What do your (career) choices and decisions have to do with your mind-body connection?

Choices, decisions, and transitions are one of the common theme that clients bring to the embodiment coaching sessions with me. Because these moments can be stressful. I know this from my own experience with several transitions over the years, for example, I am right now on my third career in the last 14ish years. Here's my short story.

My story of career choices, decisions, and transitions

For around 8 years, I worked at Philips as a usability engineer which was my first heart-aligned career. Somewhere over these years, I started to feel a longing for something different. I didn't quite know what that "something" was. But an idea that kept showing up time and again was the desire to start a business.

It took me many years to make the move. Here's the article I wrote around six-ish years ago which describes my process of making a decision. Daily meditation helped me a lot during this time. Another thing that helped was acknowledging and accepting that I was unable to move forward because of fear.

I now know that acceptance and meditation calmed down my nervous system, and that calm helped me make a decision. And I started my business as a freelance Sr. user researcher and usability engineer around six years ago.

Like all new things and transitions, my new business needed energy. So that I could make choices and decisions that were aligned with my heart. And I needed support to show up with energy and enthusiasm - so I went for haptotherapy and asked my yoga teacher to teach me sequences for openness and courage. And slowly and steadily I grew my business. Here's the article describing the beginning of my first business.

When I moved to start my second business as an embodiment coach, I saw similar fears and doubts come up. This time too meditation, coaching, and mentoring helped me a lot.

What does the mind-body connection have to do with choices?

What I have seen happen within myself or that of my clients' lives is that often moments of transition, choices, decisions can create a lot of stress within us - perhaps because we perceive the stakes to be too high, or fear of the unfamiliar/failure, etc.

This stress, if unprocessed, gets stored in our body and over time, it may create anxiety, anger, sadness, lack of energy, constrictions in the body, etc. which can cause stress to build up further. All these feelings and the sensations can occlude our thinking - making us go around in loops trying to "think through" a problem.

How can embodiment (coaching) help?

When we take the time to be present with the sensations within ourselves, two things happen often:

Completing "unprocessed" stress loops

We complete "open" stress loops which might be stored in our body - unprocessed because of lack of time, shock, politeness, etc. This is also known as dissolving frozen tension. This may show up as yawning, stretching, deep breathing, or making sounds.

As we process this stored stress, it creates spaciousness and flow within our body. Because our body moves from a state of "trying to feel safe" to a state of flow.

This means that we start asking better questions, can be creative, and see more possibilities and opportunities, instead of looping doomsday scenarios 😃.

For example, one of my clients went from asking, "Oh my God, what if this fails?" to asking, "What do I need to arrange to make this transition?"

Insights or images or metaphors or words bubbling up

In addition, another thing that might happen is that some images or thoughts come up as we lean into the inner sensations - this might happen after the session too. These images bring insights into the situations we are dealing with, and give us a clear way forward.

For example, during one of the sessions, a client saw themselves as a gentle giant who steps over hurdles gently instead of feeling small and like a pushover.

How does your body react in a time of choices, decisions and transitions?

Want to see if embodiment life and career coaching can help you? Schedule a call here: https://calendly.com/beant-ux/discovery-call