Practical spirituality – is learning to live in balance, being in congruence with your essential values (the values that define who you truly are). It also means being in harmony with your surroundings. It means bringing specific positive change into your own life, and being capable of being of real service to others.
Here are four keys, four distinctions that may help you understand the process of change, as well as the process of communicating change. They are based on a map of learning that is common to all of us, yet slightly different for each of us. This is a key distinction in our Buddhist Coaching.
1. Why? Why do I even need to change. Give me a reason. Inspire me. Tell me a story. Capture my imagination, so that I can begin this journey with you.
2. What? What will this involve. What will it cost me? What will I have to sacrifice? What will I have to give up? What will I gain? What will happen in a day, a week, a year … where will this journey take me?
3. How? Let’s start. Tell me, show me. Let’s do this now together. Show me how. Talk me through it.
4. What if? Now that I have learned something about this let me ask a question. What if … ? Suppose I did it this way … or that way …?
Some models of change dig into your history and presuppose that it is important to know the causes, reasons, and conditions that may have limited your options for change. That is a “why” modality.
Have you ever met someone who was interested in the theory, history, and background much more than in the practicalities of how to do something? For example someone who had learned all about how to make something, yet never got around to actually doing it? That’s a “what” person.
Have you ever been at a lecture and listened to people who ask purely hypothetical questions before they have absorbed, or started to put into practice the subject of the lecture. Those would be “what if” people.
The best models for change, and a key component to the work we do with Mindfulness Coaching is “how.” It means that our prime focus is specifically on helping you, and providing the leverage for you, to implement change. Mindfulness Coaching is all about how you change (thoughts, actions, habits) - so that you can, so that you do.
