The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

For years I resisted the label of “life/business coach” because through my graduate work and new career exploration I visited many coach training academies. I generally left the experiences feeling that the relationships were constructed upside-down. They were transactional and often built upon the notion that the coach was responsible for making sure the client achieved their goals; coach as the accountability police. Yikes! So, in essence, the coach held the power in the relationship, the responsibility for forward movement, and was the keeper of accountability. In such a construct when the coaching relationship ends, the coach walks away with all of the learning. The client may or may not have achieved their goals but has certainly been thoroughly reinforced in a pattern of powerlessness.

Consequently, I didn’t have a label for my practice. I only knew that I wasn’t…that. There were many default phrases mostly dancing around the notion of connecting to creativity.

And then I met Sam and later Alan. Both call themselves coaches and their work is transformational, intuitive, and client-centered. In their practices (as in mine) the relationship is created so that the client is responsible for their actions, accountable to and for themselves, the emphasis is on their becoming more powerful, more capable, and more intentional. Clients learn to seek their answers from within instead of perpetually looking for how others do it. The work is as much in the “being” as in the “doing.” There is alignment between those two words (being and doing); they were never meant to be divorced or thought of as separate things; how can you be separate from what you do, how can your doing be anything other than an expression of your being?

It is all in where we place the emphasis. I can help you meet a goal and reinforce your powerlessness. Or, I can help you fulfill your potential, a process of emphasizing your power because you are personally accountable, as intuitive as intellectual, and take responsibility for your actions and choices (this is a great definition for creativity, too).

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