The unstucking is kind of working in the body itself to help the nervous system regulate. The other way to think about answering this question is in terms of the delineation between a somatic approach, or what we call a bottom-up approach, and a talk therapy, which is the top-down approach. And you see blending of these things going on over time too. Sometimes there’s a purely top-down person who will not address body stuff at all with a client. And they’re specifically working on a cognitive level.

This question is geared towards people who feel like they’ve done intellectual talk therapy for a long time, they’re just not going anywhere with it. One of the basic reasons is that your subconscious mind is 95% of your mind power. And so it’s really running the show. Consciously, we’re only about 5%. Our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind how to think about things. So when we’re doing purely talk therapy, it is like if you’re trying to negotiate with the leader of a puppet government. If you had a leader of a government, and they’re actually not in charge of the government, they’re just a puppet to somebody else behind the scenes that are telling them what to do. If you’re negotiating with the leader of the puppet government, they really don’t have any power to negotiate or make decisions. And their primary job is to protect the person that is pulling their strings. The subconscious and the conscious mind work in a similar fashion. The conscious mind is just a kind of a puppet leader to our subconscious lots of times. That might seem offensive to some people but the thing is we’re not wired that way. Physiologically, you will never become more than 5% conscious because our brains literally cannot consciously handle the amount of information that is required to get through a day. Our subconscious mind has to do that. Our subconscious mind is always picking and choosing the information that it’s feeding the conscious mind in order to protect itself.

When we’re doing talk therapy, what you’re really doing is you’re talking to a puppet leader, where somatic coaching actually gets behind the curtain and talks directly to the person that’s pulling the strings underneath the conscious mind. And that’s why we can help breakthroughs and help people move through the deeper patterns that they’re experiencing that are problematic for them.

One of the ways to think about it is how the conscious mind, that 5%, is really about watching and witnessing what’s going on. And in talk therapy, it can be tough sometimes when we start to get into things to really witness our experience. But when a person is practiced in their body, in their physiology, in their nervous system regulation, in their window of tolerance, in being able to modulate and regulate their nervous system, they actually have a greater capacity to maintain witnessing, to maintain awareness. And so then they can use the conscious mind even better. Here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, we have a new paradigm way of thinking about the body, mind, spirit and healing and growth and how a lot of times in the therapeutic realm, we don’t completely encapsulate the tenets of coaching actually, which help people to look ahead at what they want to achieve. And when we embrace the full spectrum of the human being by helping somebody "heal" by looking ahead at what they want to achieve, we can unlock things that have been locked in a therapeutic paradigm, that when we look at the coaching paradigm, kind of quickly unlock it because we are embracing a holistic way of looking at how people grow.

To learn how to help people safely navigate change, there’s kind of a structure with which that happens and trauma-aware is the first level - just becoming aware of the widespread impact of trauma, like how many people actually experience trauma. That’s usually pretty eye-opening for people when you look at the statistics.

The next layer is understanding the trauma-informed framework, when you’re integrating the five steps, (now some people say they’re six, some people say they’re seven, they’re similar, there’s overlap). When you follow a framework that is a trauma-informed framework and you adhere to that framework in your practice and with your clients on a regular basis, that really reduces the possibility for re-traumatization.

The next deeper level is trauma-sensitive work. When you’re a trauma-sensitive professional and you’re working directly with someone’s nervous system, you can help them stabilize their nervous system. That helps to reduce the possibility of creating a re-traumatization when you’re working with people.

Then the even deeper layer is trauma-specific work. This is the world of psychotherapeutics where you’re working with people specifically who’ve experienced trauma, not just potentially someone who has post-traumatic symptoms, but someone who has actually a post-traumatic disorder that’s been diagnosed that way in that trauma-specific realm.

When you understand those layers and you understand where you fit in those layers and you understand what tools fit in each one of those layers, that’s really an amazing way to create stabilization and safety for your clients as you’ve taken through a coaching process or a therapeutic process to reduce your traumatization.

So the answer basically is become trauma-aware, trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive, and if your work defines it, trauma-specific. This actually goes back to that question about how somatic coaching can help clients become stuck when talk therapy hasn’t worked because not everybody’s trauma-sensitive. All those trauma levels help to unlock the stuckness that people have experienced in the past.

Yes. There’s a lot of different ways to work with the body or soma. There’s a lot of different somatic practices. There’s a lot of different somatic coaching techniques. We can only speak to the methodologies that we teach and use here at the Academy, and we use the sensation-based motivation coaching. It is a specific kind of somatic coaching taught in our level three certification program. In this answer, we ’re assuming that traditional coaching means intellectual or cognitively based coaching. The sensation-based model understands that an emotion is two things. An emotion is the felt quality sensations we’ve felt in our body and the narratives that we have or the thoughts, the stories about those felt quality sensations. An emotion is sensations and stories, those two things all mixed up together. When you take a sensation-based approach, you actually work with somebody and work at the sensation level without getting mixed up in the narrative stories and the meaning behind it. You get right in there and do something really powerful really quick because you’re going in the back door with the nervous system and working with the sensation base. In that way, you are actually working with emotional blocks. You are also working with a specific aspect of the emotional block that doesn’t get all wrapped up in the stories, which is the yarn that people get really wrapped up in when they’re trying to get through emotional blocks. If you’re just trying to unwrap your yarn, it’s going to take all day. Instead, with sensation-based coaching, you are going to make more profound changes because you are helping someone overcome emotional challenges by working with the emotions themselves. You're going to move past emotional blocks faster when you’re working with the emotions and with the body rather than just the cognition because we feel emotions in the body.

It’s all in the presentation for people. Never try to convince anybody of anything. The more we try to convince someone, people feel that and resist it because that doesn’t feel good to try to be convinced of something. Oftentimes when we come from a place of trying to convince, we’re actually trying to convince ourselves. We’re not really trying to convince the person we’re working with. We’re using all these rational arguments to try to convince somebody.

One of the best ways to enhance credibility is to be curious, is to ask questions of what your client or your peer wants to achieve. What do they really want to get out of moving forward? And then help them ask questions rather around where are they coming up short with that right now. Where are the gaps? What is what you’re doing right now that is not getting you to where you want to go.

And when you identify the gaps, then you can start to talk a little bit about how somatic coaching can actually fill in those gaps. That’s a great way to begin helping to enhance your own credibility simply because you’re coming from a place of curiosity and, and authentic kind of information sharing rather than convincing.

These are techniques that we teach our students when they want to gain more clients, work with businesses and talk about what they do. And we always talk about asking people what they want to achieve and looking in that direction.

A hundred percent of the time when people are concerned about how they’re going to be perceived, they are already perceiving themselves like that in some capacity. And so doing your own work and using the skills that we teach here at the academy on and with yourself will help you to rewire, decondition yourself to become a person who can professionally stand there in your full, awesome, confident credibility and really be present with the other people because really what people want is to be seen and heard. And we can do that best when we feel confident and credible with ourselves.

When you believe in yourself, other people will believe in you. It’s really easy to believe in the techniques that you see work so well with yourself. And it’s super inspiring. Once you do them here with us and you see how well they work with you and your peers, you just cannot wait to go out and do them with other people because they work so well. It actually takes the pressure off 'what do I look like' because you’re just so excited about the techniques and the methods because they’re so awesome. Because that’s really what it’s about is helping people create change.

Are we talking about the effectiveness of helping someone live a more purposeful life? Are we talking about the effectiveness of less anxiety? There’s no science that is going to look at all of the effectiveness of everything with somatic. It’s not possible. Research looks at very specific things. And we can speak to that for sure.

Now, the other part of that question is somatic techniques. What techniques are we talking about? There’s so many different techniques. We can touch on a couple of research points for specific issues. Now, I will say like in the Somatic Coaching Academy library, there’s lots of information in there about a variety of different issues that people deal with that you look into deeper. So this is a very broad question. So let’s dig down a little bit deeper into it.

If we’re looking at things like chronic pain, if we’re looking at things like anxiety, if we’re looking at things like depression, there’s plenty of evidence to show that somatic practices for sure help to reduce anxiety, help to reduce depression, help to reduce chronic pain. If we’re looking at those three issues, and nervous emotional regulation too, there’s plenty of research to show that those issues are helped dramatically by somatic practices. Somatic coaching helps with chronic pain. There’s a lot of research around all types of coaching practices and body-mind therapeutic practices that are important for chronic pain, as well as again, depression and anxiety. So if we’re looking at those three things specifically in the research, there’s good evidence that somatic techniques, depending on what the techniques are, are very helpful.

There’s some new research even on what emotions are and how emotions are created that’s substantiating these techniques and even newer research that’s really substantiating the sensation-based model too. You have a lot of research that’s available to certification students to check out and look at.

We have a whole hidden library just for the certification students to be able to use to bring back into their work, into their potential colleagues and clients and those sorts of things. Some people use it a lot. Some people don’t use it at all, but it’s there.

We also encourage you to check out case studies, which are also in the library and you can find on our website because I know that’s more anecdotal, but it’s also really profoundly interesting and you’ll get so much information from checking out the case studies that we have available.

The short answer is yes, absolutely. Here at the Academy, in our level three program, when people are becoming certified as sensation-based motivation coaches, the practices that they do, by the time they develop their competencies, they could be working with trauma-specific populations. Most of our students don’t. Most of our students have the trauma-sensitive skills to work with anybody and they’re not necessarily going into trauma-specific places because to make an impact in people experiencing severe trauma symptoms and PTSD, you actually don’t have to go back through all of the narrative and the memories of what happened to start the trauma. It's not that you don’t have to do that at all during the process in order to help people come to resolutions. Some people need that.

When people experience reactivation of their trauma, they experience nervous system dysregulation, right now in the moment. The trauma has happened in the past, the actual event is over, but in the moment, the body is re-experiencing itself as if the event is occurring now through nervous system dysregulation. Research shows that when we help someone regulate their nervous system, the symptoms associated with the memory of the old trauma change. They actually reduce. Then someone’s able to process the historical narrative more effectively because they’re not overwhelmed by their nervous system.

Can somatic coaching methods help manage that? Absolutely. We can do it without going into any of the narrative. We can do it by just working specifically with the body itself to help regulate the nervous system. It can have a profound impact.

Listen, we get it - "The world needs our help. I want these skills so badly. The sooner I can get them, the better I can get out there and go help people." We understand.

One of the things we like to say is it takes about nine months to make a human being. It’s going to take about nine months for you to become a human being who is going to deliver exceptional somatic coaching skills. It takes a little time. By the way, it’s really good to slow down. Hang on a hot minute. Slow down and soak it in and really take time to integrate and take time to rewire your own system and your own body. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human conditioning that has gotten us to this point in being the humans that we are on this planet in this time. It might take a few months for your system to get to the place where you’re a person who can hold this profound level of transformation for people and help them to get in touch with the very thing that feels so threatening and ugly and wrong and bad and all of this stuff that comes up and violent and all this stuff that comes up because we’re talking about people’s bodies. It’s vulnerable. It’s sensitive. It’s going to take time just like we would give a friend or a family member or a child time to tell us their story and to tell us how they’re feeling. We’re not going to tell them "would you get it done faster because I’ve got to go in five minutes". We’re going to give the people we love time and encourage our students to give themselves that love and time because we guarantee you at the end of your trajectory of learning, your competencies are going to be so rich and you’re going to take that for the rest of your life and profoundly impact the people who you work with.

Our program is three parts, level one, two, and three. The first time investment is about 30 days with core centering with the Somatic Practice Essentials program. Then you can take that information and then start making a difference. Some people stop there and they take that program and they do amazing things with it.

The level two program, the Somatic Transformation Fundamentals program is three months long. That gets you a little deeper into making transformations in the soma, in their experience. Then the level three program is eight months long. When we say it takes nine months to make a human, it absolutely does. That happens when you get all the way through those level three programs. At the same time, as you’re working in level one and then coming out of level one, you can start making a difference. Then level two, you can start making a deeper difference. Level three, you can really start to create transformations for people in very deep levels.

Through each level, you’re going to be able to create bigger and more sustainable transformations with people because of the knowledge that you have and the experience that you’ve gone through during your training. The way we have the program sorted out is to help support our students to get out there and start using the tools right away so that they can start getting some feedback on how they’re working while they’re still in a support bubble with us. They can keep working with it.

The overall investment is probably really a year by the time you’re done with it, but it’s put into chunks where you’re not waiting to the end of a year to start using the skills. You’re using them all throughout the period of time.The first thing you're going to do is talk with our student support person who will be able to best direct you to the team member that you should be talking to. So you'll talk with her, and she'll act like a telephone operator and help to get you into the right direction for the person that you need to talk to on our team. And from there, we'll follow up and help you to map out your coaching and your learning journey so that you can get what you need from the programs. Thanks so much for considering the Somatic Coaching Academy, and we look really forward to having you in class.

The easiest way is to ask someone about what they’re struggling with. Identify something in the current moment that they’re struggling with. Let’s say someone’s skeptical of body-mind techniques and I say, "can I ask you, what are you struggling with right now?" And they’re like, "I’m really feeling anxious." Then use a very simple body-centered technique to help them reduce their anxiety. In the moment, they actually feel better after you do it and you say, "well, there you go. Do you feel better?" "Oh my God. Yeah, I definitely feel better." And sometimes we do a little rating scale with people before and after those practices so that they can see that they actually feel better. And then they say, "wow, that was really easy. That was simple. I feel better." And you say, "well, there you go. That was a body-centered technique."

Giving someone an experience of the technique usually helps to reduce someone’s skepticism around it because now they have an experience of it that they can make sense of, and they also realize that it helped. We can remember that people feel threatened for some reason by new things. And the people who seem skeptical actually can become our most brilliant, awesome clients who then become raving advocates of the work for life. Sometimes people want to turn away quickly from somebody who’s skeptical and say they don’t get it, or they’re not my people, or something like that. But we encourage you to just lean in just a little bit because those people who have some resistance to the change actually can create awesome change and be wonderful clients to work with.

Another little tip is it depends a little on your audience too. I’ve taught and traveled all over the country to tens of thousands of people. And basically when you’re teaching or speaking, you’re either teaching to a group of professionals or you’re speaking, you’re teaching to a group of lay people. So when you speak to professionals, you’re speaking to them because they want to learn how to help other people. And when you’re working with lay people, typically you’re speaking to them because they actually are the ones that want the help for themselves. I’m not saying there’s not a blending sometimes of those audiences, but there’s basically when you’re invited to speak to a group, the group is usually defined out that way.

So when I’m speaking to those audiences that may oftentimes be skeptical, what I have to realize is that the professional group, they respond better if I speak and lead with a lot of the research and the science and then give them an experience.

For the lay group you have to lead with the experience and then follow up with the science. And when you find that little magic trick right there, then that really reduces skepticism for people, but you have to kind of know who you’re talking to. Meet people where they’re at.

You’re going to have great support and community. That’s something that we, our students reflect back all the time, that the Somatic Coaching Academy is really known for. It’s a strong community. I think it’s when you get into your first class that you start to get a feel for it. Then very quickly you realize this cohort is meant to be. These are people who I really want to know more, people like this. And here I am put in this environment with other people who think like me and are interested like me.

And then we have our classes. We have our virtual community, which has a robust conversation, I’m sure happening right now. Every day of the week, people are in there communing. And our students, some of them go in there and they kind of dip in for professional knowledge and information about the techniques and business building and things. And there are certain people who have found friends for life. They’re scheduling vacations with each other right now. And talking to each other on the phone.

Whatever range of support that people are looking for is available to them. Nobody’s making you go on vacation. But whatever it is that would be supportive to you is available within the context, not just of your cohorts, but of the ever expanding community at the SCA.

Within the community, we have monthly office hours, which anybody in the community can come to that, anybody who’s a graduate of the certification program. It can be level one, level two, level three. And at those office hours, we do a lot of business building kinds of things, but also we do some personal reflection. We do some work with the tools. It kind of depends on what people are needing in the community. Every single time at the end of office hours, we ask everybody for a takeaway and 80% of the takeaways every time are how grateful people are to have the time dedicated on their calendar to spend time with the community. Most of the talk is around business building, we talk about the techniques and stuff like that, but really the take home for all of our students every single time is that being in the community with their peers, resets them, gets their mindset in alignment, reminds them of who they are and that they’re surrounded by people who are like them and think like them. And off we go.

It's a monthly meeting for people that are currently on program and any graduates at all, no matter how long ago you graduated, you’re always come back and welcome to those monthly office hours.

While you’re on program, you have all kinds of support within the context of your programs. We also offer the students who are on program with level two and level three open coaching, which is an opportunity to get coached with our team. Our students love that. So that support’s available for you too. If you so desire and need even more personal support on top of that, we have ways to work privately with coaches so that you can get the private support that you want and need. There’s so many tailored in support mechanisms. So there’s the virtual support, there’s the opportunity for private support, there’s the cohort support, there’s the getting coach support, even the support in terms of how we organize your homework and the peer shares and how we have taken a lot of intention about how we create communication standards and things like that. Sets you up for success as a student graduate that you don’t even understand how it all flows so well, but you’re going to feel like we really have you. Because we do. And because that’s a value of ours here. So every time we do anything here, we think about how can we really infuse the value of we got you into what we’re doing.

It’s really important to use somatic practices and somatic coaching techniques when you’re experiencing any kind of burnout because it’s a thing that’s happening in our nervous system and in our body. The somatic practices are critical to being able to address burnout. It’s one of the things that our private clients are seeking out either actively or wanting to get there. But that somatic component is critical.

I see it in two levels. The somatic practices are critical as a buffer for burnout sort of thing. It’s like putting on your fire gear every day, if you will. It helps us become more resilient just to the forces around us on a daily basis. Somatic practices do that.

The deeper sensation-based motivation coaching work, the deeper somatic coaching work, when it helps you reframe your belief systems, that actually makes us almost burnout proof. Because now we’re not approaching the world in the same way. In a lot of ways, burnout is really the outcome of resisting life. And when we stop resisting life, we don’t burn out. And the reason we resist life is because our belief systems don’t match the changing environment around us. So when we don’t adapt, we burn out. And why wouldn’t we adapt? Because our belief systems are sclerotic and structured into a certain reality that we’re not allowing change to mean what’s going on around us.

So on two levels, you can kind of create a burnout shield with the somatic practices, but with the deeper core work, you can actually become burnout proof. It is really important in the times we live in now, because we live in highly changeable and pressure-filled times. 

We need to remember that no matter how big our technology gets or whatever, we’re still human. It’s still our nervous systems that we’re dealing with. And so those somatic tools, practices, and somatic coaching are really what help us to get to the human nervous system, which is so important.