The most important idea in coaching
When I decided to become a life coach, I had no idea how much I’d pull from my background as an acupuncturist.
I pursued coaching after moving to California, where the requirements for acupuncture licensure are more than I was willing to endure at that stage of my career.
Quickly into my coach training, I realized I wouldn’t have to let go of acupuncture completely.
The poking-people-with-needles part would have to stop, but many of the foundational principles of acupuncture are surprisingly similar to those of coaching.
Sometimes it feels like life coaches are pulling right from ancient Chinese medical texts!
The all-important idea
The driving idea behind acupuncture is the same one that guides coaching:
You already possess everything you need to thrive.
Acupuncture does not add or subtract anything. It prompts the body to do what it already knows how to do—heal itself—by shifting energy across a network of meridians.
Similarly, coaching is premised on the assumption that the client is already whole, capable, and complete.
Coaches don’t tell you what to do or give advice. We are partners who help you reconnect with the truth that lives within you. This is a fundamental difference between coaching and therapy.
In the same way acupuncturists use needles to unblock stagnant energy, coaches use powerful questions and actionable tools to pull apart the thoughts and beliefs that are holding you back from what you want.
My light-bulb moment
Noticing the synergies between coaching and acupuncture was a light-bulb moment for me.
It happened early into my coach training, in a session about the essential self (what makes you you).
I was flooded with ideas about how acupuncture—and especially Five Element acupuncture, which offers an elegant system for understanding what makes people tick—could be combined with coaching tools.
Specifically, I realized that coaching, like acupuncture, is a form of energy management.
Most discussions around low energy focus on the obvious zappers: lack of exercise, bad sleep hygiene, junky food, too much screen time, etc.
All of those are important to address. However, coaching offers an opportunity to tackle a deeper, more insidious layer of energy drain that often gets overlooked.
I’m talking about limiting beliefs and misalignment with your true nature. These put junk food and doom scrolling to shame when it comes to draining your energy.
You can exercise and eat vegetables all day long, but if you let your limiting-belief scripts play and your inauthentic life go on, you’re going to be exhausted.
If you want to explore the root causes of your low energy, let’s have a conversation.
