Developing intuition is an essential resource for coaches, allowing them to connect with clients on a deeper level. This episode emphasizes the importance of being present and mindful, not only for oneself but also in fostering meaningful relationships with those being coached. Brett Hill explores how heightened awareness of one's own inner state can lead to valuable insights and impressions about clients, which may not be immediately obvious through their words alone. By cultivating an authentic curiosity and being open to these intuitive nudges, coaches can enhance their ability to support clients effectively. Join Brett as he shares practical tips on integrating intuition into coaching and highlights the transformative power of genuine connection in the helping professions.

The Foundation of Mindful Coaching

At the core of mindful coaching lies the ability to be fully present with our clients. This means:

• • Cultivating awareness of our own internal state
• • Regulating our emotions and energy in the moment
• • Bringing our full attention to the client's experience

By honing these skills, we create a space of deep connection and understanding that sets the stage for transformative coaching experiences.

Tapping into Intuitive Insights

When we're truly present and attuned to our clients, something remarkable can happen. We may begin to receive intuitive impressions or hunches about the client that go beyond what they've explicitly shared. These insights might include:

• • Curiosities about their background or experiences
• • Impressions about their relationships or interests
• • Subtle nuances in their communication style

The Art of Offering Intuitive Impressions

Sharing these intuitive insights requires finesse and sensitivity. Here are some guidelines:

• 1. Frame your insights as gentle curiosities rather than definitive statements
• 2. Be prepared to adjust if your impression doesn't resonate
• 3. Use intuitive insights to deepen rapport and understanding, not as a party trick

Developing Your Intuitive Abilities

Cultivating your intuition is a practice that can enhance your coaching effectiveness. Consider these strategies:

• • Regular mindfulness practice to sharpen your awareness
• • Paying attention to subtle cues and impressions in daily life
• • Creating low-stakes opportunities to test your intuitive hunches

"When I am in this more spacious place, I not only have the capacity to connect and feel and sense and process my impressions and observations about another person, but something interesting happens."

By embracing intuition as a valuable tool in our coaching practice, we open ourselves to a richer, more nuanced understanding of our clients. This can lead to more profound insights, stronger rapport, and ultimately, more impactful coaching outcomes.

Remember, intuition is not about being psychic or always right. It's about tuning into the subtle information available in the coaching relationship and using it wisely to serve our clients better.

Join the Mindful Coach Community

If you're inspired to explore mindful coaching further, consider joining the Mindful Coach Association. Connect with like-minded professionals committed to bringing more goodness into the world through mindful practices.

The conversation centers on the profound connection between mindfulness, coaching, and the development of intuition. Brett Hill articulates the significance of being present and aware in the coaching relationship, emphasizing that successful coaching transcends mere techniques; it requires a genuine connection with the client. He explores how mindfulness can serve as a foundation for building this connection, enabling coaches to create a safe space for clients to explore their thoughts and feelings. The discussion delves into the internal landscape of the coach, highlighting the necessity of self-awareness and emotional regulation as essential components of effective coaching. Brett shares insights on how external stressors can impact a coach's presence and the importance of grounding oneself to maintain focus and clarity during sessions.

Takeaways:

• Mindful coaching requires the ability to be present and calm your inner state on demand.
• Developing intuition is essential for coaches to connect on a deeper level with clients.
• Paying attention to subtle cues can lead to meaningful insights during coaching sessions.
• Authentic curiosity about clients' lives can strengthen the coaching relationship and rapport.
• Intuition can emerge from observations and impressions about clients that are not explicitly stated.
• Practicing mindfulness and centeredness allows coaches to access deeper connections and insights.

Links referenced in this episode:

• themindfulcoach.com
• themindfulcoachassociation.com

The Mindful Coach Podcast welcome to this edition of the Mindful Coach Podcast.

I'm your host, Brett Hill, founder of the Mindful Coach association and known as themindfulcoach@the mindfulcoach.com one of the reasons mindfulness and coaching is so important and powerful is because it provides the opportunity for the coach, for you and for me, to be present with other people in ways that are uncommon in the sense that you're bringing more attention, more focus, more quality of your presence into the relationship, the coaching relationship, the helping relationship.

So let's be clear, when I say coaching, that's just a placeholder for coaching, therapy, leading, counseling, advising, healing, any of the modalities where you're helping someone in be better, be more whole, be more whole, more complete, more integrated individuals in whatever modality you're using.

That's what this is about.

So I use the word coaching broadly here and specifically about the professional relationship where a client comes to you to help them in some capacity in their life be better at what they do and hopefully with who they are.

One of the most important things in your skill set, if you will, is the ability to be mindful and present on demand, on request.

You can simply summon the capacity to be more present with who it is you're working with.

That's a requirement of mindful coaching, is the ability to do that when you wish.

Because you know, someone may make an appointment with you and just before that you get a lot of bad news or something goes sideways or you have a flat tire or you're struggling with your technology.

Whatever it is, you show up and the client shows up and your internal self is agitated.

And consequently that's what you're bringing to the relationship in that moment.

A mindful coach has the capacity to notice that go, I'm feeling agitated.

I really don't want to bring that into this conversation any more than necessary.

And then can take action in the moment to calm the nervous system and to focus on the task at hand rather than injecting that anxiety and distress into the conversation.

That's one of the key skills, is to be able to track your own inner state and make adjustments as necessary.

Now, what I want to talk about this time is not only can you do that at will, but there's something pretty special that can happen whenever you are really, really paying attention and you're connected to your own senses in a deep way so you can take a breath and connect to the core of your senses, noticing what's happening, noticing what your inner state Is like, like right now I can feel sort of a caffeinated buzz, my energy.

And then also I can feel what I call this core, this centered part of me that if I just tune to and take a few breaths, then my sense of that increases as I bring myself on purpose in the moment and hopefully non judgmentally, which is the John Cabbage definition of mindfulness, then I can bring more of that into my awareness.

And whenever I do, my whole system calms down.

I feel more connected, more centered, more grounded and resourced.

There's space to facilitate what is, my observations of what's happening, my senses of what's happening in the moment.

And right now I'm talking to a camera, to a screen and I'm doing so while imagining that there's someone listening to these words that matters and that I care about your world and that you can hopefully get some value out of this.

Now what I'm going to say next is that in this state where you're connected to yourself now, you have the opportunity to connect with another person in an uncommon way.

And uncommon, I mean it's uncommon for people to get connected in conversation, in a helping relationship to someone who is authentically paying attention in a high resolution way, in a refined way, on purpose, in the moment, bringing all of your senses to bear.

So whenever I'm working with someone it's about what am I seeing, what am I feeling, what am I hearing, who is this person, how are they impacting me?

And not so much their story, even though I am interested in the story.

But it's more along the lines of who is this person?

Now this is what this topic is about today.

When I do that well, when I'm kind of in the zone, something very interesting happens.

Now this is true for me and it's true for others as well because I know that my neurology is not unique on the planet.

I mean we're all unique in some way, but we're also have a lot in common.

When I am in this more spacious place, I not only have the capacity to connect and feel and sense and process my impressions and observations about another person, but something interesting happens.

I start to have thoughts, curiosities, feelings, impressions about the individual that I don't have any way to know if it's so or not.

And so I'm going to call these impressions, but some people might call them intuitions.

And so, and I'm way too as well.

So I might have the thought, I wonder if this person grew up on the east coast or I wonder if they had brothers and sisters that were a big part of their world.

Now, of course, you know, that's something you can ask of anybody.

I'm not trying to demonstrate psychic awareness or my, oh, my God, how did you know that?

Like, to some crazy degree, I'm talking about just noticing what comes up in me naturally, organically, that I get curious about.

And they might be details about someone's life that I don't have any way to know based on what they've told me.

That's the key to underlining that underlying that impressions or hunches or thoughts or intuitions about someone that you don't objectively have any way to know.

There's no, you know, if you played back the script of what someone said there, they wouldn't necessarily say, oh, yeah, I grew up on a lake.

But you might have a thought like, and this happens to me, where you think, oh, I wonder if this person was.

Grew up by water or their relationship to water or what's their relationship to.

Right.

Sometimes I'll be working with a client and I'll start to feel.

This is hard to describe, but I'll start to feel like the way that they speak and the way they use their hands and their gestures, maybe looking in the background and seeing, you know, books or whatever, I'll notice.

And I'll wonder, what's this person's relationship to writing?

Maybe they'll talk poetically.

They'll use a turn of the phrase that sounds nuanced, considered, conscious.

Those words will cause me to wonder, h.

This person, I wonder if they have a unique relationship, an important relationship to words.

And when I get an impression like that, which is based on.

Not only, you know, it's based on actual observation, like, I'm noticing their words, you go, oh, I wonder about that.

That's just a purely objective sort of observation.

Right.

This person uses language in a unique way.

I wonder why they do that.

So there's what I would call Sherlock Holmesian style observations.

But then there's also this impressionistic level of like, I wonder what.

I wonder if they're a poet.

And so I might often offer in some summaries, not in all readings.

Some people are not open to these kinds of things.

I might say, do you.

Do you write poetry?

Or is there something in writing that's important to you?

And frequently, because I have done this kind of enough in my own work to know that lands now, you know, I'm not trying to do psychic readings here.

I'm just trying to offer impressions on what comes to me around people now, when it does land, it's magical, almost connection, in a way, because people begin to realize that you are truly paying attention in a way that is really not only focused and intentional, but refined, that you're picking up on subtle impressions and cues and clues that other people miss.

Other people aren't going to be able to provide that kind of insight or demonstration of connection and insight because they just don't pay attention to the degree, to the level, to the quality that you are.

And you're the professional here.

You're the one in the role of paying attention.

And so intuitions are a big deal, particularly in the helping professions.

So I'll wonder about these kinds of things and I'll have a practice where I'll make a decision.

Now, I don't always give voice to these things because it might not be appropriate.

Maybe I'm dealing with somebody who.

I don't have that level of trust that hasn't been established yet.

So I won't say now.

I will then ask them something along the lines of, I'm just wondering, do you write?

Does that anything for you without making it sound like some deep insight?

Just a curiosity.

I'm just curious.

Do you write?

Do you.

In your exercise, do you work out in water at all?

I'm just getting a sense that maybe that would be something that would be good for you.

I don't know, maybe it wouldn't be.

Or maybe that's something you have done.

Or, you know, I'll just pose it as like a kind of maybe a little askew curiosity.

And if it's not on point, what will happen is they'll say, no, but I do this.

No, but I do that.

And that gives you a chance to refine your tuning, your attunement so that you can go, oh, no, okay, I wasn't right about that.

And that's okay.

I know I myself, I have done so much work in this area over the years that I don't worry about my own intuitive capacity because I know it's.

It's a thing for me.

I've had some pretty interesting insights around these kinds of things.

They just come to me all the time.

Whenever I'm dealing with people in certain way.

I kind of have to mitigate it somewhat so that.

So there's not my coaching, my life coaching, my, you know, mindfulness work doesn't become like an intuitive reading.

And I actually do that as well.

I do intuitive readings for people which aren't about coaching.

They're just about here's my intuitive questions.

How does this go?

So that's something I also do.

And it's really so rich for me to be able to bring that capacity into my coaching sessions.

And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to get in touch with those impressions, those kind of fuzzy senses that we have about what might be so for another person.

And here's the trick.

Rather than trying to make yourself right or wrong, let yourself get curious about it.

If that's there for you to do.

This has to be completely authentic.

And if it's not authentic, forget it.

Completely forget it.

But if you have an authentic curiosity, just say it.

Like, say I'm curious about something, and do it in a way where it blends into the, in the moment focus for the client so that it's relevant and on point for them.

And if you're in tune and on point, then great.

It helps tremendously to increase the rapport and the trust level.

And if you're not, then you simply adjust and go on.

And that also can be a demonstration.

In fact, I had a.

When I was passing my ICF certification exam with my teacher that the woman who ran the school that I was studying with in that session, I was talking to her about something that was going on with her, and she was having these physical reactions to a lot of forest fires that were going on around.

And so I'm like, well, what.

What's happening?

You know?

And she was.

And she was saying, well, you know, I just.

I'm so tired.

I just can't deal with.

I need to figure out something.

And so being a somatic approaching to this, I said, well, can you just turn to this sense of like, this isn't like working for me?

And she just said, no, I do not want to do very clearly.

And so, you know, my intuition was, you know, she might get some information by turning, tuning to this and exploring it a little bit more.

And she was extremely clear that that was not what she wanted to do.

So what do I do then?

Right?

So here you are.

You're.

You're trying to work with somebody.

In this case, it matters because this was an exam for me, actually.

And so fortunately, I have a technique that I fall back on whenever that happens.

If I say something and the client is adamant of that that is not the right thing, they're like, certain that they don't want to go there, then what I do is I reinforce the certainty.

And so there's a quality of work in Hakomi coaching, which is like Support spontaneously emergent behavior.

And so in this case she was certain, you know, that I do not want to do.

Oh wow, you are really, really clear about that.

Yes, I am.

Boom.

And so we went from maybe a little sideways intervention to reinforcing this sense of certainty.

And that really helped ground the session into insight that yeah, she was really clear that she needed to do something about it and was going to take an action.

And that really helped kind of.

And so that's a, that's a tip to like don't worry about being off because you can always align around what then emerges.

And so that's a little bit of a, of a finesse in these situations.

That gives you the capacity to have more range or gives you the opportunity to have more range with exploring and not worrying so much.

Like if you have a thread in your head, like this has to be right, it's really important this be on point, you know, I'll notice, name that, take a breath, relax, and then just get curious.

Is it so is it so that's the other tip.

Like when you get stuck with a client, just get curious, what are you curious about?

And then just get really open, fielded awareness around the whole session.

Back up for a moment, take a breath, think about the whole session, the vibe, the sense of it.

What did they come in with?

Where are they now, where it's been said, what is your wish for this client?

And then what spontaneously emerges that you might be curious about?

You know, I'd really like to hear more about this anxiety you were talking about a moment ago or in coaching often I want to facilitate towards resilience.

So rather than leading to the anxiety, I might say, so I'd really like to know more about what it is you're hoping for in this relationship or this work or in our coaching or whatever.

Just have them land on something that you're curious about that's going to help give you more connection, more information, more, you know, of a, more to work with so that that cloud of what do I do now?

Dissipates and you wind up in the moment in connection, authentic connection and rapport with your client so that you can help them be the best that they can be.

Because after all, that's what it's about.

And that's one of the many reasons why mindful coaching, mindfulness in coaching and these helping relationships is so crucial and critical.

So just to restate, practice taking a breath, clearing your own energy, clearing your own.

And by energy in this case, I mean your own state of inner static like if you've been busy, get centered.

I do this with my clients and the first thing we do is spend two or three minutes just taking a breath and getting centered.

And if they don't want to go along with it, that's fine.

I do it for myself and also to model what it means to transition.

So you just center, take a breath, relax, get really clear, let your open awareness with a very high degree of sensitivity align and focus on your client.

Notice the dance of impressions that come your way and give voice to things that you're curious about, even if they're, like I said, they don't have their foot, both feet in completely objective senses.

I'm curious about this.

I wonder about that.

That this kind of a skill is exceptionally powerful and it only gets better if you practice it.

So if you're worried about, oh, how off can I be, then look for situations where it doesn't really matter that much that you can begin to practice.

And if you're way off base, so what?

And maybe that's with complete strangers.

Sometimes before I wrap up, I'll tell you a story like that.

Where I often will do that sometimes whenever I'm practicing being present, if I hang out with anybody for any period of time in a one on one situation, I start to get this stance of intuition that I can't ignore.

It just comes to me.

And so one time I was in a photo shoot, I was going to be on the COVID of a technical magazine because those of you who may have read my bio know I used to be in technology and I was, you know, reasonably popular within my technical field.

And so consequently I was on the COVID of this magazine and this photographer they had hired to come and shoot take pictures for the COVID And I was with him for a couple of hours.

And after a while I start to kind of tune in because that's what I do, tune into the guy.

We were having a nice relationship, but it was professional.

All above.

What, I'm never going to see this guy again, right?

And for some reason I don't know why, but that's one of the clues about intuition is you don't know why you have this impression, but you have an impression.

I had the feeling this guy, I grew up by a lake.

Now that's crazy talk, right?

It's like, but how are you ever going to know if these things are true or not unless you find out?

So I just said to him, because it was a very low risk environment, very low, said, do you, I know this is going to Sound a little odd, but by any chance did you happen to grow up by a lake?

And he just almost like dropped his camera.

He's like, well, wait, what?

Yeah, I grew up in Minnesota.

We lived in a lake house.

I was on a lake my whole childhood and it was a big deal.

So I've had so many of those kinds of things that I know that the impressions that I get aren't always there's something there.

You know, I've had enough proof in actual testing to know that there's something happening there.

That doesn't make it 100% guaranteed, but it does make it a resource.

It doesn't make it something that I can use in my personal life and my professional life.

And I have to say it's a pretty rich place to live where you have those kinds of resources available to you.

And that's my wish for you.

I'm tracking my wish for you as remember earlier?

So I'm sitting here talking to a camera and I'm hoping that you who are listening to this, that these kinds of words, these kinds of stories can resonate with you in some way and open a field of awareness you where you can begin to attune to this world of connection that's beyond the physical.

And the only way to do that is to first connect to the physical.

You have to connect through the body, through the senses.

And when you do that with yourself really well, then this other opportunity opens to extend into a different interpersonal, relational, sometimes I call it the meta field, the space between.

Because that's really where the juice is.

And after all, all of our work is in this space between us.

And so that's my wish for you, is that you can learn to have this really rich connection to this bigger field of this invisible world that lives within us and between us.

So with that said, once again, I'm Brett Hill, the Mindful Coach.

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I am the founder of the Mindful coach association@themindfulcoachassociation.com where you can join if you're aligned with this for free.

Be a member of a fabulous community of like minded peers who are all doing amazing courageous work to bring more goodness into the world mindfully.

And there's so many good people there and we just had a community meeting and like 24 people show up as a really powerful experience to just to be in the presence of all these big lights, these big forces in the world and know that even though sometimes it feels like you're on your own out there, you are not alone.

There are a lot of people doing powerful work like you are or like you wish to be, and I'm on a mission to help you do that.

You can reach me@themindfulcoach.com I also do one on one work as well as I have a course on how to be more mindful and present as a coach.

Please check that out if you're interested.

And of course you can write to me, brett@the mindfulcoach.com I'm always happy to hear from listeners, so blessings to you.

And that's it for now.

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