How Coaching Uses Brain Science

Many of us feel that regardless of how many different books we read or podcasts we listen to, or how hard we focus on what we want or how much we practice new habits, our excitement dims and we end up feeling the same after a while: negative emotions creep in, and we’re back to feeling unfulfilled and without purpose.

Coaching changes those patterns with the help of neuroscience.

The coaching methods I use are influenced by positive psychology, mindfulness, immunity to change, improvisation, and other behavioral science frameworks. Studies have proven that these methods, over time, help clients move out of a reactive state and create new possibilities for moving forward by building new neural pathways that make their brain literally rewire itself.

When other goal-setting methods fail, neuroscience works, and the proof is in the research. Co-Active Training Institute’s (where I’m certified) white paper by Harvard Medical School states: “a 2010 fMRI study at Case Western Reserve University found that when subjects spent 30 minutes talking about their desired personal vision, the parts of their brain ‘associated with cognitive, perceptual, and emotional openness and better functioning’ were activated.”

In other words, coaching moves us out of our survival brain (where so many of us exist on the daily) which is meant to protect us in childhood but in adulthood keeps us playing small and acts as our inner critic, and into the part of our brain where compassion, joy, love, peace and empathy for ourselves and others lives. We stop being motivated by this critical voice and negative emotions and start taking action from a place of inner acceptance and authority.

This is where true transformation exists.