Gloria Walker Coaching offers individualized confidential coaching to help you:
Better navigate personal or professional interpersonal communication issues
Improve how you interact with yourself
Engage with yourself and others more mindfully
Current course offerings are ACT for Coaches (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and NVC for Coaches (Nonviolent Communication), with both courses being approachable, interactive, and thorough introductions to their respective subject matter. Both courses are designed and facilitated from a coach specific context that takes into consideration the boundaries and ethical limitations we, as coaches, face.
ACT FOR COACHES
The ACT toolkit is extensive, robust, and flexible, which makes it ideal for use in coaching. It can form the framework for a coaching session, or you can pick and choose specific tools and techniques as needed. It incorporates a healthy dose of mindfulness and body awareness techniques to complement its focus on accepting thoughts and committing to values and courses of action.
In focusing on deeply held values and desired behaviors and outcomes, ACT allows us to identify when we’re thinking thoughts and acting in ways that move us away from these values. It then takes the process full circle by teaching strategies and techniques for staying focused on the ways we move towards them.
When we want to create lasting change in our lives, we need more than thought work, we need an anchor to remind us why we want the change. Values-based goalsetting and committed action to those goals creates this anchor and an effective way to generate accountability. Recognizing foreseeable barriers and obstacles then allows us to plan ahead and not get thrown off when they arise. Add in mindfulness and self- kindness and you ensure that all of this is done in a kind and gentle way.
When we have trouble gaining distance from painful thoughts, negative self-talk, or self-judgment, ACT has a plethora of tools to help us see past the thought, gain perspective, and move forward in a way that matters to us leaving us feeling empowered rather than powerless.
NVC FOR COACHES
NVC is an approach to communication that is empathy-based and has at its heart the goal of meeting needs and finding cooperative solutions to problems or conflicts. We can view it as providing guidance for both how we communicate with each other as well as how we communicate with ourselves.
From this perspective, NVC is useful in coaching for both the client and the coach by providing valuable tools and insights for interpersonal communication and how we engage with ourselves and our own negative self-talk.
NVC helps clients work through interpersonal issues and conflicts by focusing on meeting needs in an empathetic and nonjudgmental way without creating defensiveness. While it's not just about the "tricky" situations, since its principles can be applied to everyday conversations, it does particularly well when there is an issue or conflict that needs to be resolved, whether at home or work.
NVC is also a useful approach to help clients better engage with themselves. It provides a way to practice self-empathy by identifying painful or intrusive thoughts and feelings and relating them to unmet needs. As such, NVC is essentially a form of thought work when applied to negative self-talk.
As coaches, NVC helps us to communicate more effectively with our clients by ensuring we are consciously coming from a place of empathy and observation rather than evaluation and judgment, which can lead to the client becoming defensive and shutting down rather than to the insights they could otherwise gain from their work with us.
Finally, by doing our own work in the form of self-empathy we ensure we're not bringing our own issues and biases into conversations with clients and thus creating barriers to meeting their needs. Plus, there's always the added personal development bonus of being able to apply NVC's principles to our own lives!