Calling ICF coaches - Embodying a Coaching Mindset and Maintaining Presence with Somatic Coaching

Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hi, Ani.

Ani
Hi there, Brian.

Brian
How are you?

Ani
I'm really good.

Brian
How are you today? Excited, excited for this topic?

Ani
Yeah, me too, actually. We've been talking a bunch about this topic over the past two weeks or so, so I'm really excited to do a podcast about it. We're on episode 68, and we're calling on ICF coaches today. We recently got our CE credit for the Level 3 certification. We've had Level 1 and Level 2 certified, but now our Level 3 certification program has gotten ICF-CCE. Yeah, exactly.

Brian
So all three of our levels are CCE approved. I don't have the numbers right off the top of my head. I could guess at them.

Ani
Well, it's It's enough CCEs that you can come study with us for a while and get all your CCEs handled, which is so super exciting because a lot of our people, they want to come in to take the whole thing. I love working with our ICF coaches. They're people who are, first of all, the little coaching nerds. I put myself in that. I love nerding out on coaching with my ICF people. They're people who really take their own personal development very seriously. They love personal development. I remember before I found coaching, before I knew what coaching was, Brian, I would read books, and I journal, and I do worksheets, and I'd take the occasional video program or telecom conference program because that was back in the day before they really didn't have a lot of video. Dvd sets. Right. Yeah.

Brian
On DVD sets, we would get tapes. I used to get tapes.

Ani
Exactly. I think to myself, God, I wish I could do this for a living. I love this stuff. Then eventually, I found it like, that's what coaches do. What? That's so exciting. Our ICF coaches really love personal development. You learn so much about yourself holistically when you incorporate somatics. You get to become aware of stuff that you never knew existed.

Brian
Yeah. Today, in our celebrating that all three of our levels are CCE certified now, we are talking about embodying a coaching mindset and maintaining presence with somatic coaching.

Ani
Right. So both of those things are in the ICF core competencies. Yes. Yeah. The core competencies are... I really appreciate it going through the process of getting our certification programs accredited with the ICF CCEs because we had, well, there here comes the nerd. Usually, you're the nerd.

Brian
You want my nerd glasses? I do.

Ani
You got to get in there with all the core competencies and pick them apart and look at all the aspects of how our program fit with it. It was super fun.

Brian
We might have overnerded it on a little bit because- We 100% overnerded it. Our ICF consultant said, What are you doing? Way too much detail. Way too much. We're like, But we want to make sure we got all these pieces in place.

Ani
That speaks to my love for this, by the way, because no one ever says to me too much detail.

Brian
Yeah, for you. Let's just dig into each one of these. Can we define each of these? Sure. Just to... I know we have ICF coaches here that probably know a lot of these things, but there might be some ICF coaches that are listening that actually aren't familiar with these core competencies.

Ani
Yeah. You might be an ICF core competency expert listening to this thing. We're not ICF core competency experts. We're somatic coaching and body mind experts. Let's talk about them. They're actually really similar, the two competencies.

Brian
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Embodies a coaching mindset, that core competency is defined as, develops and maintains a mindset that is open, curious, flexible, and client-centered.

Ani
I could pick apart so many... Not pick apart, get nerdy on so many of the words we're going to use today. But I think that's really interesting from a body-mind standpoint, because we come at helping humans to create behavior change from the idea that the body-mind split never happened. And then I would say mostly everybody else that you're going to talk to comes from the idea that the body-mind split did happen. So even when you see the word mindset on the ICF core competencies, I want to ask people in ICF, what does mindset mean to you? Because to us, when we talk about mindset, we're not talking about what goes on just between the two ears. In fact, I think it's largely not what's happening between the two ears, but what's in the subconscious. It's about what's happening in the heart and the gut and all of the physiological processes.

Brian
Yeah. I'm just looking through the different points underneath this core competency. I think one of the points that we've been talking about quite a bit is number six under this core competency, which is develops and maintains the ability to regulate one's emotions.

Ani
Yeah. When... I'm just hesitating there because in the other core competency, they also mentioned emotion.

Brian
Okay, so let's maybe do that first, and then we'll come back.

Ani
It's a little bit different. Yeah, sure.

Brian
If we talk about maintains presence. Sure. What's the definition of maintains presence? It's fully conscious and present with the client, employing a style that is open, flexible, grounded, and confident.

Ani
When we talk about this one, you know what this reminds me of is the definition of centeredness that the Bain article... There's an article that was written about inspiring leaders, and Bain and Company discovered that there was, I think it was 33 or 32-33 traits. Attributes or traits of inspiring leaders. And everybody had different traits except for this one trait every single inspiring leader had, and it's centeredness. We talk about it a lot when we talk about somatic practices and stuff. But in there, this is fully conscious and present. To me, well, you can't do that unless you're really embodied. But to just point back to the second core competency there, number two, the embodying a coaching mindset, it says embody right there in the words. Yeah, exactly. So we're already talking about embodiment, but I haven't talked to an ICF coach yet who tells me that they actually talked about embodiment or anything with embodying centeredness. People will talk about centeredness, but it's more of an intellectual activity, but not really embodying the fullness of the body, mind, spirit.

Brian
Interesting. Yeah. That would be something that would be very difficult to articulate unless you had fully experienced that somatically.

Ani
Yeah. And you got to be willing to have emotion conversations as a part of that conversation. The conversation of emotions was a challenging conversation when I was going through coach training school. I remember sitting there in class, we would do Q&A at the beginning of the in-person sessions, and multiple times, multiple people on multiple occasions wanted to ask about emotions as it relates to coaching. I don't remember what was specifically said, but the general idea that I was left with was that emotions are a therapeutic thing. Don't get into emotions with your clients because it's a therapeutic thing. We don't do that as coaches. And then we would go do an exercise or a piercer or something, and we would 100 % be doing emotional stuff. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in the core competencies about noticing your client's emotional shifts and energy shifts and stuff like that. So it starts to be like this, wait a minute. We're not being taught about it. We're told to watch out for it. It's actually in the core competencies. And I don't fault ICF around this or the coach training institutions.

Ani
The science on emotions is so new now, and mostly nobody really understands how emotions are created, that it becomes impossible when you're talking about an emotion as an emotion to talk about it in a coach training program and not potentially touch in on therapeutic things, which is why I think the sensation-based model that we use is so awesome and on point for coaches, because as soon as you recognize that emotions are two things, they're the sensations you feel in your body, and then there's the narratives that you have about those sensations and feelings that you have in your body. Once you realize that emotions are two things, you can actually coach on and talk about emotions in a way that is present moment, not past, not therapeutic-based with a client, and work on modifying sensations that they feel in their body in a coaching way to help them move forward in their life in the directions that they want to go. Yeah.

Brian
It's interesting. Something occurred to me as you we're talking Ani, that there's a pain researcher in the '60s, 1960s. I don't remember his full name, but I remember a quote that he said in that it's really attractive for physicians, therapeutic professionals, to focus on the cause of pain as being a physical rooted issue. That's actually endemic in the physical medicine world. He said, Is that perhaps that way because of a deeply ingrained inability and unwillingness to deal with the emotional considerations of both the physician and the client themselves around that problem.

Ani
That's fascinating.

Brian
I think this is what I hear you saying in some of these programs that we say, 'Emotions are a thing, but we're not going to go there. Emotions are a thing, pay attention to it, but don't do that. We're going to do this instead'. And so we set up all these intellectual structures to walk around emotions, like put caution tape around it, don't go there. Now, do we build those systems specifically because of our unwillingness and discomfort with navigating our own emotional landscapes as a physician, as the coach, as the practitioner itself? Yeah. And a lot of that is coming forward now in a lot of the pain research that I work with therapeutic professionals. And we use somatic coaching a lot. Tell people to transcend a lot of chronic pain issues because we adopt and we embrace all aspects of a human being, which is what you have to do if you're really going to get to the core of solving things for people. And so I know this is a little bit of a tangent, but it's- No, not at all. Coming to me as, wow, there's some parallels there with some of that pain physiological medicine that's happening right now.

Ani
Well, our ICF coaches who are students and graduates of our program tell us that they use the tools that we teach at the academy in their sessions. They absolutely do. They get better client results than they ever had before they knew the tools. The most valuable skill to them that they have learned with us is how to manage and regulate their own systems, to do the deep work within themselves so that they can show up and be truly neutral and be truly curious with their clients as they're talking about truly flexible, truly open, truly grounded. Yeah.

Brian
So what I'm seeing under the maintains presence competency here, Ani, is where it says manage one's emotions to stay present with a client. So a lot of the talk that we did before coming on to doing the podcast was talking about the compare, contrast the differences, similarities between these two ideas, these two subsets of these core competency categories.

Ani
I thought it was really interesting because the maintains presence talks about managing one's emotions, and then the embodies the coaching mindset talks about develops and maintains the ability to regulate one's emotions, which was already interesting to me because I went through an ICF coaching program that was an ACC, PCC, Level One program. So we never talked about developing... Where is it? We never talked about emotional regulation, let alone developing emotional regulation, let alone maintaining the ability to regulate it. We didn't even mention it. But there's this key, I thought, word thing with develops and maintains the ability to regulate one's emotions. And then at the other core competency, we're talking about managing one's emotions. Right. Yeah.

Brian
So it occurred to me, too. It's like, well, what really is the difference between those two things?

Ani
What's going on with that? Yeah. I was talking to our ICF director about that specific thing to see if she knew more information about the difference that ICF was looking for because Sarah, who is our ICF director here at the academy, she's not only a PCC ICF coach, she's not only a mentor coach, but she's one of the people who can grade. It's not called an auditor. I don't remember what it's called. Who can grade the the recordings when people are going for their ICF credentials. She really has a lot of training in all of this. And she was saying she doesn't know what they're trying to get at with the difference. I googled it. What's the difference between managing and regulating one's emotions? And I could not find anything that was really all that helpful. So I thought that was interesting. I did a little bit of research on... Isn't that funny? I did a little bit of research for that.

Brian
Yeah, I know. You're really nerding out.

Ani
I am nerding out completely. I did a little bit of research on what people think regulating your emotions are just to see what the Google thought that that was. That conversation I want to have with you if we have time in this podcast a little bit. Then, of course, people have something to say about managing one's emotions. But I couldn't find anything about the difference out there on the Google land about managing and regulating.

Brian
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the regulating. I think this is fascinating. What did you find out?

Ani
I want to ask you, so do you think there's a difference between regulating your emotions and regulating your nervous system?

Brian
Regulating your emotions or nervous system. Okay. I was on the other thought track with regulating or managing. Okay, Different questions. So ask me again.

Ani
Yeah. Sorry. So, yeah. Well, do you want to start there with the managing thing? Because to me, it's super obvious, I think, in the way that I conceptualize it, the difference between regulating one's emotions and managing one's emotions. But I think to really talk about it, we need to talk about the difference between regulating your nervous system or regulating emotions. The way that I conceptualize the managing or the regulating, the regulating is like having some mastery around turning up the volume, turning down the volume, be able to explore the range when I think of regulating, whereas managing is like, this thing's coming up and it can't come up right now, so I got to put a lid on it. How do I in the moment, which is reflected, actually, I think, and this maintains presence. I manage one's emotions to say present with the client it while I'm in session. If I start to get angry, I got to know what to do with that. I got to manage it.

Brian
I feel the exact same way. When I think about regulating as being an internal experience and managing being an external experience, that's the way I think about it. How do you think external in what way? Well, so by regulating, I think to your point, I'm trying to get inside of it. I'm trying to get inside of it and develop some nuances and some skill and some mastery around subtle changes, but changing an internal state from the inside. Where managing, to me, feels like I'm using a... I guess if we talk about the Freudian ideas, like a super ego, you're using the super ego part of yourself to manage your id part of yourself.

Ani
Calm down right now.

Brian
Regulating is more you're actually using the balance between the super ego and the id would be the ego to come inside and internally regulate the system, just from a therapeutic perspective. Sure. That's how I see managing is one part of the self trying to control the other part of the self.

Ani
That makes sense. I mean, management, that word is like a manager. You go here, it's not your time to do your job, you sit there, now you come on board. And that makes a lot of sense with managing your emotions to stay present with your client. By the way, when we're not taught much about emotions and told to beware of emotions, I think one of the risks that we run as coaches is actually not bringing our full self to a session to be fully conscious and present because we're potentially concerned about suppressing or repressing aspects of ourselves when we're in, because we got to stuff it like, I shouldn't be emotional. And I think that's a detriment. But when we show up with full mastery, then we actually don't have to be so concerned about the possibility that something could bubble up for us. But that comes from the fact that we understand how to more regulate, I think. Okay, so let's go back there.

Brian
If we go to the other question around regulating your nervous system.

Ani
Do you think there's a difference between regulating your nervous system and emotions? I didn't find it on Google, so I'm googling Brian's brain.

Brian
What do you think? I think that emotions are made up of nervous system experiences, let's say. Nervous system information. Emotions are built from nervous system information. So I don't think you can actually regulate your emotions without regulating your nervous system. I think your nervous system is really where that regulation occurs because of the way we talk about emotions. If emotions are sensations plus thoughts or sensations plus a story, sensations plus a judgment about those sensations, then the regulation automatically would have to include wrestling with some type of narrative or story, which I think is difficult to regulate. Now, that might be easier to manage. True.

Ani
Like manage the story.

Brian
The story, I think, can be managed, but the story can't really be regulated. What's regulated is the nervous system, is the raw data of what's going on in the nervous system. We regulate electricity that's coming in and out of a house. There's a regulator on our heat thermostat thing. I love your idea of regulating, it's like turning up, turning down, modulating an internal experience. Really as almost like a homeostatic function. Homeostasis are functions within the body that we use to maintain internal balance. They think about hunger, sweat, temperature modulation, those types of things happen internally in our body to regulate homeostasis. And we know that emotions are actually influenced by our homeostasis. When we're experiencing different emotions, a lot of that's because of the changes that are happening on our nervous system level and around homeostasis issues. We're talking about the fundamental building blocks. So the way I think about regulating emotions or regulating your nervous system, I don't think you can regulate emotions. From a definition standpoint, I think you're always regulating your nervous system. And when you regulate your nervous systems, by default, you become better at regulating or navigating your emotional experience.

Ani
I agree with you wholeheartedly. And some of the things I found when I was looking at some research on this and looking different images and models that people are using is I thought it was really interesting because I think it's really hard to understand the emotional experience unless you get behind the fact that most people are describing everything in the world, human behavior and emotions, from the standpoint of the body-mind split. We come from a standpoint that the body-mind split never happened. We think about emotions differently, which, ironically and paradoxically, is so fascinating to me, Brian, because since we think about the fact that the body-mind split never happened, we think about emotions as two things, and we actually split it up. Is it that ironic? When you do, you can actually uncover information about the emotions you never could have gotten to if you think emotions are just one thing. Correct. I saw an article that was written by the positive psychology folks, and they were talking about emotional regulation. And they were pointing to a lot of cognitive behavioral kinds of... They actually mentioned CBT and other cognitive kinds of ways to regulate one's emotions.

Ani
They would also point to mindfulness practices, which we've talked about a lot in other podcasts about how if you're just trying to enter into nervous... Like meditation, if you're just trying to sit on a cushion to regulate your nervous system, how hard that is. They point to the Body Keeps the Scorebook, which is awesome. But it's almost like 90% of the information was from an intellectual cognitive space. And oh, yeah, the body might have a little bit something to do with it. Check that out. I think that the information just isn't caught up with some of the research and I would say new truth about how the emotions really work. And how they're constructed.

Brian
Emotions are really constructed That's a lot of work that Lisa Feldman-Barrett has done in How Emotions are Made. A fantastic book about that. It is. Really, how our brains are predictive machines, and we're actually creating emotions based on what we're predicting is going to happen, not necessarily what actually is happening. The interplay between, again, all aspects of our holistic self, call it body, mind, spirit, really interesting, tremendous. But really, emotions are our constructed experience. What we're doing here is we're deconstructing it down to help people understand that if you have trouble with emotional dysregulation, then intellectually trying to wrestle with the emotional dysregulation actually oftentimes becomes more dysregulating. So what do we do? We practice regulating the nervous system. And the raw data of the nervous system is the sensory system.

Ani
Right. So as an ICF professional, and I'd say even as a therapeutic professional or anybody who's gone to college before, whatever you learned about human behavior, emotions, and how to do your trade is probably pretty antiquated. Because the information that I learned in occupational therapy school 25 years ago now or whatever, and the information that you learned in physical therapy school, how long ago now?

Brian
Thirty plus. Yeah.

Ani
It takes a long time for curriculum and the way that we educate folks to catch up with current science. Yeah, totally. It takes so long that the current science needs to become the mainstream thing that everybody's talking about, and then the curriculum will catch up. It takes a long time. So it's incumbent upon ourselves as ICF professionals, as people who have been trained in a helping profession, like a therapeutic professional or whatever, a coach, to get your own continuing education. Now, part of the reason I'm smirking and smiling and so excited about this is a lot of... I mean, we've taught continuing education for most of our careers a long time. A lot of the continuing education out there can be really boring. It's one of the reasons why I was disheartened as an occupational therapist once I got into the real world and had to take continuing Ed because it was boring. I didn't like it. I found other ways to get my credits that were more interesting to me. I love the fact that we get to offer really, really super fascinating cutting edge continuing Ed. It's not something that people are coming and just checking off boxes, but they're truly learning.

Ani
Truly learning something. They're truly transforming their lives and able to, and it makes sense, update your skill and elevate yourself as a professional. I'd say that our programs actually are like getting a master's degree.

Brian
Yeah, I would agree. I would agree.

Ani
It's really that new science. Not everybody's science-based, but I think even the people who come into our programs and aren't really science-based appreciate the fact, especially the coaches, appreciate the fact that they get to as professionals, not just learn the science and integrate the science, but then be able to speak to the science with their colleagues and with their clients because it's really interesting besides the fact it makes sense in a new way.

Brian
It makes sense. Often Sometimes just having a little bit of information on somatic science or physiological science can explain so much for people. Something that they thought was wrong with them, all of a sudden they realize, Oh, wait, my body is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Exactly what it's supposed to do. The trouble is that I keep putting myself in situations that go against what my body is trying to do thing. Or I keep not always putting myself in situations, but something maybe even happened to me in the past that my body is still trying to find a way to come to completion with. My nervous system is always trying to do the best that it possibly can. We understand how trying to go about doing that can really relieve a lot of shame and guilt for people is what I've experienced and bring a lot of new awareness. Then once people are able to let go of some of that shame and guilt, they can really move forward in their lives. Certainly with our students that we've worked with, they become really amazing practitioners and turn around and can hold incredible space, compassionate, empathetic space for their clients that are going through the same struggles that they had gone through beforehand.

Brian
They can turn around and share that information and help liberate other people as well. So I really think it's so cool how education, somatic education, the physiology can liberate people from the bondage that they put themselves in.

Ani
Yeah, I agree. I think it's one of the reasons why people say all the time in our programs, this was the missing piece. Because, for example, sitting through coach training and having all of these questions that really were left unanswered about emotions because they didn't know how to answer them. We're left feeling like there's a missing piece about it. When you learn the sensation-based model in our programs, our students say, That was the missing piece. I think that's really what you're speaking to. Hey, I really appreciate getting to be the nerd today.

Brian
Yes, all right. That was fun. Ani was the nerd today in episode 68. We're going to stamp that one as the Ani Nerd episode.

Ani
I love nerding out on the coaching.

Brian
If you're an ICF professional and you have thoughts, questions, comments for us based on our conversation, if you're not an ICF professional who has thoughts, comments on our conversation, please email them to us. Comment down below the podcast. Let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you and look forward to having you back here again with us next week on the next podcast.

Ani
We'll see you next time.