Mindful Life Coaching supports personal and professional growth while integrating Mindfulness practices. We focus on change based on the present day and create goals designed to move you toward a different future. Life Coaching uses highly developed communication skills, tools and structures to support people to shift their present day perspectives and create deep and lasting change.
First, book a free 30 minute Discovery Session. We can chat about if coaching is for you and if I’m the right coach. You can explore the number of sessions. Most people choose 12 ($1500), 8 ($1079) or 4 ($579) sessions, although occasionally people do sign up for just one session ($160). Sessions include action notes as well as email and phone calls in between sessions to increase accountability. I have strong values about offering a sliding scale so please talk to me if the financial commitment is a barrier for you.
You are looking for expertise, trust, warmth and inspiration in a coach. You want someone you can really connect to and feel safe with. Note: If you’re in active addiction or just beginning healing from mental health issues or trauma, counselling or therapy may be a better fit.
The coach:
Coaches are bound by ethics through the International Coach Federation. Everything you say to me is totally confidential, excluding information that you will harm yourself, another or a child is at risk of harm.
If you attend every session and complete the home practices, and do not feel that you received value, I offer you a complete refund. Just as if you join a gym but only attend one session you won’t get benefit, the same is true of coaching. It does require commitment.
Mindful Life Coaching supports personal and professional growth and change based on the present day focus and building toward a different future. Therapy or counselling usually deals with healing painful patterns from the past. Mindful Life Coaching uses highly developed communication skills, tools and structures to support people to shift their present day perspectives and create deep and lasting change.
Although there is no mandatory accreditation for Life Coaches yet, we can become accredited through a training program, as I did at Integral Coaching Canada. As well, coaches can voluntarily join the International Coach Federation, as I have, which has standards and ethics that Life Coaches follow.
Life Coaching isn’t for everyone. Counselling or therapy may be a better fit if you’re still struggling with issues from your past, have active mental health issues (and you’re not seeing a health care provider) or are suicidal. If you’re an addict or alcoholic in recovery, it’s best to have about a year before you do coaching. It’s a lot of change! But don’t worry, we can talk together and decide what fits best for you.
Mindfulness is about how we bring ourselves to this present moment. It includes increasing our capacity to become consciously present by noticing feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations. When our attention wanders, we learn to bring it back, with gentleness, to our original intention, on purpose, and without judgment.
Mindfulness is about listening to your own inner truth, the still small voice that whispers quietly.
We learn Mindfulness through practice. There is no shortcut and it needs to be learned experientially. The practices include both formal and informal practices, like staying mindful when you feel stressed, for example. The more you practice, the easier it becomes.
Over time, mindfulness can help in many ways. A few of them are:
Research shows that Mindfulness benefits people with a lot of different issues:
No, Mindfulness is not about techniques, it is a way of showing up for ourselves in a new way. Although we will learn some specific techniques, how you use them is up to you. During mindful coaching or the mindfulness programs you will learn how to return back to this present moment more often with intention and purpose.
We can practice mindfulness in many different ways. Think of it as a yummy buffet of choices that we use to slowly, over time, build our capacity to flourish. We choose different options depending on what we need at different times. There are some specific techniques that most people find very beneficial: awareness of the breath, walking more mindfully, completing daily practices and the body scan. You can continue to use your present practice to augment any new mindful tools you develop.
Together, we focus on the foundational skills of becoming more aware of what you are feeling and thinking in the present moment. If you have any discomfort – physical, emotional or mental – then we learn how to sit with those aspects as best we can. We begin to recognize when we are uncomfortable, to hold that discomfort for at least one breath and then if we need to, we shift. For example, if your hips become sore when you are sitting, first try to notice, and hold for one breath or more, then if the discomfort persists, you would shift consciously and mindfully. Sometimes, just noticing can shift the experience of discomfort. The skill you are building is to accept your feelings, thoughts, or physical sensations as a valid signal to be respected.
How we sit is less important than our commitment to be aware. You don’t have to sit, you can lie down if you want. Mindfulness is about building from where you are…
