ZEN COACHING: A mindfulness-based approach which reconnects you with your inner wisdom, helping you to unlock new insights, effortless transformation and a deeper sense of fulfilment.

In many ways, our daily lives are more complex and pressured than ever before. Not surprisingly, we get overwhelmed, or we look around us and believe that something crucial is lacking in our lives and our selves. Even the most outwardly “successful” people can get caught up in:

• A relentless pursuit of perfection, self-improvement, higher status or new symbols of success;
• Constrictive ideas about what they “should” or “shouldn’t” do;
• A tendency to over-analyse their thoughts and actions (or the thoughts and actions of others), which drains their energy and prevents them from moving forward. 

Instead of using a coaching approach that sets up yet more external goals, endless to-do lists or self-blame routines, it’s often more helpful to step back from these old patterns and filters.

Zen Coaching is founded upon our deep longing – perhaps even a core human drive – to be at home in ourselves, to be who we truly are. Its premise is that all our problems in life arise out of a disconnection with our true selves, and that all problems are resolved as we learn to reconnect with ourselves.

A Zen Coaching session supports us in recognising our true nature and all its inherent qualities, such as inner strength, freedom, compassion, joy and wisdom. These qualities of being are always available to us, meaning that, in essence, we are whole, healthy and resourced – whatever trauma, conditioning or other life events we have experienced.

Benefits of Zen Coaching

Once we have reconnected with our innate qualities and resources, we can bring more clarity to the issues and challenges we are facing, and we can move forward to address them with far greater ease and effectiveness. As additional benefits, we find that:

• We develop a natural clarity about the best way forward when we are faced with a choice or dilemma.
• We are able to act with conscious, mutually-supportive responses rather than automatic triggered reactions.
• Our problems may just seem to dissolve rather than needing to be actively solved!
• We still work with goals and enjoy their results, but without being stressfully attached to them or linking our happiness to their achievement.
• We start to create external lives that simply reflect the peace, freedom, balance and joy we have discovered inside us.

It isn’t spiritual or esoteric or ‘New Age’. It’s a simple, powerful approach, based on questions that refocus our awareness on the present moment and our essential nature. In some ways, it’s similar to everyday mindfulness exercises or ‘flow states’ that you may have heard about or tried – but we’re embedding these in a clearly defined, actionable coaching context. 

This is how a Zen Coaching session works – or ‘unfolds’ – in practice:

For more details about how this process works in a coaching session, please see blog: ‘What is Zen Life Coaching: (Part Two) What happens in a session?’