What led you to become a coach? Did you have a personal transformation that was a catalyst that inspired your desire to support others in their transformation? How has your transformation experience of transformation inspired your clients?
As a coach, we partner with our clients in their process of transformation. It is a relationship of walking next to a person, not ahead or behind. The ability to coach well is rooted in your own ability to walk with yourself in a skilled way that supports your highest level of potential. Your commitment to your own transformation is often a catalyst for your path in coaching as well as the secret sauce that keeps you coaching at your highest level.
After years of coaching coaches on their transformation, I have seen time and time again that everyone has some story of transformation that led them to coach. Often this story is one of overcoming a challenge or profound personal loss that catalyzes their capacity to tap into a more profound power, knowledge, and agency in their own lives. With every story, part of the inspiration that emerges is to support others to overcome similar challenges in their lives and access their transformative potential.
What we transform within us becomes what we have to give.
My journey as an embodiment coach mirrored this dynamic. I started pursuing my coach training in my early twenties after I lost my mother to cancer. My mother had advanced-stage colon cancer, which she battled for over a year before she passed. During that time, my whole life was in transition. I had switched to a college closer to home to spend time with my mom and help out my family. I was trying to deal with the reality of my mother dying while going to college and trying to figure out my future. I knew that I needed to continue to have momentum in my own life so I could keep moving forward and not be left with a big hole at the end of it.
But no matter how much I tried to continue to move forward, I was continually pulled back to my desire to be with her in her last days. My experience with my mother during this time taught me several core truths that formed the basis for my coaching career in the future:
- We are all deeply connected through the life of our bodies. The experience of death at such a young age put a permanent imprint on my sense of how our bodies are connected through this shared timeline that frames the meaning we make of our lives
- When we show up with compassion and creativity there is always a way to heal. Even though losing my mother was painful, it brought forward a level of compassion and creativity in my own life that inspired my personal and professional life in new ways.
- It is our responsibility to share our deepest truths and gifts and live each day in alignment with what truly matters. During my mother’s last days I often thought about how much she was not able to do, or the things she had held back or left undone for another day. In the end, this was not mine to judge, but it inspired in me the deep desire to determine my own life and live in alignment with my deepest truth- no holding back!
After my mom passed, I went on to start my somatic movement therapy training and my private practice. My practice was inspired by these truths of my own personal transformation. Over the years these truths have continued to inspire me and keep me in alignment as I have shifted into embodiment coaching. I have dedicated my 18 years of practice supporting others to tune into their bodies to discover deep connections and meaning, access their ability to heal, and create a life and business that inspires a movement.
How have you embodied a transformation in your life in a way that inspired your business? What truths came through this experience that became part of your mission and sense of what you are here to truly give and receive?
If you want a guide to tuning into your purpose on an embodied level,
Tune In with this free guide to embodiment.
Dawn Strom
Dawn is a Gyrotonic Master Trainer, Movement Therapist, Coach and Creative Human who loves envisioning unique possibilities and trailblazing new paths. She works with holistic minded, ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs to help them RECLAIM deep meaningful purpose, down time and joy.
Dawn Strom
Dawn is a Gyrotonic Master Trainer, Movement Therapist, Coach and Creative Human who loves envisioning unique possibilities and trailblazing new paths. She works with holistic minded, ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs to help them RECLAIM deep meaningful purpose, down time and joy.
