…as I was imagining how I might present myself as a coach I kept seeing this little bottle of perfume I used to have with three teardrops on one side and on the other side it said “all bad days”. The perfume was named An Air of Despair by a little known niche Indie perfume house called Imaginary Authors. On their website the scent is described as a woody floral musk fragrance for women and men containing notes of cedar, saffron, musk and sadness. The perfumer encourages you to “Embrace your summertime sadness. An Air of Despair will lift you up inside while keeping the outward despondency that makes you so desirable intact.” The little novella clip evoking the scent mood ends in the phrase “it’s not riches that bring happiness but happiness that brings riches.” Unsurprisingly the perfume was discontinued and I had quickly used up the bottle I owned amusing myself by sneakily spraying the back of my boyfriend’s jacket as he left the house. The boyfriend didn’t last long but the memory of the woody saffron infused perfume remained in my body mind along with the phrase “all bad days” which perfectly described the melancholic mood this particular man was so often in.
In my coaching practice of Inner Relationship Focusing we may derive meaning from symbols and images that spontaneously emerge during a session and I might say something like “your body is showing you this image”. As my body was repeatedly showing me the image of the perfume bottle with the phrase all bad days it slowly dawned on me that this could be the answer to my question “how should I present myself as a coach”. I realized that there was something in my human experience that wanted attention and as I paused to get a felt sense of the image and phrase I realized that
it is not that we don’t know what steps need to be taken in order to realize our dreams it is that we don’t have the will to take them. Our trauma keeps us believing that we don’t deserve our own positive regard, that we don’t deserve to be happy. Our internalized unworthiness, our frozen terror and our unexpressed grief haunt our present moments. We have, quite simply, too many bad days.
I started to see that when I offered my clients the relief of befriending the inner critics, inner haters and wounded younger selves with Inner Relationship Focusing their lives naturally progressed from a loving foundation based on authentic emotional expression, spacious awareness, inner compassion and self worth. I didn’t need to teach anyone how to market themselves I needed to teach them how to love themselves.
Just as any method of healing must bend and shape itself to fit the individual (not the other way around) I bend and shape IRF for the comfort of the unique person I am interacting with. The goals brought by you, the client are understood to be the natural progression of the organism that is organized in a more harmonious way. Therefore our goal is to help organize your inner relationship in a way that facilitates flow. We need to build trust with your inner defenders and protectors, compassionately empathize with your younger self and gently clear the emotional stoppages that prevent you from flowing naturally and peacefully toward your goals.