Personal Development

My Sacred Birthday Ritual

August 28, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Birthdays are an important moment – they can become a potent marker of time and of your personal evolution.

So, every year on my birthday I make time for this sacred and soulful ritual. It helps me make meaningful time and space on my special day just for ME. It connects me to my truest self and desires and helps me celebrate in deep ways. It also allows me to gracefully and joyfully let go of one year and powerfully move on to the next.

The ritual is simple, but really quite profound. Here is what I do: READ MORE

One of the Biggest Traps Coaches Fall Into

July 31, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Let’s talk about the difference between coaching & consulting, and how this distinction radically affects your client results and your business.

I’ve seen a trend happening over the last 6 or so years: coaches, teachers and healers are doing less & less coaching, teaching and healing…and more and more consulting.

In other words, practitioners have been shying away from the coaching principles of:
READ MORE

6 Actions to Improve Your Client Sessions Before the End of the Year

July 29, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Even though I’ve been coaching and facilitating transformation for nearly twenty years now, my answer to the question: “What is the one thing in your business that has the potential to make you cringe the most?” would be the same today as it was twenty years.

The thing in my business that has the potential to make me cringe the most is the thought that I am not supporting my clients in the most valuable and masterful ways possible.

This is more important to me than anything else – than marketing success, than visibility, that income.

For me, providing exquisite and highly skilled service, as well as transformation, is BAR NONE.

If you feel the same way I do, then I’m so happy to share this article with you! READ MORE

My Worst Client Case Study + How You Can Learn From Yours

July 27, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Just like everyone else, I’ve had some doozy client situations. What has really helped me become better and better and better as a practitioner is being willing to look closely and assess carefully client cases that aren’t working so well…even if it’s uncomfortable – almost painful! – to do so! (This is why in my coach trainings, we always have Client Case Clinics to look at the stuff that comes up).

I thought it would be valuable for you if I shared my Worst Client Case Study, and what I learned from it. Here we go!:

4 Tips for Effective & Transformational Exercises

July 24, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

One of the things people ask me most when they come to me for support on facilitation and curriculum techniques is “How can I create more effective transformational exercises?”

I love teaching about this because knowing how to masterfully craft exercises that move your participants is KEY to co-creating results and deep learning.

Yet, too often teachers and facilitators don’t quite get it right.

And when you don’t get it right, your exercises come off as trite, too surface oriented, misplaced or just plain weird.

There are a lot of components that are necessary for an exercise to work REALLY well, and this includes a very important piece about how you set up your curriculum throughout your workshop, class or retreat.

We’ll get to Curriculum Development soon, but for now, I wanted to share a few tips on what you can do within the exercises themselves to make them more powerful, more effective, and more moving.

Your Positive Thinking is Harming Your Clients

July 22, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

I know, I know – Positive Thinking is a good thing. I admire and have learned a lot from those who naturally have a positive outlook on life. For better or worse, I did not grow up in an environment that modeled any kind of positive thinking. In fact, quite the opposite. I grew up with two immigrant parents whose own parents had survived the Holocaust. My parents trusted no one, always expected the worst, and because of their own trauma, they were perceiving a constant threat of annihilation. It was kind of like living in Catastrophic Thinking Central.

Needless to say, my proclivity towards the negative (& my neurotic quirks!) speak for themselves!

In my early 20s, I learned about the power of looking through more hopeful and happier lenses, and I’ve been dutifully working on my own positive thinking ever since. I find it powerful and very helpful.

BUT.

And this is a HUGE “But”…

This Coaching Standard Does More Harm Than Good

July 17, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Over the summer, I had a private session with a client who had been in session with her healer the week before.

My client was telling me that her Healer had intuited that she needed to go to the beach for a week. It sounded like a good idea to my client because she trusts this healer’s intuition, yet she told him she was feeling stressed out and pressured because she just couldn’t figure out how to make a week away that month fit with her life.

The Integrity and Depth Principles

July 15, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

I often get asked how I’ve been able to grow and sustain such a thriving business, with so many hard core fans, happy clients, and referrals.

The answer? Well, it’s not just one thing (if only!). It’s been a number of things, but one of the biggest is that I approach all of my client work with what I call The Integrity and Depth Principles.

Integrity and Depth are at the core of creating an environment that motivates your clients to trust you deeply, be vulnerable, explore the parts of themselves they otherwise would ignore or reject, see their Truth with clarity, and be willing to take bold, aligned actions.

Integrity and Depth also allow your clients to see you as the practitioner they have profound confidence in, an individual they cherish and want to do their soul work with.

Over the next week or two, I’ll share some of these principles with you. Here are the first 2!:

1. Love all of your Client’s Parts (this is not as easy as you might think)

A big integrity issue as well as transformational skill is the ability to fully love ALL of your clients’ parts: not just their brilliance or their motivation or their kindness. But also their judgmentalness or their laziness or their victim selves or their jealousy.

When you are passing judgment or uncomfortable with or scared of an action your client has taken or a way that they are showing up either in the world or with you…your client can feel it.

Even if you don’t say a word about it, your client feels the judgment or fear, and as a result your client either feels shame or resentment or defensiveness. It does not create an environment of trust and willingness to look honestly at issues.
Practitioners are able to go deep and act in full integrity (i.e. guide clients to make the most aligned decisions) when they are able to love and accept each and every aspect their client shows up with…even if the client shows up in anger or resistance to the practitioner herself.

But it’s not so easy to do this.

It’s not so easy to truly love and accept all of your client’s parts, especially when they show up in a way that has you feel you’re not doing a good job, or in a way that challenges your own belief & judgment system.

It takes deep inner work around Accepting Yourself, Managing Your Own Triggers, and also Checking Your Biases and Filters so that you can show up fully present for all your client brings to the table.

2. Be Willing to Be Wrong

We’ve all witnessed this: a practitioner who is “GURUing” their client.

A big mistake I see practitioners make is that they offer an opinion to a client – either about a situation or an inner pattern or dynamic in their client – and the opinion simply does not resonate for the client. But the practitioner sticks to her guns – out of fear of being wrong, or out of fear of “not looking smart enough”.

And then one of two things happen:

a) The client ends up feeling unseen and unheard, and often mistrusting the practitioner

OR

b) The client overrides her own inner wisdom, listens to the practitioner, and ends up taking actions that are misaligned for her.

It sounds easy enough to Be Willing to Be Wrong, but in fact, most practitioners need more work on this one. It requires deep work Befriending Your Own Fears around being good enough, and being seen as smart & able. It also requires skills work around how to Create Awareness for clients in ways that activate their inner wisdom without “GURUing” them.

Hope these first two Integrity and Depth Principles were helpful and sparked some inner conversation for you! Will share more Principles soon!

6 Tools to Create Deeper Transformation with Your Clients

July 6, 2020 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

In my 15 years of facilitating Transformational Experiences for thousands of individuals and groups, I’ve come to learn that there are certain skills and elements you need to master as a leader and facilitator in order to be successful at creating lasting shifts, healing and real openings for your participants.

In fact, what I’ve come to see is that without these tools, things can go very, very wrong. Your workshops can fall flat or not go deep enough, or someone in the group will dominate and upset everyone else, or you will misuse your energy and feel exhausted and spent.

Here is a snapshot of some of the most valuable tools I’ve developed over hundreds and hundreds of rituals and workshops:

Inanna’s Descent and You

November 18, 2019 by Joanna Lindenbaum Leave a Comment

Every Autumn for the last 18 years, I’ve spent time working with the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent. It’s work that becomes deeper and deeper, more and more meaningful and profound each cycle I focus on it.

The myth of Inanna is one of the oldest myths we know of. Inanna, being the Queen of Heaven & Earth, was a goddess with power and respect and clout and status.