Coaching Comment

Susan (her real name), a fun-loving and intelligent woman in her late 30s, will tell you “I was diagnosed as bi-polar at the age of eleven, and put straight onto medication”. She then goes on to say that she spent the following 20 years of her life in an emotional mess, a drug and ignorance induced ‘fug’, unable to work and on multiple government benefits. She was struggling and failing to live any semblance of a happy life, was under psychiatric supervision, and living with endless counselling and CBT appointments.

She called Powerchange, having been recommended to seek our coaching by a friend. We had several Therapeutic Coaching appointments, during which she experienced the powerful effects of Auto Response Psychology and began to regain significant control of her life. In the following year joined our GOLD Coach Training programme and came steadily off all her medication.

As you can read in her email on this page, she is now ‘spreading the joy’, free from the damage of her early years, and is such a lovely fun, relaxed and sparky person to be with. Children love her. So do adults.

Susan has withheld her surname to protect the identity of the children she mentions in her email, but if you would like to speak to her, just let us know and we can put her in touch with you.

Susan is a Music Teacher who lived with ‘bi-polar’ for 20 years! She writes:

Just thought I’d tell you about something that happened at school yesterday. These days I quite often intentionally coach in the classroom situation, either coaching the whole class, or an individual.

I have a girl, I’ll call her Rosie, in class 5 at one of the schools, so she is 9-10 years old. She has always been quite fearful of singing to the class, she will sing with the class, but wouldn’t sing to the class, such as if we were singing a short line to a song each or something. I will never push a child to sing, yet will encourage them to try. Well Rosie had written a song with two other children, Joseph and Sonia. All 3 weren’t keen on the idea of performing it. With Rosie though, you could see the fear in her eyes at the idea of singing, I felt it was a phobia on some level, not just a ‘being shy’ thing.

So I talked to the whole class about fear, about spiders (and talked about how scary it was for the spider, and how I felt sorry for it. I had the class laughing). I then spoke to Rosie about how I wasn’t going to force her, and I hope she understood that, that it was ok not to do it. I also asked her what it was she was afraid of about being at the front singing.

Others in this class (there are about 3 or 4 who seem to be anxious about the idea of singing where they might be exposed), felt that it was the singing which was scary, not just being at the front performing. I asked Rosie what the worst was that could happen. She thought about this, one of those long ‘thinks’, yet couldn’t say. (I felt that she was beginning to wonder if there was anything to be afraid of).

I then asked if she was afraid of people laughing, she thought she might be. I asked her permission for the class to laugh and see how it felt, she gave me that permission, so we did! She admitted that actually, that was fine, nothing awful happened. I also did some coaching with Sonia around the same thing (flitting a bit from one to the other, and others around the class to, so as not to make Rosie feel exposed, though I did sense she was fine with it).

Well I then left it as that, again giving them permission not to do it, but saying that I thought it was a great song, and that the class would love to hear it. When it came to performing, that group were the first to volunteer! They did it! They not only did it, but Rosie has a fantastic voice, and the other two sing nicely too. Rosie changed, her eyes lit up, the fear was gone, she was SO pleased with herself.

The whole class who’d witnessed this and become part of the process clapped the group. I asked Rosie “what is that like?” She kind of chuckled and said something like ‘great’ and then later in the lesson, “I just don’t feel scared anymore”. To me it’s not just about singing, that is great, but some of these children often fear being asked to do other things in class. I believe that moment will be life changing for her, and for others in the class to.

At the end of the lesson, I release this particular class back to parents. Rosie ran across the playground to her Mum, I could see her, still beaming, excitedly telling her Mum what had happened.

A very successful lesson.