Coach Denise is a certified compassion teacher with 12 years of experience in mindfulness, energy psychology, somatic practices, and healing modalities in all areas of wellness. She helps others understand the importance of showing yourself compassion. If you do not have the tools to help your overall wellness it can affect other areas of your life, especially in the work environment. Allowing yourself to be more mindful and self-aware gives you the ability to connect the mind and body, therefore decreasing anxiety. Tune in to learn more about how mindfulness is becoming more apparent in society and its benefits.
Transcript:
Narrator [00:00:00] Successful individuals use coaching and mentorship to help them unlock their potential. Not all coaches are created equal and that’s why we work with the top 5% of coaches at idea mix. Welcome to Coaches Unit brought to you by ideamix.
Jamie [00:00:17] Welcome to Coaches to know a podcast short designed to demystify coaching and help you, our audience, understand what coaching is and how it can help you. I’m your host, Jamie, and today I’m here with Coach Denise to talk about integrative coaching. Coach Denise has been a coach for 12 years. She is a certified self-compassion teacher who seamlessly blends her formal coach training with mindfulness, energy psychology, somatic practices and healing modalities in all areas of wellness. And very interestingly, she’s an immigrant, born to immigrants and has spent much of her life living between the US and Sweden. Her clients are a diverse range of executives to nurses to working moms, and they’re all seeking to live purposeful lives while finding fulfillment in all aspects of what they do in life. So please join me in welcoming coach Denise and thank you for being with us here today.
Coach Denise [00:01:26] What a warm welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
Jamie [00:01:30] So we’re going to start off just with a basic question. If you could just tell us what is integrative coaching and maybe talk a little bit, if there are any misconceptions about what into integrative coaching is.
Coach Denise [00:01:46] Absolutely. So when we’re talking about integrative coaching, it means that we are combining traditional approaches with alternative or complementary modalities and we are really looking at the whole person. So we’re looking at what is happening happening in the physical body. What’s happening in the mental body? What are the emotions that are present? And we’re working with all of the tools that we have access to within the various modalities that you kindly mentioned here in the intro to make sure that we are really using whatever is the most pragmatic approach to get the client the result that they are looking for. And so it’s really combining what we know in a very Western modern sense and all of this influx of information as our society continues to be more global that’s coming in from other places and especially Eastern influences. And so I would say that one of the biggest misconceptions about integrative coaching is that it’s somehow woo woo and that it’s not effective, that it’s not founded in science. There are over 16,000 studies now that have been done since the seventies just on the secular program of mindfulness. And so this idea that it’s not effective to take care of ourselves at the same time that we’re getting the results that we want, it’s just outdated and it’s no longer true.
Jamie [00:03:13] Thank you so much for that very thorough explanation of integrative coaching. And I appreciate this idea that we are taking the influences that come from other places and how we can think about human beings and think about them from a much broader perspective. Can you drill down a little bit and tell us sort of why? Why would somebody come to seek integrative coaching? Why do your clients come to you wanting this type of coaching in particular, or do they normally come with a specific problem, or is it just a general, maybe a feeling of imbalance? You know, what is it that drives people to seek this type of coaching?
Coach Denise [00:04:07] So there will be two reasons. One is they they are specifically looking for somebody who has a holistic perspective. So this is something that is now becoming more mainstream. We have a lot of people seeking complementary approaches. A lot of people recognize that the conscious mind and the conscious thought is not all that we have to work with. This is showing up in therapy and coaching all over the place so people seek it out. They want an approach where they’re actually changing their way of being. They’re starting to come online with what is actually happening in my body, what is my inner knowing. There’s this whole other language that many of us don’t speak because it’s not taught. And so people actually want that. And many of my clients are even looking more to more of a spiritual connection of what is my purpose? Why am I here? What is the meaning of all of this? Maybe there are already very, very successful. I specifically tend to work with very motivated women in a space where they already are. A lot of the time, very intellectually strong, very emotionally strong, and they’re not understanding why they’re coming up against the same challenges. And so there’s this element of stuckness. A lot of the time and a lot of the time, what we’re changing isn’t necessarily whether they’re going to be successful or not. It’s how they go about it so that they can experience contentment and well-being at the same time that they are reaching their goals.
Jamie [00:05:40] There’s so many great nuggets in what you just said. But one of the things that I think sort of resonated in terms of my understanding of integrated coaching is. It really hones in on helping people change their way of being in the world. And to me, I would differentiate that from a non holistic approach. And correct me if I’m wrong by saying, you know, coaching is a forward looking exercise. You can work with a career coach, for example, who just does career coaching, set goals, you know, upskill, you know, set plan goals and actions to to get there and to move and progress forward. But it is not. It’s an exercise, a very narrow exercise. So integrative coaching really takes a step back and say, let’s not just look at this one area of life. Let’s look at all areas of life and consider how we interact with all of them and how they make us feel. So let’s find enjoyment. Let’s work on finding enjoyment and again, changing our way of being and and how we interact with the world holistically. You know, which is I just think it’s very, I think, very powerful. Can draw down a little bit on what you said about stuckness I just want to understand a little more about what that normally means for your clients. Because, you know, it’s interesting. You said many of them are motivated women. They’re intellectually strong. They’re emotionally strong. I mean, in my mind, I hear success when I think about so. So why are women who have these, you know, strong attributes feeling stuck?
Coach Denise [00:07:38] This is like Pandora’s box because there’s no one size fits. All right? And I also just want to follow back up on something that you mentioned about, you know, we’re talking about career coaching, for example, if even integrative coaching works, even when there’s a very specific goal like to get a job, it’s just again, how am I going about it? So it works to use integrative coaching even when you have a very, very specific goal. Just I just wanted to make sure that that one thing that people also were aware of. But as far as this element of stuckness. So what will happen a lot of the time is that we are raised from the neck up. And so I am my own avatar. This is me, you know, very successful in the way of of on paper quickly promoted A-plus student. And I’m going here from the neck up. So I every time there’s a problem, I’m thinking more about it. I’m going to fix it and I’m good at fixing it. And this even became my job. So knowing steps A, B, C, and D, and then being able to think quickly and to come up with a solution. The challenge with that sometimes is that what actually a lot of the times brings us that contentment that. Satisfaction in life. That ability to stop and be in the present moment isn’t thinking more. It’s. It’s this element of getting to know myself and what is actually important to me and that core knowingness and connecting to that core knowingness. And so what we can think about is. We talk about metacognition and mindfulness, for example, and this is maybe the very first thing to recognize within integrative coaching, and that’s the fact that everything you think isn’t true just because it doesn’t mean it’s true. And just because you have this pattern of thinking more and doing more. And according to this set of beliefs that you have that have been conditioned your whole life, it doesn’t mean that they’re true. And so we can think about this. Metacognition is the first thing that starts to happen. A lot of the times when we enter into a a mindfulness practice or a somatic practice, and this is studied even within business executives, this is something that’s called out. So it’s this witness that’s starting to be able to observe what are my thoughts? What are my emotions? What are the sensations that are happening in my body? And so you start being the witness. You are this person who’s able to observe what’s happening within you. And that is the first step. Because then I have choice. And then for people who are also very smart in this way, a lot of the times I’m being motivated by a very harsh inner critic. I need to get more done. Even when I’m hurting, I’m going to go immediately to fixing it. But that’s not actually what makes us feel better either. And the research, again, doesn’t support that. This makes us more productive. If you’re able to teach yourself how to show up for yourself with kindness and to reprogram that to be your inner voice, it is so much more productive from even a scientific perspective. We have 30 years about a research on compassion now, and we’re seeing that you get at least the same results, if not better, is when you’re really hard on yourself. The difference now is that you get less anxiety, less depression. And so as you start to be able to be this person that is in metacognition, that’s observing yourself, you start realizing what’s actually important to you. And time sort of slows down. So it’s the whole this is what we’re talking about, this whole other way of being. And then you bring the energy psychology on board and you start transforming unconscious beliefs at the level of mind and body. And it’s like, holy cow. Now we’re opening another box of possibilities. And so I’m not one always for being succinct, but it’s just a little bit complicated to explain the transformation in how we do do life.
Jamie [00:11:49] And lots of great things in there. But really tapping into the self-awareness sounds like it’s the first step, and particularly around what’s the narrative in our heads. And and, you know, I think that modern day society really separates us from that self-awareness in a lot of ways. We’re constantly distracted by what we need to do that we we oftentimes don’t take the time to sort of get in touch with what that narrative is. And it sounds like in working, with your clients, you work with them to help them first tap into that narrative. But can you talk us a little bit in more detail about about your process, sort of, you know, what is it? What does it look like and what is the time frame cover? You know, like, for example, you’re starting by that sort of observational self awareness step, it sounds like is the first one. So like, how long does that take for somebody to be able to understand what, what their true wants are and what their narrative is?
Coach Denise [00:13:02] I would say that every session is transformative and every session is unique, and there’s a big element if people are open to it, of intuition that’s present in the sessions, too. So there’s always a coaching field between the coach and the client. And in certain instances, if you choose a coach like myself where mind body connection, awareness is is big then and that also ends up being the focus of the session. And we it sometimes if clients are open to it, even we use applied kinesiology which is where similar to what a chiropractor will do, where we lean into the body to ask us what direction to go in with with the session. And so I have people who want to work with me for years and I have people who just want one session and it seems to be exactly what they need regardless. And I’ve started to trust that. I’ve started to trust that the experience is going to be different depending on the person. Some people really have a need to work on the self-compassion work that tends to be front and center. And a lot of the times when I start working with especially the very smart clients that I work with, we do rely heavily on research to to explain why it’s important. So that’s often where we start. But like you mentioned, when there’s a very specific goal, like I want to get a new job, then all of the learning you are doing is at the same time that you’re working on your goal of getting the job. So it’s not like I’m sitting there lecturing. It’s as things come up within an actual coaching process. And so I think that’s what is really important to continue to focus on is that it’s not that you’re going to be sitting there. I don’t have time to focus on awareness building. I need to get a job. No, you’re going to get a job. You’re probably going to get it a little bit faster because you have access to more of yourself to get that job. And if anxiety shows up, then all of a sudden you learn, fine new tools to handle that in the moment. And so it’s not about getting less done because we’re adding all of these elements, even though it sounds rather cumbersome to speak about them, they show up as they are needed to reach your goal.
Jamie [00:15:12] I love that though, that basically this idea that in working with you and thinking about something that doesn’t seem related at all to getting a job, it actually it provides a shortcut in a lot of ways. It’s almost like a hack, right?
Coach Denise [00:15:32] Psychology is like a hack. And I know I was telling you I wanted to do something experiential because it’s like you can’t just sit and talk about these things, but there are so many things that you can do. That are so quick. My little brother is an M.D., Ph.D., and he’ll call me when he’s a little bit stressed. And I’ll I’ll given little tools that he can use. And he says, oh, my gosh, that was transformative. And I’m like, Yeah, I know. And some of the programs I teach are actually for for medical students. And so it’s funny, it’s like these high stress jobs and situations, a lot of the time we’re so stuck in. We know how to do it cause we’ve always been so successful that this idea that there’s something else that would also make us feel like more of ourselves, more alive, It almost seems like What? I don’t need that until you start. And then it’s like, Oh, okay, I do need that. I do need that.
Jamie [00:16:30] I like that. I that’s a great thought to actually end on because we are out of time. But this idea that integrated coaching is a tool for making you feel more alive. It’s quite powerful. So thank you so much Coach Denise for speaking with us today. And to our audience, if you would like to work with Coach Denise or one of our other qualified coaches at Ideamix, please visit us at theideamix.com. And thank you for listening today.
Narrator [00:17:03] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer, Martin Milewski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.