The practice of transpersonal coaching can be considered a holistic and integrative approach to life coaching.
What is life coaching?
Life coaching involves a collaborative relationship between a coach and a client that aims to help the client achieve fulfilling results in any area of life. This form of coaching may use generative psychological skills to serve the client’s needs, values and visions, while supporting them in overcoming the obstacles that prevent them from reaching and sustaining their goals.
A coach is someone who helps you to achieve your desired outcomes, who provides you with unconditional support, who identifies your strengths and helps you build upon them. You are assisted to find strategies to deal with your unique challenges and develop creative solutions.
Why hire a coach?
The coaching process provides people with new perspectives and resourceful attitudes which enable them to deal more effectively with challenges. Coaching may enhance creative thinking, decisiveness, and confidence, for example. It may promote effectiveness and productivity while enabling people to elicit value driven goals and compelling strategies for their achievement. Coaches can assist individuals and groups to improve performance, interpersonal skills, and workplace satisfaction. Coaching aims to cultivate the kind of self-motivation that may generate momentum for change. It is a process that mines potential and self-esteem, builds character and celebrates progress.
What is transpersonal coaching?
Transpersonal coaching is the specialized practice of coaching that takes a holistic and integrative approach to supporting client growth and potential transformation. This is achieved through an individually tailored process, which is person-centred, and which may, for example, involve helping the client to identify what provides them with a sense of meaning and purpose. The focus may then revolve around supporting the client to find ways of purposefully expressing this in their work, their personal life and within relationships.
Transpersonal coaching draws on the transcendent quality of consciousness to shift the client from an ego-centred focus on problems, towards an eco-centred (expansive and interconnected) awareness, drawing on the principles of nature and spiritual wisdom, but in a pragmatic and solution focussed manner that aims to empower people in the contexts of their everyday lives. Transpersonal coaching can be considered as a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual approach to coaching that may help clients resolve issues concerning the body, mind, relationships, and spirituality.
Why hire a transpersonal coach?
The role of the transpersonal coach is to support the client to develop a more interconnected sense of self and, in so doing, to help the client access the necessary resources (social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual) with the aim to help fulfil identified goals and, if the client so desires, support them more broadly in realising more of their potential. The skills employed by transpersonal coaches include the cultivation of practices which may evoke peak experiences, recognising that such states can bring forward insights that have meaning and practical applications in the area where the client wants to resolve a challenge. Clients learn how to embody their insights and anchor their new perspectives into the relevant contexts of their life.
The primary means of intervention on the part of the transpersonal coach involves holding a liminal space (open, receptive, and emergent), walking the client through a transformative passage of questioning and expansion, while helping the client to reintegrate new, widened, and resourceful perspectives into their lives.
The following articles further describe the value of transpersonal coaching and how it works:
- Transpersonal Coaching – an introduction
- Coaching the Whole Person
- The Transpersonal Coaching Model
- Transformation in Transpersonal Coaching
- The Healing Potential of Transpersonal Coaching
- Transpersonal Psychology – New Perspectives
- Mindfulness, Bodyfulness and Open Awareness
- Open Awareness (a transpersonal coaching skill)
- The mindful remedy for stress and burnout
- Bouncing back from burnout
- Ecological Coaching and Leadership
- The Evolution of Coaching Psychology
Read all about it in a comprehensive, interactive, and practical guidebook for coaches at all levels, including anyone interested in learning the transpersonal approaches to coaching:
The Transpersonal Coaching Handbook
Become a Certified Transpersonal Coach:
Transpersonal Coaching Courses – online & onsite
By Jevon Dangeli, MSc Transpersonal Psychology Coach & Trainer
