This Wednesday I started what is the beginning of an exciting adventure. I’m already one day of training into a 3 day training on the Spiritual Life Coaching Model. I’m giving up two days of office work, and 1/2 of my only day off to make it happen. I’ll get to do this once a month for the next 6 months, and I’m doing it along with all the pastors on staff at Trinity. It’s definitely a breaking of old “pastoral counseling” habits, and a relearning of relationships.
Coaching is defined as a powerful partnership designed to promote and forward the lifelong process of growth, effectiveness and achievement around a God-given purpose. Life Coaches are committed to helping all those who are around them perform at their best, while reaching their full potential in Christ. Life Coaching is about serving others while expanding your own personal horizon in a grand space of creativity.
Over the past two years, our Senior Pastor has become certified as a Life Coach through the Coaches Training Institute (CTI.) CTI is the first ICF-accredited and the largest coach training organization in the world. It is however, NOT a Christian coaching network. Since our pastors recent completion of his 2-year certification process, he began to develop (based on the CTI model of coaching) a Spiritual Life Coaching model. So I’m working through a manual that he has designed, along with the book Co-Active Coaching. I’m the coaching guinea pig! I’ve got lots of reading homework, and I’ll be actively pursing a coaching client willing to let me practice on them. I really do love learning, and it’s been way too long since I’ve had an expectation of learning put on me.
I’m excited for what this can do for me both personally and what it will allow me to pour into those I’m called to serve. It’s been a frustration of mine for years that I’m expected to biblically counsel those in and around our church, when in all seriousness I’m severely unqualified to do so; in the counseling sense. It is my prayer that being able to have a posture of coaching when working with others will allow me to discover new opportunities for releasing the potential in those around me.
Stay tuned for more as I journey down this road…
