Somatic Coaching is the new Mindset Coaching

But it isn’t the full picture.

Marie Groover, CEO & Founder

Remember when mindset was all the rage?

I remember reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and smugly attributing my own success to the way that I had trained my mind to engage with the world and approach problems. It was glaringly obvious to me that one’s mindset was indeed crucial to not only one’s success, but really to one’s entire experience of the world.

I’ve since come to learn that mindset is important, but it isn’t everything. In this journal article we will explore what mindset coaching is, introduce somatic coaching as another tool to add to the belt, and talk about why both are fundamental to meaningful transformation in personal and team development.

What is Mindset Coaching?

Mindset coaching teaches us that our beliefs (often subconscious) influence our thoughts, that our thoughts dictate our feelings, and that our feelings catalyze our actions. And it says that if we can master our beliefs and our thoughts (master the mind), that we can take a new level of control in our lives — living and working intentionally, meeting goals and accomplishing great feats with new levels of focus and alignment.

Mindset coaching introduces tools like limiting belief work, cognitive behavioral techniques, time-line therapy, neuro-linguistic progamming, hypnotherapy and more.

It’s proven to be highly effective across the board of applications in career, executive, team, life and relationship coaching.

What is Somatic Coaching?

Where mindset coaching focuses on the mind itself, primarily rooted in thought patterns that influence feelings and behaviors, somatic coaching focuses on the body and bodily sensations to reprogram thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Somatic coaching is the tuning in and the tracking of sensations within the body. These sensations can be physical, emotional, mental (perceived), and experiencial (memories, or a combination of physical, emotional and mental). Somatic coaching shows us that the insights we gain through tuning in and tracking our bodily sensations are often meaningful and crucial in the unblocking of self-sabotage, unhealthy habits and patterns, limiting beliefs and overall energies associated with trauma, harm, or life experiences.

Like our minds, our bodies keep track of and store information throughout our lived experience. This information, or programming, unconsciously influences our behavior, mindset, and way of being in the world (within our careers, relationships, teams, families, etc.).

Somatic coaching is an emerging field that utilizes tools such as breathwork, movement, body scanning, and more, to help individuals obtain greater results in life, career, relationship, and beyond via the reprogramming and clearing out of stored bodily information.

Why We Need Both:

In my experience, mindset can only take us so far. The deeper I travel down the road of human development (self-help, personal development, team building, team development, executive coaching, etc.), the more cases I observe where mindset is both a tool and a blocker.

When you learn how to reframe the mind as a means for achieving a goal, you also learn how to justify or reframe just about anything. Because human beings are dualistic creatures, mindset work can feed cognitive dissonance and breed confusion or lack of clarity, when there are conflicting beliefs or feelings within the subconscious.

While mindset work helps us to access the subconscious, the body is a more direct and efficient access point. Bodily sensations do not lie to us, whereas the mind can be deceiving.

When you combine the two techniques (mindset + somatic coaching), you unlock new levels of potential and gains through safety, efficiency, and clarity.

This is particularly important in the world of business, where so many conflicting beliefs and experiences rule the mental space and compartmentalization often falls short.

Additionally, somatic work helps us to reorient in safety, which results in a deeper level of connection to self and to others that cannot be obtained simply by working with the mind.

Examples where a combination of somatic and mindset coaching helped to eradicate inner conflict and unblock new potential in individuals and teams*

• Tonya, a senior leader at a large fortune 100 company, was holding the belief that all systems were rigged against her, based on a childhood experience. Throughout her life and career, evidence that fueled this belief triggered a recurrent unconscious experience in her body. Without being aware of it, she was replaying an old story over and over again through new scenarios and situations, resulting in resistance to her responsibilities as a leader, for fear of harming others like her. Accessing this awareness through bodily sensations allowed her to eradicate a story that was no longer serving her, and that was ultimately keeping her from leading authentically and effectively.

• Rebecca, a service-based entrepreneur, held a belief about sales that resulted in a stagnant business. Having grown up witnessing unethical sales practices at her dad’s used car lot, she vowed to never get into sales for a living. When she launched her business, every time she pitched her offers, she felt her throat close up and her voice dried out. Even though she believed in the work she was bringing to the world, she felt like a bad person for trying to make an actual sale. Through a mixture of somatic and mindset coaching, she was able to make sense of her experience and clear out the programming that kept her static in her business.

• Edison managed a team of 8 brilliant engineers, all of which held conflicting beliefs about various aspects of business and leadership. Because subconsciously they were all on different pages, they would individually sabotage various aspects of the development cycle, creating an experience for Edison that felt like pulling teeth (thus also shaping Edison’s beliefs and bodily sensations around what it means to be a manager or a leader). Before tapping into these beliefs through somatic practice and a limiting belief workshop, Edison was ready to throw in the towel on management, and two members of the team were actively seeking new positions as well. After becoming aware of what was really at play, the team was able to work more openly and effectively, producing a genuinely meaningful and fulfilling work experience.

Where to begin:

In our day to day experience, especially in the realm of remote work, we are very much in our heads as opposed to our bodies. Therefore, a great place to begin is simply with the introductionary somatic team experience - Somatics at Work. It’s a 60-90 minute experience for a team or organization to re-orient the self in the body, to establish a basis for safety in the workplace, among other individuals, and for sourcing the clarity and connection that we often miss in our regular interactions.

Another great offering to explore is Beliefs in Action. This is a half to full day working session and team experience to uncover the non-supportive unconscious beliefs held in the mind and body, and to empower your team in reprogramming what may have been holding them back. This is an inspiring, reinvigorating experience that will leave your team excited for the future together and with a new sense of meaning at work.

If you’d like to partner with Essential Teams in any of this work, submit an inquiry here. We would be beyond thrilled to hear from you.

*The examples above are but snippets of the full stories, thus removing much of the nuance in each scenario. As this combination of coaching suggests, there is always more than meets the eye (or the ear) to every story. While combining somatic and mindset coaching can be a powerful inquiry and tooling for many a problem, I am not suggesting that this is a blanket tool or solution for any and all coaching or therapeutic matters.