Coaching for deep transformation

Becoming your own healer, leader and teacher with Psychophonetics

The purpose of 21st Century psychology is not the correction of psycho-pathology back to normalcy – but the transformation of all life challenges into opportunities for spiritual development”Y.T.

The idea of coaching and the idea of deep psychological transformation are usually a contradiction: coaching is considered by-and-large to be a short term intervention for improving performance in some field of life or work, intended for very functional people who want to be more successful; on the other hand the psychological intervention required for deep transformation is normally called psychotherapy: it is assumed to be long term, often open-ended therapeutic process, intended for people who are troubled in some area of their life, and creating deep relationship between practitioner and client. These popular notions are hard to change, even though many coaches intend to go deep and many psychotherapists intend to improve performance in relatively short term.

It is the nature of the human soul to evolve. From a certain point of view the healthy human soul is the evolving human soul, even when it goes through challenges and crisis on its way to the next level of its own evolution; The unhealthy human soul is the one that is stagnant, even if from the outside it looks and function well.

The process of soul creation is on-going. We are busy developing the human soul and its various expressions from generation to generation and during the life-time of every individual. Our ever-changing civilization, culture, economy and ways of life are evidence that we are consciously changing psychologically – while our bodies stay the same for thousands of years. Our work, family life, relationships, technology, economy, politics, education, communication – they change continuously in front of our eyes.

The changes do not come from nature, they come from us, from our ever-evolving soul life, both individually and collectively. Human civilization changes because people change

It is undeniable that human beings evolve, but who can claim that he/she knows what a healthy human soul acts and looks like?

No one can do it from the outside any more.

It is still evolving, and because the next level of human soul development has never happened before – there is nothing and no one to compare it with. A soul crisis at any point of individual and social development is not necessarily a health crisis. It could very well be a threshold between one level of soul development to the next one.

The perfect prototype of a healthy soul cannot exist because the soul is still in evolution.

If change and development is human’s essential nature – assisting it consciously and methodically is justified, but coaching and psychotherapy are dealing with this challenge in very different ways.

It is good to remember that there are at least 1,000 known forms of psychotherapy methods, and there would be at least as many forms of coaching methods in the world today, therefore no definition and no characterisation can do justice to all of them.

While the terms coaching, counselling, psychotherapy, clinical psychology and training for personal development are each being used in a huge variety of ways and often overlapping with each other – some broad definitions still apply.

“Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance“[1].

Psychotherapy is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “treatment of disorders of the mind or personality by psychological methods”, or: “Psychotherapy is the informed and intentional application of clinical methods and interpersonal stances derived from established psychological principles for the purpose of assisting people to modify their behaviours, cognitions, emotions, and/or other personal characteristics in directions that the participants deem desirable” by the America Psychological Association.

[1] Passmore, Jonathan, ed. (2016) [2006].

Excellence in Coaching: The Industry Guide

——–

Coaching was used from 1830 as a name for helping Oxford students to pass exams, and from 1861 in sport training. Only from the 1980 onwards it has been used in the broader sense that prevails today to indicate the process of conscious improvement of life and performance in a whole variety of fields: life coaching and executive coaching, health coaching and fitness coaching, diet coaching and marriage coaching, sexual coaching and breast-feeding coaching, to name a few.

None of them is expected to last for long or to create dependency on the practitioner, which traditional psychotherapy was expected to do. Coaching is intended as a short-term training for improving one’s performance from ordinary to excellent;

Psychotherapy is intended as a long-term process for deep change from some kind of dysfunction back to normalcy or optimal. Psychotherapy is considered to deal with the depth of the soul, starting from some kind of pathology, with the danger of creating dependency.

Coaching is considered to enable improved performance in some area of life or work, starting from normal functioning, with the danger of shallowness.

Is it possible to create a methodical combination between the two ?

As the motto above expresses – I believe that this is the future direction for the development of modern psychology, psychotherapy, clinical psychology, coaching, counselling, personal training and even psychiatry.

I will use Psychophonetics as an example of a range of methods of personal development and change who attempt to synthesise the best attributes of both, coaching’s performance improvement with psychotherapy depth and transformation.

I am well aware that there are many other methods of personal development that aspire to combine these competencies both philosophically and practically, but I speak on what I know well as a professional practitioner.

Psychophonetics is intended mostly for normal to highly functional people who wish to realise more of their human potential in their life and work, as well for people who wish to recover from past and present limitations.

Twenty years ago while I was practicing Psychophonetics psychotherapy at the Melbourne Therapy Centre, the leading Anthroposophical Medicine clinic in Australia, I decided to give my work another name: ‘Psycho-Development’.

The soul of most people is not sick, it is driven by a healthy intrinsic aspiration for further development. That can be professionally assisted.

What makes it possible for Psychophonetics to be a combination of the competencies of coaching and of deep transformation is its ability to engage deep dimensions of human intelligence: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, body awareness, gesture-movement, visualization and the sounds of the universal human alphabet.

• Its process is designed for empowering the client to take responsibility for and to take charge of the purpose, the direction, the meaning and the intensity of the session.
• It supports the client independent self-awareness that leads to self-improvement, which he/she can take home with them and continue.
• It is a personal training in becoming one’s own healer, leader and teacher for life

What enables Psychophonetics (and similar modalities) to become Coaching for Deep Transformation includes its philosophical, ethical, methodical, structural and practical dimensions:

Philosophically Psychophonetics’ attitude to human earthly life is that it is fundamentally a course learning and development, not a purpose in itself. Life and death are two components of one cycle of the soul-life which does not start at birth and does not end with death.

We choose this life for deep purposes, and even if we forgot that choice and that purpose – facing life’s challenges conscientiously can awaken in us that deep self-knowledge. We come to life potentially equipped with what it takes to fulfil its purpose, and life challenges are so many opportunities or that awakening and for that fulfilment. No real value in human life is ever wasted or lost, and both the context and the deep meaning of it is spiritual in nature

Code of ethics:

There lives a fundamental striving for the cultivation of higher consciousness, morality, freedom and love in the depth of every human soul. For the practitioner of soul-development to be of real help in that striving – a special Freedom Code of Ethics is required.

Psychophonetics code of ethics is based on 7 principals which are designed to guarantee that the counsellor assists in the realisation of the client’s own true being in his/her life – without becoming a replacement of it and too central for it.

These principles are:

1. Everyone is fundamentally equipped for the journey of their life. We can help people access and mobilise that life-equipment, but it is inherently there.
2. Independent inner guidance lives in the depth of everyone’s soul. It can be encouraged.
3. Knowledge cannot be given to people from outside. It has to be created, cultivated and discovered internally.
4. The developmental process is to be a team-work: we do not do anything to the client. We try to do something with the client.
5. Everything we do with the client is to be a practical contribution to the self-realisation of the client’s individual spirit at every step of the process. The way and the purpose are one.
6. In everything that we do in a therapeutic/developmental session we are completely accountable to an all-human dimension of morality that is greater than our personality.
7. We do with ourselves what we try to do with the client: the counsellor is committed to an on-going process of self-healing and personal development of oneself.

Methodical Empathy

We are committed to the constant development of 4 levels of empathy:

1. Clarity of understanding the client’s sharing;
2. Imaginative perception of the client’s view of their own reality;
3. Hearing the inner voice of the client’s human experience;
4. Intuitive understanding of the deepest intentions, aspirations and meaning of the client’s spirit in their own life. The whole educational process of becoming a Psychophonetics practitioner is dedicated to that development.

Session’s structure

In every meeting the topic presented by the client is the starting point for a Methodical Empathic conversation leading to the formation of the Wish by the client. The Wish expresses a consciousness higher and broader than ordinary daily consciousness, and it becomes the over-all direction of the following process. Through the Wish the client is being appointed as the actual director of the process

Action Phase

Following the formation of the Wish – an actual moment of lived-experience from recent time will be chosen by the client, which exemplifies the presented challenge. With the use of Active Sensing, Gesture, Visualisation and Sounds the client will Enter that experience again, by choice, and will Exit from it, spontaneously visualise it, identify the internal characters who unconsciously conducted that moment of life (and many other such moments), and make conscious choices of the interaction and of the further development of these internal characters, in light of the established Wish.

In that process the client becomes the play-writer, the director and the actor of the drama of their own life.

Desired changes are invented and tried up in safe ‘laboratory conditions’ to be implemented in one’s actual life.

Home-Work

What the client did in the safety of the session will be summarised and given as Homework for the client to take home with them and keep developing and implementing in their ordinary life.

In this way the dynamics of the therapeutic/developmental session will continue through the conscious conduct of one’s normal life, both personally and professionally, enabling life itself to become an on-going process of conscious personal development and healing

The combination of the above philosophical, ethical, methodical, structural and practical elements makes Psychophonetics into a method of Psycho-Development, the combination of coaching and of deep transformation. It is an example of bridging the gap between the competencies of coaching and of psychotherapy.

In this light practical Psycho-Development is Coaching for Deep Transformation.

The healthy human soul is the evolving human soul. Y.T.

Published in Slovakia as:
Koučing pre hlbokú transformáciu
Vitalita magazine, Bratislava Slovakia.
Yehuda Tagar, April, 2021