Useful Steps in Personal Transformation

1. Have you suffered enough to find your inspiration to evaluate and change your life?
   
   
2. Are you motivated to increase happiness - not just to talk or complain about it - rather to set specific goals and take concrete steps?
   
   
3. Choose between short-term relief and lasting solutions. Long-term solutions will usually require changes in lifestyle ... and relationships.
   
   
4. Discuss your problems, solutions and goals, and create a timetable. Ensure that your final goals are EXACTLY what you want. Each step should be solution oriented, and provide feedback about effectiveness and consequences.
   
   
5. Explore the consequences of any change in your relationships to your family, friends and co-workers. While a few people prefer dependent, codependent or symbiotic relationships, most people want to reduce suffering. See Dependent Relationships
   
   
6. We help people resolve guilt, mentor damage or depression. This is time to check your relationships - especially with your families and past partners. Are you "frozen" into family chaos? We help people defrost old habits, clarify relationships and find peace.
   
   
7. Find and stabilize your experience of integrity as a basis for long-term transformation. Then you can restructure relationships, resolve traumatic memories and choose inspirational role-models.

We help people find solutions for neurotic and addictive behavior, such as compulsions, addictions, relationship habits and emotional problems. We can also help people alleviate some psychosomatic [1] symptoms, which occasionally seems to accelerate the healing of disease [2].

We start with an interview in which we discuss goals and problems. During this interview we and our clients determine whether our coaching is appropriate for them and their goals. People who know their goals, complaints, motivation and maturity can better decide if they are ready and willing to change, and whether to invest time with us.

Resolve Crisis

People in a crisis may be unable to focus on their goals. People in crisis (e.g.: divorce; war; chronic pain; unwanted pregnancy; unemployment; etc) often behave childishly and cannot focus on long-term goals. Coaching people who are preoccupied with a crisis usually requires that we try to help those people sort out crisis first - or attempt to refer those people to appropriate professionals.

Relationship Diagnosis

We help people examine their emotions and relationships, and the structure of relationship problems. Then they can better integrate our coaching into their goals and planning. If they have have guilt from betraying, abandoning or hurting people, they may sabotage their success and depress their happiness until they atone for the behavior or discover their guilt to be a mistake (e.g. I still feel guilty for leaving my (inappropriate) first girlfriend years ago).

If damaged by previous mentorship, or if their life lacks sense, transformational changework would be difficult at best until they first resolve any mentor damage or depression.

Goal Diagnosis: Recognize Consequences & Objections

Motivated people can define their goals while identifying and resolving their objections to their own success. As they sort out your objections, they can improve or fine-tune your goals. (Otherwise - simple changework could take months instead of minutes.) For example, many people want to be happy - but have inner conflicts, limiting beliefs or identity issues about achieving this goal.

Mother - Son Problems . Father - Daughter Issues . Children who Hate Dad

1. Resolve Guilt and Conflicts

We perceive that guilt is one type of conflict, and that resolving a conflict is often a step towards integrity. Few conflicts are simple decisions - more often a conflict is just the tip of a complex emotional iceberg. (See this transcript about coaching a person with complex conflict).

2. Resolve Identity Loss

Some people lose part of their sense of identity during abuse or trauma. We call this identity loss. They may identify with other people (identification). They may show identifications by sentences such as: "I have always ..." or "Since I was born ...". (We teach resolving identity loss in Systems 6.)

An experience of integrity seems to be a natural result of recovering true or original identity, aligning personality parts, and resolving identity loss. People can then evaluate their dependencies and codependent bonds, and the consequences of ignoring these bonds. Unwanted bonds (E.g. “My feelings about my ex-partner seem to stop me seeking a new partner”) are changed. People learn to express honesty, candor and integrity within their relationships, see Psychobiology of Soul.

3: Relationship Bonds

We use the term relationship bonds to refer to feelings of connection that often show up as fixed limiting beliefs. People bonded to past partners (see emotional incest) or missing siblings, for example, may feel unable to live life fully. We help people dissolve unwanted bonds.

4: Assimilate Trauma

Strong emotions that can sabotage important goals are usually associated with traumatic experiences  . (E.g. “I am overwhelmed with sadness when I remember that event.”) The sources of such emotions often include abuse. We help people rationalize or assimilate trauma, after which they find the once-disturbing emotions to be motivating. (E.g. “Sadness about my loss reminds me to make the most of my life”). See Trauma and PTSD

5: Evaluate Role Models

Role models are people from whom other people can learn behaviors and attitudes. After dissolving guilt and trauma, people can choose whether to replace ineffective or toxic role models - and any damaging beliefs and unwanted behaviors that were inspired by them (mentor damage). They can choose which influences they want to keep, and change unwanted behavior, in alignment with their desire for life.

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[1] Somatic or psychosomatic? - Do symptoms disappear following a non-medical change in lifestyle (a change in diet, relationships etc). Many physicians have told us that their patients with psychosomatic symptoms outnumber those patients with somatic disease.

[2] Physical disease, trauma or surgery that has destroyed or removed non-renewable tissue is unlikely to be reversible. In these situations, we help people improve their emotional reactions to disease, disability or impending death.