Triage vs. Transformation
One of the best decisions you can make is to seek outside help when you’re in a painful situation or stuck in a non-productive cycle.
And, it helps to have eyes on exactly what it is you want out of the partnership, and for yourself, as a result of the work you do together. Your mindset, your intentions, and your awareness will all determine how effective working with a new coach or practitioner, or starting a new practice, will be.
There are many reasons to partner with a practitioner or mentor, and of course there’s a ton of nuance in how each individual journey unfolds. But, generally speaking, I find that these partnerships tend to fall into one of three broad categories along a continuum of themes.
Healing >>>>>>> Skill Building >>>>>>> Transformation
On the far left, you have Healing. This is when you might have some sort of emergency, an acute challenge, or chronic pain that needs to be addressed. You can think of this area as the “repair” bucket; you have to do some triage in order to get back to your normal. For people seeking the help of a practitioner with healing, the priority is relief over any higher-level work. Typically, there’s a bunch of “noise” in the system (pain, distress, emotions running high, etc.), and there’s simply not space for the higher-level work of learning something new. For some, just getting relief is all they want or need and the journey ends there.
In the middle is Skill-Building. Building higher-level skills through bodywork, coaching, and the like is a great practice when there’s not an emergency. It can also be a natural place to come to completion once initial healing or triage work is complete, to help stabilize your System and avoid slipping back into distress (think PT exercises post-surgery, or the development of Mindful Movement skills while seeing a Rolfer). Skill-building is the beginning of wanting something more in your life – anything from better stress-coping skills to being more present in your day-to-day to learning new tools for optimal body mechanics.
As a practice, I tend to consistently nudge my “healing” clients into the skill-building phase, in the form of practices they can take out into their worlds to stabilize their Systems and help them integrate the work we’ve done into something deeper. This helps them create a higher baseline of overall wellness and gets them thinking proactively about how to have a more empowered physical, mental, or emotional ongoing state. And, it tends to keep them from coming back to see me as frequently for healing work!
On the far right of this continuum is Transformation. For some, the process of bodywork or mindfulness-driven work is a lever they use to catapult themselves toward deeper change and purpose. This is where you’re ready to take the healing and skills you’ve developed and put them into real action to make change in your world. This type of work often takes on the look of a longer-term mentoring relationship, where client and practitioner are devising thoughtful experiments, working through the feedback loops together, and refining along the way. It’s not all love and light in this space; most often there’s a constant spiraling back through new versions of earlier challenges and themes in the work. I tell my clients who are in the mindset of doing transformative work that the minute you decide to go this route, all your gnarly stuff will come up and try to stop you. It can be an arduous path, but it’s tremendously rewarding too.
Stepping into this mix, we usually have a clear starting point on the continuum in mind, but that doesn’t mean things stop there. Very often a healing or mentoring partnership will progress in a semi-linear fashion from one stage to the next, and at times the work bounces back and forth from area to area within this continuum, depending on the client’s particular needs, experience, and resources in any given moment. And sometimes there is a clear-cut focus on one specific area; not every person who wants pain relief is interested in or destined for transformation.
If you are considering working with someone to heal or create change in your life, take a few minutes to assess and understand where you may be on this continuum. Ask yourself the following discovery questions so you can get the most out of your work:
How do I want to feel on the other side of this work? Do I want things to get back to “normal” or do I want something to be completely different than what I already know?
Is it important for me to rest into a practitioner’s expertise and let them direct? Or is it important for me to assert my experience?
Am I looking for short-term relief or am I more interested in establishing a consistent practice?
What’s my level of awareness of my System and what’s happening within it? Am I inspired to dig deeper or not?
Am I motivated to work through my growth edges on a regular basis?
What kind of help do I specifically need?
Whatever bucket you find yourself in is perfect. Not everyone is interested in or ready for a transformative journey, and it’s OK to simply seek relief from chronic pain or stress and to save the bigger stuff for later. It’s also OK to hover in the middle and build your toolbox for future challenges.
Wherever you may be, I applaud you for taking the time to be intentional around experiencing a new and better way of being for you.