You came to me because you needed to process your emotions and eventually come to terms with why you were sabotaging yourself. You thought that there would be more conversation, more introspection, and more untangling of your personal narrative. Instead, I now ask you to drop your personal narrative and stop talking about your emotions for a while. As your life coach, I have seen this pattern hundreds of times.
Here is the hard truth I have learned after years of coaching. Your childhood was what it was and your ex did what they did and your boss said what they said. None of that information is news to your body because your body was there for all of it. Your body already knows every single detail of your history better than your mind ever will. You do not need to drive those old highways one more time. You need to build new roads entirely. That is where somatic practices enter the conversation, and that is exactly what a skilled life coach can help you navigate.
My most stuck clients are not the ones who lack insight about themselves. They are the ones drowning in their own insights. They can trace every flaw back to a specific source and they have the perfect vocabulary for their pain. None of that understanding has changed how they actually feel when pressure mounts. The story lives in your head and the pattern lives in your body, but your head and your body do not speak the same language. A great life coach knows this distinction and works with both.
Your nervous system does not understand English or any language you use to think about your problems. It understands pressure, tension, breath, and movement. When I ask you how you feel about a difficult person, your nervous system shrugs. When I ask you what happens in your chest when you think about that person, now we are speaking the same language. Somatic practices meet your body where it actually lives, in sensation and in the subtle clench of your jaw that you forgot you were holding. This is the difference between a traditional life coach and one who practices somatically.
I used to think I was helping my clients by asking all the right questions. I was not helping as much as I believed. I was simply keeping them busy with more thinking. Being busy feels like progress, but it is not the same as real change. Real change is when your shoulders drop without you telling them to drop. Real change is when you breathe through an argument instead of exploding. That kind of change only happens when the body learns something new through somatic practices. As your life coach, I am no longer interested in keeping you busy. I am interested in real transformation.
Pause what you are currently doing and soften your eyes. Raise one question, not the question that you usually ask yourself. Do not ask about why you are such or why you have this problem with yourself. Just notice what goes on behind your throat right now. There is neither any goal nor solution here; you just notice whatever without making any judgments. This small act of noticing is a somatic practice which is neither complicated nor sophisticated but true. When you practice it enough, a change will happen since you actually quit trying to analyze yourself and started to experience yourself. Any life coach will tell you that this is where the real work begins.
I am not here to help you be more aware of yourself; I am here to assist you in living within your own body differently. It is going to take less talking and more feeling, as well as less thinking and more breathing. If this feels like an area of discomfort for you, it may mean that we are on the right track because when we are comfortable, patterns have formed and become solidified. When we are in an area of discomfort, those same patterns begin to break down. A trustworthy life coach walks with you into that discomfort rather than avoiding it.
Do you want to stop justifying and explaining yourself and really experience yourself? There are many somatic practices available to support you on this journey and I will walk with you throughout my role as your life coach. Are you ready to stop talking and start feeling? Let us begin.
Dylan Kaufman
Building coherence for a thriving future
