News & Blog

Integrating Mindfulness into Coaching: Three Mindfulness Practices to Employ in Coaching

May 19, 2021

When we realize the fact that everything changes and can find our composure in it, that is the fruition of the practice.” – Master Suzuki Roshi

What is mindfulness and how can we bring it into our coaching practice? In this session, Alison Whitmire, President of Learning in Action, offers the benefits of incorporating mindfulness in our coaching and shares three practical exercises we can use with our clients for a deeper and more meaningful coaching experience.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is defined in many different ways by various people. When we break it down, it comes to purposely attending to our present moment experience with acceptance or without judgment. We can point to the three core components of mindfulness as present moment awareness, being on purpose, and accepting our experience. Meditation comes in as the practice we use to develop mindfulness.

Benefits of Mindfulness

How is mindfulness beneficial to our coaching clients? Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which was started by Jon Kabat-Zinn in a hospital in Massachusetts over twenty years ago, has been studied in a clinical setting for decades. Research provides evidence that mindfulness reduces emotional exhaustion, stress, depression, and anxiety. It also improves feelings of accomplishment, self-compassion, the quality of our sleep, and relaxation.

In these incredibly uncertain and challenging times, mindfulness can give our clients the ability to maintain a degree of buoyancy or a sense of resilience and spaciousness that they would find difficult to access otherwise. This is what we are looking to foster with our clients: the ability to be with what is, no matter the circumstances.

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Using the RAIN Method to Support Mindful Relationships

July 9, 2020

Our relationships are perhaps the single most important aspect of our lives. Yet many of us still find it challenging to heal severed or damaged relationships and maintain strong connections. Being mindful in relationships is the work of bringing presence and acceptance and conscious awareness to the most difficult aspects of our relationships to begin to heal the relational divides with ourselves and others.

Being mindful in relationships is the work of bringing presence and acceptance and conscious awareness to the most difficult aspects of our relationships to begin to heal the relational divides with ourselves and others. Click To Tweet

One means to support ourselves in having mindful relationships is the RAIN method — a mindfulness process to use when triggered or when experiencing intense or difficult emotions. We can use the practice of RAIN to awaken us from our reactivity and our non-conscious, habituated patterns to be more mindful, particularly in relationships.

What Is the RAIN Method?

The RAIN method was introduced 20 years ago by Vipassana teacher Michele McDonald and has built upon by Buddhist meditation teacher, Tara Brach. In the context of our connection with others, RAIN is a very specific way of giving ourselves what we need to feel accepted, appreciated and loved so that we can give them to others. (more…)

Awakenings: What does that mean that “I need help?”

May 22, 2020

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”

― Brené Brown

Many of the narratives that have emerged from amid the COVID-19 pandemic revolve around needing help and what that means.

In a recent conversation with a business owner and colleague who, like many, is struggling, he said, “I’m not used to needing help. I’m used to helping. What does that mean that I need help? I thought I was beyond that.”

Let’s think about the implied judgment around those who need help or those who give help. Does it feel out of balance, like there’s perhaps a higher or lower relationship in each role? Or can there be an equality to it, of sharing the same experience?

Perhaps the universe wants us to wake up to our connectedness. To wake us up to how we’re all similar. To wake us up to what we have in common. To wake us up to our humanity.

What meaning are you making of this? Is it challenging to ask for help? If so, what makes it challenging? What have you learned from helping others or asking for help during this time? Watch today’s Awakenings video and share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

P.S. If you’d like to take a step back with us, reflect and make meaning to begin to transform your experience, sign up to receive the Awakenings series along with a free guided journal page to your email every week. Sign up here.

Awakenings Amid a Quarantine: Reconnecting with Our True Selves

May 20, 2020

As the world changes — for many of us daily life pared to the essentials — with less travel and shuttling back and forth to the office, gym, kids’ practices and social engagements, we find ourselves adapting as well.

Have you noticed that conversations with friends, family, clients and colleagues have become more real? More truthful and authentic? That they are saying things you’ve never heard them say before?

We at Learning in Action have tuned into this wisdom and truth in the everyday language of people everywhere in the past few weeks of quarantine, and it inspired us to launch this new Heal the Divide video miniseries, “Awakenings.” We invite and encourage you to explore this awakening with us. This is how it will work:

First, come as you are. Connect from a place of comfort and sanctuary twice a week for short, 3-6 minute videos, on Sundays and Wednesdays. Wear whatever is comfortable and be ready to take in what the world is trying to communicate and what meaning can be found in what’s happening right now. Each week, we include a downloadable guided journal page where you can write your reflections. And we encourage you to share your reflections or awakening with us!

This series invites and encourages a way for us all to find meaning from this time of uncertainty, together. The series is simple, focusing on this one very important question:

What is this time wanting us to awaken to, in ourselves, each other, the world?

Join us as we take a step back, interpret, make meaning, try to understand the universal why of these times and begin to transform our experience. Sign up to receive Awakenings by email.

Moving Through Fear in an Age of Uncertainty

April 24, 2020

“The best way out is always through.” — Robert Frost

We at Learning in Action are here for our community, and we’re listening deeply to what’s needed in the world right now. And what we’re hearing is that there’s a need for resources and insights for working with fear.

We developed the new video course, “Moving Through Fear,” to help you name, tame and move through the fear of what you may be experiencing and would be so natural to be experiencing during this really challenging time.

Much has been written about how to handle fear of things we can control, like fear of flying, fear of public speaking or even fear of failure. But less is available about how to handle the fear that comes with situations like we’re experiencing now —those over which we have little to no control.

Whether they’re top of mind or running in the background, our questions and doubts can generate fear. Will life ever return to normal? Will I or someone I love get sick? Will I lose my job? What about my financial future?

And so that’s what this article — and the video course — is about. How do we work with fear in the face of great uncertainty?