Coach Approach Blog

You've seen me write before about practices that make coaching a spiritual experience. Today, I want to share three more of the practices that make Awaken's way of coaching so deep and life-changing.

When I first started coaching, it shook my world entirely, as I've talked about more deeply in my memoir, Holy Rebellion: Waking up from Religious Abuse. I had spent the first decades of my life in a patriarchal, hierarchical worldview built on success and failure, right and wrong, and other black-…

Transformational coaching certification trains you to work at a different level than most ordinary coach training. Rather than teaching you to help clients set goals and build action plans, it trains you to help people recognize who they already are, beneath the roles, fears, and self-concepts they've accumulated. With that recognition, real and lasting change follows on its own.

"I've spent well over a decade training hundreds of coaches, and I've watched what happens when a program teaches te…

The coaching industry is at a crossroads. For years, we have been obsessed with cognitive behavioral markers, word-based frameworks, and the neat, tidy architecture of solving problems through language.

But guess what? AI can now do the word-based stuff. If all you do in your coaching is word-based, which is what a lot of the coaching education industry if now doing, as they continue to "teach to the test," you're moving toward irrelevance at top speed.

Awaken has always gone deeper. We believ…

The coaching industry is in the middle of a real shift. The ICF is introducing a new standard for mentor coaches, the Mentor Coach Specialization, which will be required for registry as a mentor coach in 2027. Coaches at every stage are asking the same question: what does this mean for me?

Here's what we believe it means: freedom, not restriction.

For years, credentialing has pushed coaches toward memorizing behavioral markers and treating a checklist as the goal. We understand why. When you'r…

Why Performance Coaching Falls Short

Some people think coaching is about doing more: setting sharper goals, pushing harder, keeping clients on track, and measuring progress at every turn. That kind of coaching can look productive on the surface. When I first started in 2009, I was stunned by how quickly people could reach their goals in just a few sessions.

But in today’s AI-driven world, where apps and algorithms can already remind us of our goals and track our steps, that kind of performance…

I was sitting on the edge of the Rhine the other day, on the French side, watching a duck drift smoothly across the water. It was having a ball! Sometimes it let itself be swept downstream in the strong current, other times it skimmed above the water upstream to play its game again, and sometimes it just relaxed in a quiet space by the shoreline.

It struck me how often people use that old image of the "duck syndrome" to describe their own lives. They imagine themselves as frantic paddlers, hidi…

When you look at the landscape of coaching today, the environment can feel as though you are being pushed into a corner. You have your credentialing requirements, your hours to track, and an ever-evolving set of standards to meet. Some people might tell you that the path to your ACC or PCC is simply about memorizing behavioral markers and locking you safely within a predetermined line.

At Awaken, we hold a distinct vision. We feel that an over-reliance on rigid behavioral markers is jeopardizin…

Some people spend their lives trying to fix every messy part of their world before they step fully into their leadership. They look at the external systems they're in, see the friction around them, and the immediate default setting is to jump straight into trying to change the world.

That is certainly the way I used to live. It created a heavy burden of perpetual striving. I felt that, with each success, the boxes just kept getting bigger. I even had a recurring nightmare that I had to run fast…

I've been thinking a lot lately about how rarely people inhabit their lives and the subtle ways they distance themselves from the present moment.

At Awaken, we're becoming more and more aware of what it means to be fully alive, and for me, it always comes back to being fully present, here and now, and noticing the exact moment I begin to use a story or a framework to filter my experience.

Even the language I use is telling. Do I believe myself to be carrying a client, or caring for them? Do I …

Expanding Time Is Like Expanding Love: How to Expand Your Day and Your Heart with Slowness

Some people have become obsessed with saving time. They listen to podcasts at 2x speed, eat standing up, and treat their calendars like a battlefield. I remember those days!

One afternoon, I had two phones in my two hands and a computer on my lap, attempting to set up a 20-minute meeting between a CEO in France and the US Vice President. The meeting was two months away, and finding a 20-minute window to …