The Role of Spirituality in Coaching

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"If you can discover one spiritual fact, it will change your life forever." -Syd Banks

When I first started out on my journey as a coach, I was hesitant to share my personal understanding of spirituality. I was afraid of what people would say if I used words like God, or Spirit in a coaching conversation; so I did my best to keep the conversations grounded in the physical world. I spoke with clients about goals, and we developed strategies to meet those goals. I used techniques and processes to motivate and inspire people, while also holding them accountable.  And yet, I never really addressed the human spirit directly.  After all, peoples spiritual beliefs are their own and who was I to question them?  However, I had begun to notice that this type of "performance coaching" had only been yielding moderate results. Sure, frequently I was able to help people achieve their goals, but that never seemed to make any significant difference in their lives.

I went on this way for some time, until I had some personal insights into my own spiritual nature. Those insights took me from an intellectual understanding of spiritual principles, to having a personal experience of transformation. It was then that everything changed for me, and my coaching was never the same again.  I stopped being a "performance coach" over night. I literally could not coach that way any more even if I had wanted to. My work was now firmly grounded in my new found spiritual understanding, and it has only deepened since then.

Now, in order for this to be useful for you, I need to address the question: what is spirituality?  This word can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so let me clarify what I mean by it. One of my favorite definitions is one of the most simplistic: waking up to the truth of who we are; no more, no less.  It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion, and it's far more practical than most people realize. If you want to dive a bit deeper into this conversation, check out some of my other articles like Are We a Body or a Mind?.

So, what does this particular kind of spirituality have to do with coaching? In my experience... everything.

Most coaches, are Performance Coaches.  This is how I was originally trained, and it is simply helping people to get what they want, without being directly involved in the getting. These coaches are catalysts, creative spark plugs, motivators, and strategists.  And while this can be extremely useful in helping people achieve the goals that they set for themselves, it rarely helps people to have a more wonderful experience of life across the board. Of course the client will make changes, but they are almost always temporary, and usually go away shortly after the client stops working with the coach.  This also tends to breed a form of dependence which I personally always found a bit icky.

There are a handful of spiritual principles that are pretty reliably absent from this form of coaching.  Either the coach doesn't know about them, or doesn't really understand them in any meaningful way. These principles are "constant properties" of the Mind or Spirit(I use these terms interchangeably).

Here is a summary of some of the spiritual principles from which I coach and teach, they are incredibly simple, but often very difficult to fully or even partially grasp. Take your time with them, open your mind, and you just might understand them for yourself.

Spiritual Principle # 1: Our entire experience of life, is created within our own minds via the forces of Thought and Consciousness.  Let this sink in for just a moment.  There are some pretty significant implications to this principle which I can't even begin to do justice here.  Let's suffice it to say that, we've been taught that our experience of life comes from outside us; from other people, places, events, and circumstances; essentially, the actions we take, and the things that happen to us. This is not true, and we have all of us been taught incorrectly.

We have developed habits of thought that make it appear as though our experience is coming at us from the material world, but that is an illusion. We live a psychological existence without even knowing it.  None of us are born with a user manual for how the human experience gets created, but if we had been, this first principle would be in it, front and center.

If you don't understand this principle as a coach, you are innocently going to mislead people into thinking that the answers they are looking for, are indeed "out there" in the world.  You will in essence, be helping to perpetuate a lie which says... "If I can just get really skilled at getting what I want in life, then I will hold the key to happiness." Every person who believes this lie(almost everybody on the planet, whether they know it or not), is going to struggle because of it. As a result, most coaches are inadvertently serving to keep people looking for their happiness, peace of mind, and well-being where it is not!

Spiritual Principle # 2: Human beings can think, and believe anything! This is a wonderful creative capacity of the mind, that we have mistakenly used to imprison ourselves. This power allows us to take thoughts and ideas that are fundamentally false, and turn them into what appear to be gospel truths. If you don't believe me, go look up the modern day flat earth society, or the group of people who deny the Holocaust ever happened. These people aren't crazy, they are simply using the infinite capacity of the mind to delude themselves in a much less subtle way then the rest of the population does.

These delusions are known as false beliefs or false idols.  Instead of using thought to create and extend ourselves, we end up using it to limit who we are.  We attempt to make something that is unconditional, conditional.  These thought conditions are placed on our own happiness.  We then forget that we were the ones that created them, and simply go to work to fulfill these completely fabricated conditions. Some very common ones that you might recognize include(but are not limited to): not having enough money, not an attractive enough partner, not being treated with "respect", not being loved enough as a child, not having a good enough job, not having a romantic partner, or having a physical disability.  This list could be infinitely long, because we have an infinite capacity for new thought.  Unfortunately, this also means we have an infinite capacity to create false conditions, believe them wholeheartedly, and then act as if they are true... ultimately wasting most of our time.

We have been taught to believe by a very well meaning but incorrect world, that to experience a deep and profound sense of well-being, we first have to meet certain conditions in the world. This is a lie. And yet, most of the world experiences this as true, because of the power of the mind to deceive itself.  And yet, the problem isn't just that we can deceive ourselves, it's that we don't know that we have that capacity, so we go on living our lives,  assuming that:   Belief = Truth.

This ability to experience something "as if" it were true, is the very reason why people experience a sort of "imitation happiness" when they fulfill their very own made up conditions.  Our mind tells us, meet this specific condition and you'll be happy; and therefore we experience it as somewhat true.  The problem is, a new condition or idol is very quickly created by us to replace the old one. There is a part of the mind dedicated entirely to this process; I call it the condition factory.

Think about it, have you ever struggled your way to a goal that you thought was instrumental to your happiness or peace of mind, only to get right back to work on another bigger and better goal soon after?  So long as we are stuck in this cycle, we never fully experience the peace of mind that we believe achieving our goals will get us? This is the condition factory hard at work.

We were simply never taught that these conditions on our well-being are made of our own thinking, not brick and mortar. Without understanding this as a coach, we might be able to help people get what they "think" they want, but we will never be able to lead them to the kind of lasting peace and love that they are truly looking for.

Spiritual Principle # 3: Every single human being has innate well-being and peace of mind. This is a principle feature that is woven into the very fabric of who we are as spiritual beings. You might even say it is a gift from God.  Our spiritual well-being is quite literally, unconditional. Nothing has to be done, accomplished, or obtained to experience this innate health.   I have found this to be 100% true, no exceptions.

Here's the catch though; because of the first and second principles, we can think and deceive our selves into believing that there are very real conditions, and therefore we will cut ourselves off from the flow of who we are. Not in any permanent way, but it is as if we had pulled a wool over our eyes, and thought the sun had been destroyed. If we think and believe that we are fundamentally flawed, broken, and scarred beings, we will consequently have that experience.

The good news is, there is nothing that has the power to alter, change or damage our innate health. Innate means it is built in and cannot be taken away under any circumstance. We, as human beings, have simply deceived ourselves into dreaming a terrible dream that we are separate, lonely, miserable, broken people... and there is no hope for us. Or, perhaps we think there is hope for us, but it will only come when we have met all the conditions imposed on us by the big bad world. All of this is but a dream; and fortunately, what happens in a dream, matters not. The dream can have no lasting impact on the dreamer. Everyone has the potential to wake up tomorrow from a life of misery and be happy.  The only thing there is to do, is to recognize that we are dreaming, and we will begin the process of awakening.

If you as a coach, don't know that every human being has innate mental health, then you might be tempted to treat people as broken and needing fixing; instead of spending your time pointing people toward the truth of who they are.

I can't conceive of any coaching or teaching relationship that supports people to transform their lives, in which these principles are not present.  Other practitioners will likely use different words to describe these principles because the words themselves are meaningless.  It is the truth behind the words that makes all the difference in the world. All you have to do is see them for yourself, and it will change your life forever.

With all my love,
Tyler