To turn it into a career is different than turning it into something that you do on the side sometimes. Because let’s just be honest, some people do do that. 80% of the people who go to massage therapy school do not go and become a massage therapist.

One of the biggest things that goes into actually turning your personal experience into a career is getting trained as a professional, especially if you’re going the coaching route, because coaching is unregulated. You can hurt people if you try to do somatic stuff and you don’t have the background. You don’t have to be a licensed professional, but you really do have to have training.

If you had a transformation, and you are wondering how to turn that into a career, ask yourself, "how would I want to go about doing that actually?" Because there’s lots of things you can do with somatic work. You can be a somatic educator. You could do somatic coaching. You could do somatic therapy. You could also be a class teacher or be a coach. There are people who make their career and their living about teaching somatic-based classes, and then there’s people who see private clients. So there’s all kinds of different things that you could do, they all include somatic work. You may be more inclined to do one of those things rather than another one of those things. The question for you is, where do you feel like you’re most called? So think about that.

What do you want your business model to be? How do you want your business to support your life? What lifestyle do you want? Because each of the above careers are very different. This a really good way to start to conceptualize how you’ll move forward and get trained in the thing that you want to do.

Another good way to go about doing that is to work with people, like hire someone to do somatic coaching with you. Maybe explore and do some somatic therapy. Take part in some somatic education classes. Go to some retreats and workshops. Go to some retreat centers. Play with it a little bit and feel like, 'Oh, God, that’s what I want to be doing.'

A lot of people don’t do that before they hop into training programs. Just like a lot of kids go to college, they never do an internship and hop immediately into a career. It’s great to get that background and think about how you fit, try out a bunch of things all around somatic work, and then figure out, hey, what is it that I’m really feeling called to do? And then go get trained. It’s the fastest path to be able to help people. Otherwise, you’ll be a person who wishes that you had done it 10 years ago.

Let’s nut down a little bit into the difference between somatic therapy and somatic coaching. They really are two very different tracks. You can become a therapist who does somatic work. You can go down the path of becoming a body worker who does somatic work, or you could go the somatic coaching path. Those are vastly different professions, hands-on and not hands-on, and licensed professional and not licensed professional.

Also consider, after your training is done, do you want to be working for someone else’s company? Or do you want to be working for your own company, too? Do you want to work strictly in the wellness profession, or do you want to be working in a larger professional? If you get into hands-on somatic bodyworking, you’re in the health and wellness lane. You’re working in a wellness center, you’re working in your own office. It’s a very different life than if you’re doing something like somatic coaching.

The therapeutic conversation is usually 'How do we get you back to baseline from where you’re presenting right now?' Whereas the coaching conversation is more about 'What do you want to achieve? What do you vision for yourself? Who do you want to be?'

On an aside, the difference in being a person who has therapeutic conversations all day and the person who has coaching conversations all day, lifestyle-wise, is huge. Personally, at the end of a therapeutic day, I was drained. I needed to recoup. People used to ask me, How do you protect your energy all the time? I honestly never feel like I have to protect my energy as a coach because I’m always having these kinds of aspirational conversations with people and I find those conversations to be so energizing.

Somatic work also can be delineated between hands-on modalities, hands-off modalities and no-hands modalities, which is more coaching and using our words, asking questions, using linguistics to help people with somatics versus doing hands-off things like energy healing, Reiki, etc. Hands-on is more traditional bodywork and manipulative therapies and those types of things. They’re all somatic practices. So again, how do you fit? What are you really interested in?

You want to take a look at what your experience has been and what impact you really want to make with people. If your experience is in JourneyDance, and then you go and you get trained in a very different modality, you’ll be like, 'wait a minute, but I wanted to help people dance'. I know that sounds intuitive, but not necessarily. Consider that because not every somatic program that you’re going to go take is a mix of the body-mind. Some of the somatic programs you take are very body-based. They’re just body. It’s like, move your body like the Feldenkrais Method. Then some somatics are body-mind integration-based, more like our program where we’re doing body-mind-spirit, integration work. Also, not every training program that you’re going to take has a scientific background to it. One of the things that the people who come and get certified with us really appreciate is when they go out and they talk to other professionals, they have that science base to lean back on because it does matter so much in our society.

The first essential skill is to do your own work and practice regularly. That’s the first and most essential skill of being able to do somatic work with other people is to do your own work on a regular basis. There are people who are very highly trained in somatic stuff, but they don’t do a lot of their own work, and it shows up. I can even say for myself in full transparency, there’s been periods of time where I’ve gotten really busy with the business and travel, my own practice has fallen off a bit. It really affects my capacity to be with someone else, to hold that space, to understand what they’re experiencing with empathy and compassion. All those things are interrupted when I don’t do my own practice regularly.

Another way not sincerely doing their own work shows up for people is they start to have external circumstances that are bothersome or frustrating. All of a sudden, there’s family drama or clients or not meeting their goals. There’s this weird external stuff that a lot of times we think, what’s going on out there that once we course correct on the inside, it clears up the external fluff.

Doing your own work is the most primary thing. It sounds really basic, fundamental, but it’s really important. That’s the first and most important essential skill of being a somatic practitioner, therapist, coach, whatever, somatic, fill in the blank after.

At the Somatic Coaching Academy, we teach in a foundation up way. The very first set of essential skills that we teach somebody are somatic practices. No matter what somatic work you’re doing, whatever lane you’re in, doing your own somatic practices regularly, and also being trained in how to lead other people through somatic practices is a fundamental skill. What do somatic practices look like? Well, there are familiar things like meditation, breath work and breath practices. Breath work and breath practices are received differently in the marketplace. Breath work, a lot of people think about that as 'I’m going to work the breath, like breath of fire. I’m really going to activate the system.' I’m not always thinking that those are the best things to do all the time for people. Whereas breath practices are like, 'Oh, so I could go different ways with breath practices and do things.' So breath practices, meditation, mindful movement practices, self-massage practices - those are all somatic practices that are really foundational to anything that you’re doing with people in the somatic realm. Some people stop there and they’re somatic practitioners. Some people want to go on and do more specific work. But having that foundation is essential.

Some of the skills are around knowing how to ask the right questions, and that’s where we start coming into coaching. We have our somatic practices where we’re leading, holding space. You’re leading people in practices and you’re suggesting to other people that they might do some things. You’re like a teacher. When you’re coaching, you’re turning that around a little bit. Now you’re asking questions that are specific to someone’s somatic internal processing systems that then the person themselves starts to come up with the answers around those things. Coaching is a partnership with the client, whereas as a somatic practitioner, you’re not necessarily in partnership like that. You’re leading.

Essential skills, too, are going to break down into whatever avenue you decide to go into. To summarise, you’ve had an experience on your own, somatic transformational experience. You want to do that work in the world with other people. Step one, keep doing your own work for sure. Step two, decide which lane you’re going to go in. Work with other people, do some practices, train with other people. Decide which way you’re going to go. Then learn that skill. You have to learn a marketable set of skills or techniques or methods in order to then turn that into either being hired by a company or to start your own business.

In short, do your own work, decide which way you’re going to go, learn that marketable certified skill, and then take it into the marketplace.

Essential skills are going to be specific to whatever lane you decide to go in. Some people are going to need business skills and some people aren’t, depending on how they go.

To highlight the lanes that we train people in here for people who do not already have a wellness background or anything like that, like an accountant who has had a somatic transformational experience and says, 'I’m ready to shift out of accounting or add something else. What can I do?' If you come work with us, you’re going to learn the very first trauma-sensitive somatic practices because we know that that is one of the most effective things to learn first, to turn around and make marketable very, very quickly, to be able to start helping people and generating some revenue. Of course, here we are at the Somatic Coaching Academy, so we’re really heavy into the somatic coaching lane. So that’s the lane that we take people in. From there, you learn how to create somatic transformations, and from there how to be a somatic coaching professional.

As soon as you start working with somebody’s body or emotions you could open up a Pandora’s box. If you don’t already have some skills or backgrounds in what it means to be able to be trauma-aware, trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive, trauma-specific, we have a podcast called The Four Levels of Trauma Practice. It’s very detailed what each level means. Trauma sensitive is the level where we are learning how to work specifically with people’s nervous systems in a way that we are enhancing stability and regulation in their nervous system. That’s what it means to be trauma-sensitive in coaching. You can handle things that come up, whereas before being trauma-sensitive, if stuff comes up, you really aren’t trained to be able to handle those things. We have a great trauma awareness training. You can get a trauma-aware practitioner badge with the Unlocking Human Potential program. It’s on demand, and you can do that anytime.

A little contrast is helpful with this question. A typical session for a somatic body worker doesn’t have talking associated with it because the body worker is doing something to somebody’s body.

A somatic therapeutic session is sometimes combined with body working, sometimes they’re not. That session is going to look like, first of all, talking. It is usually set up more like a therapy session would be where you come in and the client says what they want to work on that day, and you go in, and you might talk about your past - past things that have happened, past memories. And then you process whatever it is that’s going on, both through talk and maybe through some movement and breath and self-massage and things like that. And then it’s time to end, and off we go.

With a coaching session, it’s set up in a very specific way so that our coaches help a person to get where they want to go, and to be the person they want to be, have the things they want to have, do the things that they want to do. And that’s a real distinct difference between the somatic therapeutic and the somatic coaching session, is the coaching session is set up in a specific way to help somebody grow and get more in their life, an aspirational quality.

Some of the stuff in the middle looks similar. Like there could be some somatic practices in there, regulation work, that sorts of things. But the end it looks a lot different because at the end of a somatic therapeutic session, it’s like, 'Okay, we’re done. When are you going to see me again?' kind of thing. But at the end of a coaching session, we’re talking about evoking awareness around what did you learn about yourself today? We’re talking about what action steps are you going to take following the session? Where are you going to go with where we went today? What accountability do you need or want? What does that look like for you? That coaching container is a vastly different experience than a somatic therapeutic container. That’s what a somatic coaching session would look like.

Number one, get trained and make sure you’re trained in trauma-sensitive methodologies when you’re doing somatic coaching. Make sure that the program you’re working with, you get instructor feedback on what you’re doing. Make sure you’re doing plenty of peer sessions with your cohort peers you’re working through so that instructors, mentors have their eyes on you, giving you feedback right along the way.

Do you have a dialog going with your instructors and your mentors? Is there a way to get a hold of them directly so that you can make sure you’re getting your questions answered? What are the competencies in the program? How are you checked out on those things? Are you clear about that? Does your instructor clearly say, 'Great. Okay, so this is what we like. What’s happening here, this is really looking good. These are some areas for growth'. Is then your instructor giving you parameters on this-is-what-I-think-you’re-ready-to-start-doing, this is what I’d get a little more work on?

You really have to trust and lean into your instructor team to not always give you the green light, but to really reflect back to you that you’re ready to start doing these things in a safe way. I’d like to think that upon graduation, you’re going to know you’re ready. That’s the mark of a really great program.

If you’re asking about how can you build your confidence working with clients, that’s a looking forward thing because you’re not working with clients right now yet because you haven’t been trained yet to do that.

Let’s just talk about confidence for a second. How do we build confidence in any way? Confidence is built when you have had enough repetitions with doing a task or strategy and you’ve had enough feedback that you’re accurate with that task or strategy. Think about driving a car. When you first started driving a car, the first time you got behind the wheel, my guess is you probably weren’t too confident. If you were too confident, you were probably dangerous. If it’s the first time you’re doing something and you’re really confident, maybe you should get some coaching accurately assessing where you are with things. Too much confidence can be a little dangerous. Let’s assume that the first time you drove a car, you weren’t very confident. Sometimes you fall into a ditch, and you got to get pulled out of the ditch, and then you’re like, 'Now I know not to get that close to the ditch again'. Those bumpy roads build your confidence. Your first year of driving, after you drove through some snowstorms and some rainstorms, all that stuff is how you build confidence.

You build confidence by practicing, by practicing, by practicing, by practicing, and by cataloging evidence that you were successful with your learning. Not necessarily always successful with the exact strategy, but did you keep learning things from it? That will inherently develop confidence such that then you end up in a session and someone asks you a question or you ask them a question and you’re totally in the flow. There’s no self doubt. The peer shares that we see in our program are a huge confidence builder. By the time we get to the place where we’re testing people out on their competencies, they just have a lot of confidence.

One difference between being a person who’s had a somatic transformation and not been trained versus someone who has been trained is - oftentimes working in the world of somatics can get murky because we’re dealing with sensations and emotions which are very murky - if you have not been trained to navigate through that territory with a specific process, what will happen is you’ll end up in all kinds of potholes and rabbit holes and backwoods and bogs and marshes and scary places. You’re guiding someone through those places and you find yourself together lost in the woods, boy, that is a great disservice and dangerous for you and your client.

It’s moments like that that aren’t getting your car in a ditch and getting pulled out and going, Whoa, I know not to go in that ditch. It’s like, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this with my life, kinds of conversations you have with yourself because it can get big.

One of the things we talk about a lot, a lot, a lot in our training program is to trust the process. The process works. When you work the process, the process works. Our students don’t have the big, scary dark woods kinds of moments with their clients because they are trained, they can handle it and because of who they are and the practices that they do, they don’t even attract that thing. But it’s more the people who haven’t been trained and aren’t doing their own internal work to really do their own pattern deconstruction, that those kinds of things will come up. I remember for me, I remember the session. I had a session where it was a big, scary thing that happened. I did have the training to lean back on it. But really, one of the wake up calls for me is I was not being in full integrity with my own practice at that time, and I really had to get my act together with doing that.

Another little tip there on building confidence is work with a process. Don’t rely on your intuition to get you through a session because that’s dangerous, and that will create avenues and places of self doubt. Whereas when you lean into a process, then you can become confident using the process. Then no matter where you are during the session, you always ask yourself, Where am I in the process?

Intuition is something that comes up a lot as aspirational even in the coaching world. As in you should really use your intuition. We want to keep our eyes on that as somatic practitioners, actually. Intuition is a great quality or characteristic to bring once you’ve dialed in the process. But you don’t want to lead with intuition with somatic work because your subconscious pathways will be leading you, and all of a sudden, your subconscious is leading your client’s subconscious, and that is not a great place to be.

From the Somatic Coaching Academy perspective, at least right now in the foreseeable future, any of our grads continue to have access to their program faculty indefinitely in the virtual communities that we hold, but also to their peers, not just the cohorts that they went through, but the greater graduate community.

You really must be a part of a collegiate group of people who’s actually working, and not just doing work on themselves, but working with people to be able to talk about the things that come up.

If you’re a graduate within our community, then we do monthly office hours for the whole community come and learn. We do business building and skill building and keeping people up on market changes too, because the market changes right now in the somatic and coaching world are actually pretty profound.

We do skillshares. If you’re a part of our program, you get open coaching as a part of your program. You’re getting a lot of support to help you become the absolute best coach that you can be.

When you look at certification trainings, you want to make sure you’re not just getting dropped off at the end. Make sure you have ongoing support forever as a part of a really well-held community.

You can go be an employee either in the somatic therapeutic or the somatic coaching or the somatic body working lanes, or you can work for yourself. You don’t always have to work for yourself.

If you’re looking to gain skills as a somatic coach and then go work for yourself, you’re actually looking at learning two things - how do I become a somatic coach? How do I become a business owner? If you haven’t worked for yourself or if you’ve worked for yourself, but you’ve sold products but now you’re working with people, that’s also a totally different business. It’s not a problem. It’s just a mindset shift, and you got to know that. You’re going to have a mindset shift into becoming a somatic practitioner, but then you’re also going to have a mindset shift in becoming a solopreneur. And those are two different mindsets that you will need to transform yourself into and adopt.

One of the easiest ways actually to adopt a new mindset is to do somatic work. So throughout the course of your program, you can be working on shifting your mindset to become the person that you want to be. But you really do need to have a business mindset and adopt a business mindset.

How do I attract clients? In our program, we primarily teach you the sales skills to be able to do that because you can go off and get yourself involved in the crazy, expensive, rabbit hole-driven marketing stuff that a lot of programs will teach you. Even if you go and you get a certification that doesn’t have any business building involved in it, which ours does, then you’re left to your own devices. What a lot of people do is they start creating online businesses and marketing funnels and social media, mumbo jumbo, that really doesn’t get you new clients. We teach you how to get new clients. The way that we do that is through sales skills, conscious, loving, intentional conversations. Win, win, win, win scenarios for you and your client and everyone involved.

If you’ve had a somatic transformation of your own, you want to start doing this work in the world, the first step is to keep doing your own work for sure. That’s really important. Next step is to sample other practitioners’ ways of doing things. Sample somatic practices, go to retreat centers, take some classes, hire a somatic coach for a while, do some somatic therapeutics, as many different disciplines as you can experience to say, 'Hey, which one really feels right for me?' Why don’t you decide which one feels right for you, sign up, find a program. We’ve actually written a really great article for one of our partners, Life Coach magazine on how to choose a somatic coaching program. That’s in our library. Check that out. If you’re thinking about a somatic coaching program, and you’re like, 'Well, which one do I choose?', we wrote an entire guide for that - how to check boxes, to go through and ask about, Hey, does the program offer this, this, and this? Is it a match for me? So definitely check that out. Choose a program, get trained in that program, keep practicing those skills, and then learn how to bring it into the marketplace in a really holistic and heart-centered way. It’s worth it. It’s a life-giving, wonderful career. And if you do feel called to it, follow that calling.