What is Mindfulness Coaching?
Let me start with a strong statement: we can’t get a lot out of mindfulness if it’s not accompanied by careful introspection and solid analysis of the experience. Mindfulness has been adopted from Buddhism where it comes with an epistemology, an ontology, ethics, etc. It exists in a context that allows you to make sense of your life. Mindfulness coaching is meant to do just that.
Mindfulness is a part of how I do life coaching or any kind of coaching. It’s how I live my life too. In fact, one of the reasons why I decided to go into coaching in addition to my work as a psychotherapist and psychotherapy supervisor was to be able to explore different ways in which people can use mindfulness-based techniques to improve and even radically transform their lives. But when I talk about mindfulness coaching, however, I am talking about something completely different than traditional life coaching.
Mindfulness coaching is my approach to teaching mindfulness and giving you a method to create a meaningful philosophy to live by. Mindfulness coaching includes:
1. Learning and practicing different meditation techniques
2. Accountability vis-à-vis daily meditation
3. Taking steps toward a more mindful lifestyle
4. Adopting a system for effective, deep self-reflection.
We explore different kinds of mindfulness, but in everyday life, we place a special emphasis on interpersonal relations. Being mindful around people entails being fully present and engaged during interactions, accepting whatever arises without judgement. It involves actively listening to others, understanding their perspectives and one’s own biases as they inevitably pop up, and responding thoughtfully rather than reactively. By focusing on the current moment and observing our thoughts and emotions, we can foster authentic connections and empathy. We can connect with others but not lose yourself in those connections. This kind of mindfulness encourages self-awareness, self-reflection, patience, as well as respectful communication. We can understand how we relate to others and by doing that we are slowly understanding our own patterns, shedding light on the shadowy, dysfunctional aspects of our psyche but also on aspects of our personality that may be precious and important, but that we don’t see: mindlessness is an insidious force. Mindful speech, gratitude, and genuine respect for the people you're with also play a crucial role in creating meaningful and enriching relationships, all of which we practice and develop through mindfulness coaching.
Mindfulness has the potential to guide you in discovering your genuine desires. By practicing mindfulness, you can gain a clearer understanding of who you are now and while that may not always be a wonderful experience (we humans are, shall we say, imperfect and messy beings), it is, nonetheless, the only way to change going forward. To know how to get to your desired destination, you need to know where you are right now. How else do you make a map of your journey?
Developing mindfulness through formal and informal practice can lead to recognizing your true aspirations and values. Mindfulness enables you to connect deeply with your most authentic and vulnerable parts, helping you differentiate between desires influenced by external factors like family or culture, and those that truly reflect your core. Through self-reflection and the reduction of external distractions, mindfulness allows you to explore what truly brings you fulfillment and joy. By enhancing emotional awareness and consistently checking in with yourself, mindfulness provides a pathway to uncovering desires that align with your genuine identity and evolving goals.
How do you start mindfulness coaching?
What is the process like?
Everyone needs a foundation. Most people start by completing my Mindfulness 101 course. This course is 8 weeks long and it will give you foundational knowledge of the most common way to cultivate mindfulness and qualities like compassion, equanimity, joy and loving-kindness. This course will prepare you for more complex practices we will be engaging in in Mindfulness Coaching. When my clients already have an established practice and experience with meditation, we skip this step, but the main requirement is not skipped: ability to meditate daily is a conditio sine qua non. I usually send out a detailed questionnaire to make sure that my new potential client is ready and able to take on the challenge of mindfulness coaching.
After you’ve mastered the basic techniques, we dive in deeper. In the second stage, we develop something that psychology of personal constructs psychotherapists call “the community of selves”, a creative, unique approach to self-understanding.
Where most psychologies fail (in my opinion) is when they try to fit people’s lived experiences into prefabricated boxes. Humans have their own paths, and they aren’t obligated to live in a way that satisfies a silly psychological theory. Constructivist psychology resolves this by turning things upside down: the goal of psychology is not to tell people what they’re like, what’s good and what’s normal, but to create a framework to help them make their own theory of their own personality.
The community of selves is a particular constructivist approach to this psychology developed by the late Miller Mair. According to this approach, our experience of the world isn’t one. Who we are isn’t ever one thing. Lives are too complex for our experience to be one coherent stream of information and insights. Instead, we are actually communities of different selves: different contexts and relationships in our lives create clusters with their own values and goals, and those clusters co-exist within us and often have very complex relationships that overall make up who we are. The second stage of mindfulness coaching focuses on this idea and helps you get to know your own community of selves. This is a long and exciting process where you get to know the nooks and crannies of your mind, some exciting, some scary – but all you.
As you explore different parts of you, we will slowly identify different parts that require tweaking and tuning or perhaps more comprehensive changes. It’s through these little insights that we slowly get a fuller picture of where you are and where you want to get to. Then we create a path for you to walk. The path is always provisional and as you walk, the path may change. That’s what makes personal growth so wonderful, so challenging and so exciting, all at the same time!
This process takes place in a particular way after you’ve explored your community of selves. Each month, we decide on a topic to work on – a part of you, a goal, a value, a desire. Whatever you decide is at the forefront. We also make sure that we don’t focus only on the negative. Mindfulness coaching isn’t psychotherapy, it’s a way for you to further advance your mindfulness practice and get to know yourself, and “yourself” includes the good experiences as well as the difficult ones.
Once we decide on a topic, I create a monthly plan for you to work on: you get a lecture, a set of mindfulness practices and a pdf form to record your experiences. At the end of the month, you send me your workbook and we schedule a meeting to assess your experiences and define the path for next month. In the meantime, as you go about your daily practice, we touch base weekly or more often (as needed) to help you stay accountable and clear up any questions or issues you encounter – and you will encounter them!
The goals you set for yourself can be geared towards introspection and greater self-understanding, or they may be practical: reduce anxiety, think more clearly, improve your decision-making skills, spiritual development, etc. This is up to you. You are smart enough to know what you need, and I am happy to follow along. My job is to come up with a way to achieve this using mindfulness-based techniques. In some cases, I may throw in a bit of philosophy and philosophical exercises into the mix. I am eclectic in my approach, but overall I stick with my love for ancient philosophy and American pragmatism. Quite a jump in time and ways of thinking, I know, but I too have more than one self!
Mindfulness coaching is in 2023, what psychoanalysis was in 1923. It’s not just a means to an end, a way for you to achieve this or that goal, but a whole system that allows you to glimpse beneath the surface and see yourself in all the complexity that your lived experience has produced. Because our culture is dictated in part by our economic conditions, contemporary coaching and psychotherapy are all too focused on end-results and symptom removal and not enough on self-understanding and insight. Mindfulness coaching is here to remedy this situation by providing you with a symptom to get to know yourself and direct your life where you want it to go, appreciating all facets of your rich experience. It’s a path of self-acceptance and self-improvement beyond limiting ideas such as striving for mere productivity. It’s a path to emancipation.
