The Essence of the Body-Centered Coaching Method:
the 5 essential qualities &
the 13 skills and techniques

The Essential Qualities of the Body-Centered Coaching Method

Simply Being

Simply being who you are is one of the greatest assets that you bring to your relationship with clients. As you embody your authentic human ‘beingness’ through self discovery and your acceptance of self, you can fully be in a helpful and healthy relationship with your clients. As you connect with your inner resources, strengths, values and wholeness, you become more congruent, supportive and powerfully creative with your clients. It is what brings your work alive and allows you to be yourself and be with your clients in a way that is fulfilling for both of you. It is the difference between doing coaching and being a coach. When being is in place, then doing can occur in a more meaningful and creative way. Ask yourself, “Who am I being while I am doing coaching?” Relating to others from a place of simply being who you are will feel more effortless, enjoyable and energy-sustaining. This truly engenders being creative.

Being Present,  Mindful & Centered

Being with yourself and with another person involves being present to the moment by moment experience. When you are present, your compassion, intuition, curiosity and creativity are more accessible to you. As you appreciate and focus compassionately with your client, the space for insight and healing is created. Being present quiets the mind and assists you to be more patient and calm. The practice of centering brings you into balance and stillness.

Being mindful is an open, non-judgmental way of being conscious and aware of your inner self, your client, and the surrounding environment. It involves being non-attached to particular outcomes. It involves stepping back from habitual patterns and letting go of trying to make something happen. It’s about letting go and letting be. 

Reflective Presence

Reflective Presence involves the mindful awareness of your present experience – both while it is happening plus after the experience. Being reflective gives you the ability to move from reaction to creative response. Being reflective enables you to have a greater capacity for self-awareness and self-regulation. You can make healthier choices and be more attuned to your own needs and to the needs of others. This focus on self-reflective awareness for sustaining your own energy is often undervalued and yet it is the most creative and self-nourishing way to work effectively with others.

Body Wisdom

The body is a resource for learning and for creating sustainable change for yourself and others. The body is always responding to thoughts and feelings. The practice of body-centered coaching is based on the premise that the body has a natural intelligence and wisdom that can offer coaches, and consequently their clients, a new depth of learning. It involves being curious and intuitive about the language and signals the body is sending. Client interpretation of the information and the ensuing integration opens many creative pathways for both coaches and clients. You cannot talk clients out of their perspectives; the change needs to be experienced through the body.

The practice of body-centered coaching works with the inter-relationship of the internal and the external. The internal involves having your clients notice their internal experience: their body sensations and the signals and messages their body is sending. The external takes the form of body posture, gesture or changes in body position. By involving the wholeness of the body, there is more data available and the learning becomes more fully integrated.

In service to your client’s learning, you notice what is happening in your own body as well as intuitively sensing what is happening in your client’s body. You work with the body’s wisdom to better understand feelings, thoughts, perspectives, memories, intentions and intuition – the many diverse aspects of the human experience. 

Embodied Wholeness

The process of embodiment embraces the totality of body, mind and spirit to become a fully integrated person. It is about oneness and coming home to oneself.

The practice of body-centered coaching recognizes that body, mind and spirit are different aspects of your whole being, like different doorways into the same house. Sometimes your heart wants to go in one direction and your mind in another.  When you pay attention to the totality of body, mind and spirit, you listen with all parts of your being - eyes, ears, heart, soul, body, and mind – encouraging all parts to be heard and respected.  The individual parts partner with each other for the greatest good - for you, those around you and for the environment. You need to listen to your heart’s wisdom, as well as your mind.  Although the body-centered coaching method focuses on the body as an avenue for insight and learning, the reality is that you are whole persons moving toward becoming integrated people.

The Skills & Techniques of the Body-Centered Coaching Method

The Body-Centered Coaching Method is an experiential method where clients are fully involved in the process of mindful self-discovery and integration. It is used for coaching issues such as decision making, goal setting, the quest for insights and inner peace, health and well-being, the relationship with self and others and resolving conflict.

The skills and techniques that are in the “Body-Centered Coaching” chapter titles are as follows:

• Empowered Listening: As a listener, empowered listening is a way of being as a listener that has the power to impact your clients in a positive way. Your clients’ feeling of safety, their trust of self, their esteem and their potential for personal growth can be significantly affected by your level of good will, awareness and expertise as a listener.

• Contact the Storyteller, not the Story: As you become curious about the storyteller rather than the story, you begin to get a sense of the essence of the client’s experience. By acknowledging the essence, rather than the details, you provide the opportunity for the client to feel heard and understood in new ways. As you learn to use contact statements, your clients will go to a much deeper level of sharing and insight.

• Begin Within: The more you are self-aware and in touch with your body experience, the more easily you can encourage your clients to have an awareness of their mind-body-spirit inter-connection. You become more connected with your true center when you shift away from ordinary awareness to self-awareness or what I call ‘being-awareness’. By learning the skill of mindfulness and the practice of centering, you will experience more balance and stillness. By being in the present moment you will have more access your intuition. These will become client-centered teachings.

• Experimenting with Possibilities: This body-centered technique helps clients discover information that is not readily available through the intellect. It is useful for clients as they consider various options and choices. Embracing the skill of mindfulness, a client will tap into the body’s wisdom for added insight and learning. As a coach, you will learn the five step process to guide the client toward the mindful noticing of each possibility.

• Decision-making: It is important for your client to experience the “beingness” of a perspective by embodying it. Your client can ‘try on’ a number of perspectives to access their body wisdom and intuition. The body has a different way of giving needed information from its own perspective. As the coach, you will learn how to incorporate all of the information the client needs to make their decision and move forward.

• Remembering the Resource: This body-centered technique helps clients to realign with what has gone right in their lives – their resources and their accomplishments. They connect with their internal ‘natural resources’ – body, mind and spirit – and remember their resilience and strength. Remembering the resource creates a good feeling which is often accompanied by an image or symbol. It reminds clients about the part of them that can use this resource to handle the current situation. 

• Embodying Key Words: Along with empowered listening, it is important that you listen to the language your clients use. They may use language in the form of metaphors, word pictures and other words or phrases which are expressive. Often the language they use is representative of how their body is feeling and contains valuable information about how they experience the world. This technique can be used both as a way of being with a client going through a difficult situation or as a way to celebrate an accomplishment with them.   

• The Power of Beliefs: Beliefs can be empowering, encouraging limitless possibilities in our lives. OR, beliefs can be disempowering, encouraging us to settle for limited possibilities in our lives. Beliefs form patterns of thoughts or attitudes that we have about ourselves and influence how we interpret our world. They are the filters through which we respond to life - creating our reality, thereby creating our behavior. The practice of body-centered coaching offers a 7 step process for transforming disempowering beliefs and old patterns of behavior into empowering beliefs and behavior. 

• Overcoming Con-fusions – (collapsed distinctions): ‘Con-fusion’ refers to the way we have fused two things together in our mind. An example would be the idea that if we cry it means that we are weak. So, when we shed some tears, we automatically assume that it’s a display of weakness. Using hand and arm movements, this technique assists the client to separate the two ideas or concepts that they have fused together. This is based on the idea that bringing something subconscious more fully into awareness is a prerequisite for change.

• Inspired Visualization: Inspired visualizations invite the client to be sufficiently mindful to allow them to tune inward with an attitude of curiosity and non-attachment. During visualizations clients may see an image, get an impression, imagine something, have sensation in their body, have tactile sensations, hear things, taste or smell something or access their intuition. This technique is a way to momentarily suspend what the mind has made up, and allow other information to come into awareness. Often something that has not previously been thought about ‘comes into view’. 

• Moving Toward Emotions: Sometimes a client comes to the coaching session totally overwhelmed. The feelings are so strong that it’s obvious that this is the place where the coaching needs to begin. Or, strong emotions may emerge during a session. At this juncture, you may encourage clients to move toward them rather than move away from them. The client moves into their body to explore the energy of the sensations. You are not interested in intellectual insight; you are interested in having your clients experience the energy of the sensations until they come to a place of calmness and spaciousness. Then it is possible to be with the situation.   

• Embracing the Signal: ‘Embracing the signal’ is primarily an attitude.  It’s an attitude that says to our body, “I am listening. Thanks for signaling me to pay attention and to be mindful.” In body-centered coaching you get curious about physical sensations: anything from pleasure to pain.  Everything that is happening in the body can be something to become interested in; thereby assisting your clients do likewise. It also involves appreciation and giving thanks.

• Movement: Physically moving your body allows for shifts in your body’s energy. Bodies are designed to move. When you remain in one position too long, your body can start to give you signals that it’s time for you to adjust your position; to stretch or to get up and move. The same applies when your mind is ‘stuck’ on a position for too long. As you assist clients to study and embody their current position, many habitual body and thinking patterns can come into awareness. Movement is also used to help clients distinguish what they need to say “yes” to and what they need to say “no” to. There are many body movement metaphors with which you can work.

As a coach or other helping professional, you know that you make an important difference by assisting your clients to get to the heart of what really matters to them. You are being a significant witness as they move towards greater harmony in their lives. As you include the body in the coaching conversation, you will witness more sustainable change and insight with your clients.

The Body-Centered Coaching Method, developed by Marlena Field, is primarily a blend and integration of the teachings of the Hakomi Method of Psychotherapy, the coaching methods of The Coaches Training Institute and other studied modalities. It is a body-centered, somatic approach for coaches and other helping professionals such as counselors, therapists, social workers, psychologists and wellness practitioners. The practice of body-centered coaching can be done in person or over the telephone.