Systemic Coaching to support the transformation of family dynamics.
Coaching transformation of family dynamics from the inside out is at the very forefront of modern coaching methodologies.
These kinds of coaching methodologies are making a significant impact on the lives of many people worldwide.
We are InnerLifeSkills Master Coaching, and this is a short tutorial about the three significant methodologies you can add to your coaching practice to work with systemic family dynamics.
The first thing that helps is understanding how modern science, specifically quantum physics, supports and honors and validates the approach that we’re taking.
When coaching systemic transformation, it’s important to understand 21st-century quantum physics. It gives us an understanding of a reality that opens opportunities for us. It’s a way to validate and know that we are working with a field of intelligence that we can impact and are impacted by an appreciation of the quantum fields of the zero-point field, the morphogenic field.
There are many names for this field of information that we are all a part of.
We will look at one or two understandings that this has revealed that can support you in coaching family systems.
The second practical and profoundly helpful teaching is around the Shifting from Small Truth to Big Truth.
Bert Hellinger had a massive contribution to the world of psychotherapy and systemic work. He pioneered a ‘transgenerational healing’ methodology or, more popularly known as ‘family constellation work.’
We’re going to be showing you how as Master Coaches, we can incorporate some of the research and some of the insights that came out of Burt Hellinger’s work in a coaching environment and a coaching session.
We’ll also be highlighting a Four-step Systemic Coaching Method for you that all InnerLifeSkills Master Coaches learn.
It’s a methodology that you can use to work with your clients to make profound and significant shifts inside their hearts, minds, and guts around the entanglements that they experience resulting from systemic and family burdens.
Unbroken Wholeness:
It’s worth understanding that one of the key phrases to come out of quantum theory and quantum mechanics, understanding the very fabric of reality, speaks to systemic coaching work and systemic therapeutic work. This phrase is ‘Unbroken Wholeness.’
Instead of seeing the universe as independent mechanical pieces that don’t impact each other or are unrelated, the understanding is that everything is interconnected.
Science is validating that underneath all of the stuff, there isn’t stuff. There’s an emptiness. There is something beyond physical reality, a field that rises with mass-energy that has the appearance of matter. All of this has a relationship to this fabric of reality, which is an unbroken wholeness.
Why is this important to us as coaches when we work with systemic coaching?
When you start to work at a level of this systemic fabric of reality, no longer looking at clients as separate islands, you begin to appreciate that we are all interconnected.
This kind of systemic approach is important because we look beyond this little bubble that we call an apparent separate self. And we start to include an understanding of the ripples of life in the ocean of the collective consciousness.
It’s vital to understand that even generations before us have a ripple effect through their descendants. And that we might be carrying systemic burdens because of their impact.
But just as much as it can painfully impact us, there is also the remarkable gift of this work; once we work with the field, we can make ripples of healing. We can create waves of transformation.
It’s helpful to have at least some appreciation or understanding of this unbroken wholeness that the world of 21st-century science validates. It helps us to work systemically and to work with family systems, as well as organizational systems.
Shifting from Small Truth to Big Truth:
And now we look at a practical and beneficial teaching.
As mentioned earlier, we need to acknowledge the pioneer and founder of this work, which is Bert Hellinger.
We’re going to talk about a shift from the small truth to the bigger truth.
It’s helping our clients shift their perspective from focusing on the surface story to acknowledging the deeper truth.
The deeper truth is the facts, something beyond personal opinion.
It takes courage to shift from holding a small truth to surrendering to a bigger truth.
But this is where we see profound healing transformation shifts in awareness, claiming of wholeness.
And we see that our clients make significant breakthroughs in their lives when they shift from small truth to big truth.
The gift of this work is all about inner work – shifting from small to big truths inside of ourselves and facilitating that.
And we want to be guided by wisdom, self-care, and love to protect our children and honor ourselves.
4 Step Methodology:
This four-step methodology is about creating a space for our clients, where we sit with worksheets and draw, write, contemplate, inquire, and ask powerful questions.
This is a safe and professional Master Coach created space – a space of no judgment. It’s a space Master Coaches use all of their hard-earned skills to give our clients the best chance of creating massive inner transformation, breaking through inner obstacles and finding their inner wealth.
The four steps sequentially include:
- belonging,
- placement,
- burdens,
- and gifts.
Belonging:
Master Coaches learn to have conversations with our clients beyond the intellectual to include somatic awareness (checking in to how our physical body – the sensations and emotions – responds to the work we’re doing).
When some clients hear the word belonging, they may feel triggered. And the trigger may not even make sense intellectually. Still, we can rely on the body to tell us whether somebody feels like they truly belong – to life, heritage, and family systems.
Belonging does not mean agreeing.
We all have our paths to walk. We all have our truths. Belonging means it’s a deeper truth.
Being alive means you belong, that you are a part of life, and therefore you have an equal right to life itself.
When we exclude ourselves or are excluded from the river of life, we are denied.
There is a profoundly important aspect of systemic coaching and therapeutic work when we look at belonging.
Step one would be a conversation around belonging. We’d be checking in at a body level, how open we are, whether there’s a closing or whether there’s an openness to belonging.
And this is about holding a space of non-judgment to see what shows up and then to invite more belonging, to invite shifting from that small truth of the big truth to claim belonging, and to facilitate our clients claiming life and their true belonging.
Placement:
Belonging connects very beautifully into the next step; placement.
Not only is it true that we belong, but we also belong in a true place, not often, or not always a place that we choose, but a place that is factually true.
Metaphor time: my shoulder belongs where it factually is and where nature and life put it; if my elbow tries to take its place, it will also take the burdens of the shoulder. And my elbow is not equipped to take the burdens and the responsibilities of my shoulder.
Look what we do in family systems. How many of us are emotional parents to our parents? We’re not talking about looking after parents financially or having to do some of the duties of a parent if a parent is absent or incapable, et cetera. We’re talking about a shift in roles.
And this is where a conversation and an exploration around placement becomes valuable in coaching and therapeutic work.
It’s a meaningful conversation around how we might clarify and claim our true place and acknowledge the placements of family members and people that belong to a system. We can guide our clients to make adjustments in their hearts, bodies, and minds.
Sometimes placement is dislocated, out of alignment caused by trauma, out of survival, or an act of misguided love.
Burdens:
After working with placements, the profound work that we see happens when we do the inner work of giving back the burdens that don’t belong to us.
Burdens are unconscious or conscious.
We may know of them or not, but they are systemic.
We might inherit emotions.
We might inherit loyalties.
We might inherit longings.
We might inherit difficulties from several previous generations.
Suppose someone in a family system has, for example, been denied a career that they wanted; someone may be born with a longing for that exact career. It’s as if they carry the burden of that ancestor to honor and fulfill that out of love and loyalty.
Gifts:
There are, of course, gifts handed down through family systems, and that’s the fourth step.
It’s difficult to take the gifts from our systemic family systems when our hands are full of burdens.
When our hands are filled with burdens, we cannot receive the gifts, including the gifts of strength and the gifts of love.
Being able to feel love and support and the strength inside a family system is a gift that we might be denied – because we’re in the wrong place, there’s a lack of belonging, or we have taken on others’ burdens.
Summary:
There are 3 keys to offering professional Systemic Family Coaching to your coaching clients.
1) The revolutionary Science of “Unbroken Wholeness”
Be wowed by the latest scientific insights that prove how everything is interconnected. Instead of seeing our clients as separate “islands”, we see them as interconnected within their family systems.
This means that to help our clients the most, we need to work with their “system” (this doesn’t mean coaching other family members – it means shifting the family dynamic in their hearts and minds).
2) Small to Big Truth Shift (Inspired by Family Constellation Work)
This simple method helps our clients shift their perspective from focusing on the surface story to the deeper truth. And this is where you will be able to facilitate incredible change in your clients because the truth really can set us free.
3) The 4 Step Systemic Coaching Method
Guide clients through 4 liberating steps, each one more powerful than the next. First, “Belonging” to help your client claim their full sense of belonging… Then “Placement” is about putting everyone in their true place, to free love and support. Then most important (where you will see the most transformation) “Burdens” where you help your clients to hand back their known and unknown emotional burdens. And finally, “Gifts“, where you guide your client to open more fully to the gifts of life.
If this interests you, consider enrolling for our next Systemic Family Coach Certification ZOOM online course.
Spaces fill months in advance, so if Systemic Family Coach calls to you, be sure to enroll as soon as possible.
We would love to see you coaching this powerful work. Join us on Zoom for our next class, enroll here.
Enroll for our next Systemic Coaching
Twice a year we invite 15 students to join our live zoom certification courses.
