Energy Coaching - The Realm of the Cool

Marshall Thurber was one of the presenters with whom I shared the stage at the 6th Annual CoachVille Conference held in Chicago in May 2006. As a trend watcher and early adopter, Mr. Thurber explained that all innovation starts out at the fringe, moves to the edge of the norm, and then becomes the cool new thing before being adopted by the mainstream. This is true of the emerging field of energy coaching which, once seen as a fringe element in the coaching profession, has recently moved its way past the edge of the norm and into the realm of the cool.

For many years I have used energy coaching as part of my coaching toolbox to help clients achieve their full potential. As a former hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner, stress management consultant, and meditation and yoga teacher, I have seen first hand the many benefits of using energy as a tool for personal evolution. My presentation at the conference, titled Leading from the future, included a number interactive activities designed to assist the audience in shifting their perspective and unlocking future possibilities by becoming more aware of how our energy affects our reality.

One of the ways I demonstrated energy coaching was through a method called dowsing. Dowsing it is an ancient tool used to locate hidden or unseen energies. Early dowsers used a divining rod to find underground water sources, a practice sometimes referred to as 'water witching'. Throughout the years, dowsing has also been used to find lost or hidden objects of all kinds. Most recently, the use of dowsing has been expanded to include detecting subtle energy fields in human beings, including thought fields.

As part of the demonstration, I called for a volunteer from the audience to come on stage and have her thoughts dowsed to ascertain the reach of her energetic field for each thought. We then dowsed several different kinds of thoughts with different energies, such as a neutral thought, a happy thought, a sad thought, and a mystery thought. The length of reach of energy measured for each thought was decidedly different. In debriefing it was noted that a negative thought decreased our volunteer's energetic reach while positive thoughts expanded it.

Many coaches now incorporate some form of energy coaching as part of their coaching tool repertoire. Whether it is 'somatic coaching' having to do with body awareness, or 'ontological coaching' dealing with being vs. doing, clients are deriving great value from experiencing these approaches as they endeavor to make changes. Personally, I have used energy coaching techniques with clients in a variety of growth areas including gaining confidence in public speaking, stepping up to a new opportunity, and developing leadership skills in the workplace.

In Walk on Water: How to Make Change Easier, I devote a section of each chapter to how to change our thinking. Making thinking visible and measurable, as I demonstrated in the dowsing experiment, is a helpful step forward in prioritizing what we will spend energy on and shifting our perspective. For those who want to be ahead of the curve and in the enviable position of the realm of the cool, becoming more aware of how we use our energy is a surefire way to manifest the future we want instead of recreating the past.

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