psychotherapy, as you may or may not know, is what we call talk therapy. So, it gets the help of the science behind psychology to be able to help people with their psychological difficulties, psychological disorders, emotional difficulties, that they're going through. So, it's there to alleviate their pain, their suffering but also to help them fulfill the best of who they are and the best of their capacity. 

EMDR is one of those approaches that was discovered or found by Francine Shapiro, some 30 years ago haphazardly. It is there like any other psychotherapy approach to reach these goals. But it uses specific, very specific, standardized techniques to get there. There are certain protocols that we follow to get there and that involves what we call in one of the phases, Bilateral Stimulation. 

The EMDR rests on a model called Adaptive Information Processing, which believes that all the dysfunctions that you are experiencing today as a human being, the difficulties that you have in the ways that you're thinking, that you're feeling, that you're behaving, come from a certain place that we call in EMDR, Traumatic. Traumatic means disruptive. A certain disruptive life event. 

There are two kinds of trauma in EMDR and we all have them, so "no one can say I've never been through a trauma in my life", according to EMDR. These traumas are in two groups: There are the Big T traumas, with a big huge T that involves traumas like war, traumas of violent death... all the things that come to mind readily. But then, there are the small t traumas which are actually everyday life events:  My classmates used to mock me at school… bullying, the first boyfriend that I've ever had at age 15 cheated on me with a friend of mine...

How do you know that you are not over it? That you have not successfully processed that? Is when anything that can give you the same or a familiar feeling, or touch upon this negative belief, triggers you… Then you know that there is a wound out in there that hasn't closed well. And it's going to show in the way you react or you behave. Therefore, it's going to affect your personal relationships, your internal relationship with yourself, your relationship at work with your co-workers, with your boss, with everyone else. So, there are three components: How you feel, what you think or what you believe,  and then, how you behave.

With Bilateral Stimulation, we're just nudging your brain, we're helping it just connect or wire up between the two hemispheres.

Research has linked a lot of similarities to what happens in REM sleep or that sleep phase where our eyes are moving right-left, right-left, and where we know that our brain is processing things that happen to us during the day, and trying to make sense of it.

EMDR strongly believes the science behind it and the idea is that your brain can heal, as well as, and has the same capacity for healing as your physical body.

One of the most important parts of any psychotherapy is to assess. Really get to know the person that is sitting in front of you because therapy is a relationship. It's not the technique that you do on something and then that’s it, they're gone. It's a relationship. It's a collaboration.

Ayadi is a blessing because it has made it much easier for these people who haven't crossed this barrier yet to reach out for help, in the privacy of their own room.

For this first-ever episode of Ways to Grow I had invited Esther Martínez Navarro to talk to us about Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy which she describes as a really gentle, non-invasive, hands-on, bodywork. And the goal of this approach is to support the healing process by listening to the body and regulating the nervous system. The idea is not to fix anything from the outside but allow the body to get in contact with the resources and heal.

If you suffer from stress, anxiety, insomnia, pain, panic attacks, digestive issues, dis-regulation of the autonomic system, or if you need to reconnect with your body, or on the other hand, you have a baby that has breastfeeding issues or sleeping issues, or is crying a lot or has reflux or colic, or the baby had a difficult birth or pregnancy was not easy, this episode may interest you

Apart from all this, we talk about burnout, trauma, addiction, parenting... Here are some highlights of this session:

"The architectural biology of what is happening is actually, and that is what Stephen Porges would say, is that the body is feeling safe and when the body feels safe and I say the body, not the head. When the body feels safe, it can switch off the defensive mechanisms and that is when the body can actually rest and sink and melt."

"Stephen Porges always says that safety is the treatment."

"One of the most important questions is, what is the intention? Because we always work with an intention and before every session we will set an intention."

"Ray Castellino used to say that in order to have a hundred percent yes, I need to be able to say no because if not, the yes is conditioned and it's not real."

"In order to survive, some of us, have had to not be in contact with who we really were. In order to maintain that attachment with our caregivers, we had to shut down who we were and that was something really smart to do and that saved our lives. But now, in the present, as adults, this might be getting us in trouble or even sick. We can get sick."

"We understand behavior as being something under voluntary control. As adults, we are not able to do it but we expect children to be able and their nervous system is not yet ready. The structures that help us do that, are not there yet. And they will develop on time and the way we respond to them is going to have a huge impact on their ability to actually regulate and respond in different ways."

"We should ask not why the addiction but why the pain? what is that addiction trying to help us with?"

"The body needs to feel safe in order for us to have access to information that is there. And even going beyond the technique is also the relationship that you have with the person that you are working with. That is actually what is healing. It's not that much the technique is how safe we feel."

"Peter Levine always says, is not the technique… It is the relationship"

"It is important to understand that families are systems and the idea is to help with that co-regulation of the family and that is what it actually changes"

"Those headaches do have a lot of information and is that understanding of what is going on, not necessarily from a cognitive point of view but the body actually processing whatever might be going on."

"The wisdom in the body is beyond what any therapist can know. So, trusting that is one of the key principles in biodynamic craniosacral therapy"

"Gabor Mate: Tension needs attention. So, whenever there is tension in the body is telling us that something is going on, so pay attention to what is happening in the body"