Why Gestalt Coaching
Gestalt Coaching
While all birds in nature seek shelter in the rain, the Eagle soars over the clouds to protect itself from the rain. It is very dangerous for people to build fortresses and separate themselves from their social life to protect themselves from events that they feel they cannot cope with.
It is better to engage and collaborate with people instead of being in fortresses that prevent you from the awareness of the most valued flow of life. And protection?
It is possible through being the Eagle of your inner world…
Eagles live, soaring to the top, gaining a deep and complete perspective. Away from the chaos below, it reaches a high spot and decomposes itself. When you learn to calm down and observe, you realize that not every subject needs a reaction. With this awareness, you understand that most problems are common, but ATTITUDE makes a difference.
After my blog posts about the Gestalt Approach, we will go deeper in this article.
Why is Gestalt Approach so important in Coaching?
On a ground where the subject is human and we focus on the form of psychology that influences our progression in life, the gestalt approach, in the Coaching session, turns the Coach and the Client into a living Eagle who experiences and helps others experience strong awareness.
At the point we arrived in the flow of our sessions, my client, who described himself as a samurai in his life, with the mental power he uncovered, stated that he was destined to be crowned. He went on to say that essentially, he was the King. He was his father’s only son and an heir to the family business.
Worn out from taking on all the cases in the businesses they managed himself, he was very worried about the uncertainties, and he had regrets about many situations. With the gestalt approach in coaching, he chose to manage himself and his life by protecting his present through his realizations.
Your worries about tomorrow always steal your joys from today. The cure for uncertainty is to be prepared. One should not regret anything that happened, as they are all in service of this day. The gestalt approach brings an intuitive understanding of each situation and distinguishes gain and loss more effectively in worldly matters. Thus, it is a great answer to the question of ‘why gestalt’ in coaching.
Coaching opens powerful doors to areas where even the Gestalt approach cannot find answers to. Therefore, the program of combining gestalt and coaching is a must for a coach. The coaching techniques and tools that come with Gestalt transform a coach into a master of mindfulness.
The destruction of the past, having to experience change for different reasons in an unexpected period, the worry of options that have not been evaluated, not being able to use the opportunities that got away, walking away from some situations with disbelief, coldness in attitudes and behaviors, being responsible for what you did not do as much as what you did do, waiting to be compensated for the negative situations, needing a solid beginning opportunity to rise again and strengthening your faith are common situations that we can associate with all our living spaces. No matter which of these situations you ground on, the focus is on our attitude and behaviors.
The gestalt approach, which showed us that my consultant, who often saw himself riding a balloon in Cappadocia in his dreams, wanted to get out of the environment he was in and discovered that he dissatisfied with his life, led to a great phase on our session. My client, with the awareness that he experienced, cheerfully moved into the action plan, adding desire, strength, enthusiasm, movement to his life, very much like the arrival of spring.
In the gestalt approach, our dreams show us the feelings we have left unfinished in our lives, the actions we have not completed, the decisions we have not carried out, and the issues we need to solve that cause us distress.
It is often our fixed ideas and patterns of faith causing us to take actions that do not lead us to go forward or to the point we imagined they would. We need multidimensional perspectives that create awareness for understanding events and observing areas where we are curious as to what is happening.
For someone who has difficulty expressing his/ her feelings, developing the belief that this is a weakness; it is a safe space to behave in a secretive, mysterious and cold manner. My client, with whom we talked about the difficulties he experienced with the friendships in his social circle, was constantly coughing when he described what he had experienced during the session. I wonder if there were some words caught in his throat but just couldn’t come out?
In the story he told, there were things that both parties wanted to, but couldn’t say. Based on emotions and feelings, if there is holding, withdrawing, but an outburst and stubbornness, words want to come out from the throat. Or if there is a disruptive behavior while communicating, the sentences then don’t want to come out of the throat at all.
Sometimes it helps to suppress these emotions when communicating in relationships for the first time, but suppressing emotions for a long time causes blockages when telling the story or when the inextricable knots inside want to be untied after a while. There are some sentences left unspoken in your heart. In one of the coaching sessions I had with the gestalt approach, my client was on the verge of losing his self-respect with the compromise he made in his friendship, and there was formed the space where he expressed his anxiety.
It was fear that his heart would be broken, worry that he would make more requests concerning the relationship, an effort to save the intimacy by engaging in secretive behavior, believing that he would not be taken advantage of and be pushed into the background. He was clear about what to do or not to do with the realizations he experienced during the session. Be careful of who you meet halfway and what you tolerate. Because in all the relationships you establish in your social environment, you teach people how to treat you.
An example from another one of my clients was quite interesting. I asked him how he felt about this experience he was going through, and I said, what did it really feel like if he could make a comparison? “I feel like a forgotten half-lemon on the refrigerator’s egg tray because she has put me aside in our relationship and she is moving on.” He said. As he planned to bring the relationship back into balance, he was now ready to explore a whole new era in his life by putting his ego behind him and increasing his self-esteem to fulfill his longing for the lack he experienced in his soul.
Gestalt coaching provides a space of awareness that awakens us from our assumptions, our illusions, so that the consultant is here and now in the session. The past is lived and done, the moment in the process of being lived is now, and from here, it moves into the future.
As you will see in the story of my client who talks about the rush he has experienced in his heart, while the first spring came into his life and he wanted to bloom, focus on the chirping sound of life. The emotions and the experiences that created those feelings came from the person’s past or his/ her worries about the future. A couple who has a strong desire for intimacy in their relationship worries whether they can use their potential after a disappointment. We reflect each other in our relationships.
In a coaching session, where my client expressed that his “thoughts were constantly in question marks”, that he was “generalizing by establishing a cause-and-effect relationship for every detail”, he continued to say that he “did not know which one was real”. The quick result we accomplished with the gestalt approach took only twenty minutes of our time.
He felt like he was trapped in a mirror room. This couple’s happy news they shared with me after the session was incredible for me, as well. After our Coaching session on the phone, his relationship took on a real dimension with these sentences he said to his girlfriend. “Your presence helps me move forward in my life, I am very happy with your attention, compassion, love, and understanding in me, you cheer up my soul.”
Never lose your honor, joy, courage and always be at the center of your life. Don’t leave your throne; break out of limited perceptions and gain multiple perspectives. That is when you live without fear of what you have left behind, without chasing life. Everyone experiences their life as much as their consciousness. To be an Eagle, a coach who finds a way to be an Eagle, the gestalt approach in coaching is essential.
Through many examples, we talked about the gestalt coaching approach in this article. I am asking you, hoping that it will help you with whatever you are going through today.
What do you think you are lucky to have?
What would you want luck to look like in your life?
What does this mean?
Now embody your imagination. What does it feel like to embody what you imagined?
How do you feel now? Can you stay with this feeling?
I share with you a cloverleaf with all my heartfelt love, may luck be with you.
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