To Change Your Life is to Change Your Mind about Yourself
Just as Integrative Performance Coaching (IPC) can impel transformational change in a person’s professional life, it can also work wonders in their personal life. IPC ultimately helps people produce desired results—private or public, professional or personal. In other words, as long as someone has a compelling goal,, project, or vision, IPC can help them realize it faster and with less interference.
The potential categories for growth and improvement are unlimited; however, the clients I call changemakers often seek coaching in five areas:
- Health and Wellness
- Finance and Wealth
- Career and Mission
- Relationships
- Major Lifestyle Change
IPC has helped clients turn their dreams into realities in each of these realms. It’s important to reiterate that IPC is not the same as therapy. Its function is not to untangle mental or emotional issues. Rather, it’s about helping people transform their thinking, feeling, planning, and acting to attain meaningful outcomes—and surmount any barriers along the way.
Achieving genuine change in any of these areas is primarily an inside job, because being healthy, wealthy, fulfilled, or loved is fundamentally a matter of mindset. Before someone can change their reality in any domain, they must first change their mind about themself, about what they think is possible, and what they believe they do or don’t deserve.
Bringing Your Authentic Career Vision to Life
Career coaching is a frequent focus in IPC, because career looms large in so many people’s lives. When someone’s work-life is out of balance, it’s hard to create harmony in life period.
Unfortunately, too many people treat their careers as matters of happenstance. They settle for jobs and work-life circumstances that don’t align with their authentic selves, principles, passions, or purposes. Career is one of the last things in life that should be a left to chance. The IPC approach to career coaching focuses on making one’s career path a conscious choice and a product of design innovation. It only requires a person to invest the time to discover who they are, who they really want to be, and how they truly wish to live.
Career development has historically been approached as if it were solely a cognitive matter, solved by list-making and analysis. But the cognitive aspect of career development is not the only one and, for many people, not the most important one. Choosing or changing one’s career direction is a deeply personal, existential matter—a vision quest of learning, growth, and change. IPC supports career development in five respects that are all important and interdependent, helping each person align their thinking, feeling, visioning, learning, and acting to realize their authentic career vision.
The Natural High of Vibrant Health
IPC is informed by six powerful change-management practices that work in concert to help clients achieve peak health and wellness.
- 360° Fitness Coaching
- Meditation and mindfulness coaching
- Nutrition counseling
- Transtheoretical Model of Change (TTM)
- Motivational Interviewing (MI)
- Client-centered coaching
In applying these methods, I have seen people of all ages and initial fitness levels transform their physical body and innate wellbeing into wellsprings of vitality, power, and confidence. True wellbeing is about more than attaining a high level of physical fitness; it’s about generating the vitality for vibrant health in mind, emotion, and spirit. This quality of energy enables better performance in work and in relationships. It helps a person to become someone with an inner and outer glow who attracts, and is positive example, for others. Integrative wellness might be the most valuable asset anyone can possess. And IPC helps make it happen in ways that are fun.
Better Relationships Spell a Better Life
The IPC approach to relationship coaching helps people create positive, healthy relationships in all areas of their life. This is truly the foundation of fulfillment. In many ways, someone’s quality of life mirrors the quality of their relationships. IPC is powerful here because it supports a person’s need for improving the most important relationship of all—the one they have with themself. Sadly, this is often their most ignored relationship, yet it sets the tone for all others.
IPC helps each person create greater connectedness with friends, family, and coworkers. This comes about through building core relationship skills in such areas as communication and conflict resolution. IPC also helps people to take stock of, and step more fully into, their many relational roles, whether as a true friend, loving spouse or partner, family maker, caring parent, or organization leader. Indeed, the most critical aspects of leadership really come down to interpersonal and group relationship skills. When a person cultivates the meaning and fulfillment they experience in their relationships, they also create a positive force for change in their health, finances, career, spiritual life, and emotional intelligence.
From Financial Planner to Wealth Creator
The IPC approach to Wealth Coaching begins with redefining wealth right out of the gate. Wealth isn’t just about numbers. It’s about freedom, security, growth, and legacy. In the final analysis, it’s more a matter of mind-state than financial moves per se. I’ve coached people who have lots of money, but who aren’t wealthy within—and it shows in their health, relationships, and inner life.
IPC helps clients examine inherited financial beliefs and stories that have shaped their fiscal patterns. Patterns of scarcity and survival are more prevalent than one might think, and they don’t show up solely in people who grew up poor. It’s also critical to gain absolute clarity on where one stands financially. We all have financial strengths and weaknesses—blind spots and unknowns. But the road of wealth creation begins with honesty. It’s also critical to connect wealth to a deep emotional purpose through a Wealth Vision Quest. Turning this Vision into a stepwise, grounded plan, with finely tuned systems and metrics for continuous improvement is the crux of IPC for wealth coaching.
A true wealth creator is someone who realizes their wealth is ultimately measured by the value they give, whether in time, energy, knowledge, or money—and they freedom they experience in this giving. Ultimately wealth is not about what someone accrues. It’s about creating abundance in relationships, health, mission, wisdom, and meaning. IPC develops the knowledge, skills, abilities, habits, measures, and outlook to realize this degree of freedom.
Transformation is Inspiration in Action
IPC is an outstanding support for people facing major turning points in life, situations that literally demand transformation. People who do well in navigating such change are those who develop strength within, build solid support systems, and create effective, practical plans of action. Some areas where such transformation applies include:
- Facing retirement
- Making a major geographic move
- Recovery and rehabilitation from a major disease
- Dealing with empty-nest syndrome
- Loss of a loved one
What these situations have in common is: 1) the grief that attends loss; 2) the need to renew and recreate meaning in life; and 3) the need for a powerful plan of action that keeps dreams and goals alive. Can someone do this alone? No doubt. But it’s not easy. That’s why an IPC coach can be a vital resource to smooth the transition and help people convert passing dreams into lasting realities.
The Courage to Step Up to Change
People standing at the precipice of major change are brave souls. Transformational change takes courage, confidence, and clarity. It’s much easier to keep on going the same way, even when it doesn’t feel good. If you know someone ready to step up to a higher way of being, I hope you’ll encourage them to reach out to me. That higher road is calling them, the road of transformation. And their time has come.