Today I passed my ICF ACC certification.
These past few days, I've felt it more and more strongly: attachment is everywhere, and so are the chances to notice my own attachment.
I keep turning over the question of how to hold the relationship between "getting certified" and the coaching journey as a whole. The certification feels more like a single piece of fruit on a tree by the roadside on my journey: I pick it, I eat it, and it satisfies my hunger.
But the destination or purpose of walking this path was never to eat my fill or satisfy my hunger.
It's to keep following the path onward and experience: Along the way there will be fellow travelers, there will be thorns, and there will be the occasional wild creatures. All of these are simply things that can happen on a journey.
The moment I TRY to push any one of them away, the urge to push becomes attachment: One more pack loaded onto my back, draining me without a sound.
So I've decided to accept and draw all of these elements onto my map. When seen that way, the map actually looks more colorful.
Through the whole journey, the element that feels most central to me is this: to hear another person's voice, and to let them feel that they've truly been heard.
When I was working at a university, teachers would sometimes refer students to me: sometimes the student was resistant, sometimes they weren't very willing to cooperate. Slowly I discovered that what helps most isn't rushing in with a pile of knowledge and advice, but first letting the student feel heard, feel seen, creating some silence. Ever since I began refining my listening, more and more of these students started showing up and opening up more.
This lines up exactly with the heart of coaching.
Too many cases have made me truly feel how important it is to listen to and understand another person, not "listening" in the literal sense of the words they said, but first creating a space in which they feel heard, and letting them experience being heard.
And the precondition for all of this is to offer care to myself first, because only then can I truly serve both others and myself resourcefully.
So this journey has also led me to give myself more care and more awareness.
Before: I used to fix my attention on "Am I providing value to the other person?" and "Do they feel that value?", but that very thought would keep occupying my energy.
After: "Let them go with the wind. I’m holding a bottomless mug. " (I learned to save more of that energy-level care for myself.)
The whole coaching journey has also been helping me see clearly what inner work I still have to do. I can feel that my awareness has grown, and I'm beginning to be able to coach myself through a coach's eyes. When I feel these inner resources starting to hold me up, I find I have more strength to support more people.
Along this path, I've come to see my blind spots one by one. For instance, the old me didn't much like unfilled silence of time, I was coming from a tech background, I was used to prizing results, always pushing myself to reach the outcome I'd envisioned, and that led to a good deal of attachment.
I've realized that when I first started coaching, I was actually still chasing "the ultimate result for the client": whether they were satisfied, how much I'd helped, and so on. It was easy to get pulled off course by those expectations.
But once I gave my own inner gremlins a little bit of being seen, things became a lot more at ease.
And now I understand it more deeply: every coaching session is also helping me cross, the very lessons I came to this planet to learn, and give back to these coachees.
This reminds me of a dream I had last month. I found that dream was deeply insightful: In it, a stranger on a boat told me: "Allowance creates more space." It felt remarkably real. Ever since, whenever I catch myself pushing for results, I remind myself to allow more to give more room to myself: to my own emotions, my decisions, my actions.
And when a client responds in their own, different way, I offer them that same allowing, that same room to be.
No attachment.
About Ziwei (Fan) Braunstein, ACC, BCH
As a certified ACC coach and hypnotherapist, Ziwei has a passion for supporting people. She is a firm believer that everyone has their own talents; if the strengths were not seen, it's because the environment has no the capacity to ignite them yet. To follow and connect with Ziwei on LinkedIn, visit her profile.