Teach Strategically so the Client can Thrive
There’s a lot to consider when teaching skills to clients. Over time the choices of what to teach when and the strategy for doing so become easier to determine. Initially, it can feel like an overwhelming task, and it can even feel tempting to follow the lead established by The Present of Presence, teaching Setting the Chakras (all 9 of them) and Grounding, and then moving one by one through the skills offered in CLEAR. While that works well for a training business, such as EHI, it is not how I do things with my private practice.
Here’s some other considerations:
- Someone who is new to energy work, the chakras and aura, may not be prepared to jump in to Destroying Contracts. That may be too big a leap mentally, emotionally and for the client’s belief systems to tolerate.
- Teaching skills is all about engagement, commitment and compliance. If you teach something the client is not prepared to do, they won’t practice or spend time deepening their relationship to self-care. Other skills become more difficult to teach because the client has not invested in what you’ve already taught.
- What appears to be a critical client need may or may not be the first thing you address. For example, teaching someone how to Repair Rips, Tears and Holes in their aura so that they can have fewer beings and entities in their field is less important than teaching them basic skills for embodiment.
- Simple skills that tend to have significant impact quickly may be a better place to begin than a more complex skill that gradually unwinds a pattern or behavior.
Rules of thumb
Here’s some important thoughts about developing a skills protocol for your clients.
- Tie the skills to the client case. If the issues correlate to the 2nd and 3rd chakra, avoid asking them to clear the 5th and 6th chakra. It’s not that they won’t benefit from clearing those chakras, it’s that you want the client to focus on the work at hand, and then to move into other chakras as they gain agency with clearing energy and are seeing the benefits occurring as their patterns or behaviors begin to shift and evolve.
- Rely heavily on the Formula for Evolution as a guide for helping your clients to understand the role of observation and conscious awareness, clearing and resetting, and owning their behaviors, experiences and choices. [You can buy the Formula for Evolution poster in 2 different sizes for your practice space. You’ll be offered the links for practice tools near the end of the program.]
- Ensure that the chakra settings are in place before having the client clear energy. If the second chakra is flooding their energy body with other people’s emotions, the task of clearing is endless and fruitless. Until the second chakra begins to regulate, the flooding is going to be a perpetual issue.
- People relate more easily to chakras than the aura (think about your own experience and things you’ve said during office hours). I repeatedly hear practitioners (and clients) speak of their relative ease working with chakras, and the lack of perception and sensation when working in the aura.
- In general, interrupting an active pattern, behavior or emotion is done through the chakras, because they’re metabolizing the energy that is being used to generate the pattern right now.
- Unwinding and eliminating a pattern, behavior or overwhelming emotion is done through working in the aura, primarily with Programming, Agreements, Karma and Contracts. Thus, starting clients with chakra clearing skills is usually more viable and generates better initial results than beginning with the big 4 skills used to evolve the aura.
- Choose ‘low hanging fruit’ — difficult emotions, issues with family members, toxic patterns or themes, or a behavior or feeling that a client deeply wants to change. Keeping things relatively simple in the beginning so that the client is focused on one important evolution vs. a laundry list of wants and interests allows the client to make genuine progress, and for you to monitor the case efficiently, watching to see the level of effort made on the client’s end, and the results of his or her work.
- Listen to your client’s unfolding stories at each intake to connect the dots to other people, experiences where s/he is acting out the pattern or behavior that is being worked on. Add the names of the people to the clearing practices, “let’s now ‘say hello’ to your boss Michael, along with your mother and grandmother, since he invalidates you the same way they do.” This reinforces the need for the skills, and helps the client to observe him or herself more carefully to look for other places where the behaviors are playing out.
- Teach as few skills as possible at a time. Again, no need to teach all 9 chakra settings if embodiment is the presenting issue. Focus on the feet, crown, 2nd and hand chakras (using your pendulum to determine whether or not the hands are contributing to the embodiment problem). Teaching all 4 major aura clearing skills at one time does not allow people to sink in to the work. Which skill is most important right now? (When the issue is behavioral/emotional patterns, I usually end up teaching Programming before the other 3 major aura skills. If there are people/relationship issues, I teach Agreements, possibly Contracts before the other aura skills.)
From Skills to Protocol
Consider a protocol. What is a protocol?
A protocol is a series of skills, taught in a specific order, anchored by an intention for evolving the chakras and aura and helping the client find new ways of behaving, responding, being.
It’s not that you’d teach the protocol all at once, you’d break it down into smaller chunks, but building the essential skills as a protocol helps the client integrate the work as you continue to monitor progression on the case.
If you’re clever, you’ll learn how to create mp3 guided meditations for your clients so that they can apply a protocol in their practice that you create (and charge them for). Aim for a 20-25 minute protocol, nothing longer than that or it won’t get used. If you bug me, I’ll create a standalone module on this topic. I’ve built it, just don’t know how many people want it. If you do, let me know through office hours, or through one of the discussion forums. If I get enough requests, I’ll add it to the program development schedule.
Teaching Skills to Clients works most effectively when you ‘sell’ the skills. How do you do that? You present the skill as a solution to the client’s problem or issue. Something like this:
We’ve discussed how your negative self-talk is really not you, it’s internalized messages from the way your mother spoke with you as a child. She told you that you weren’t smart enough or pretty enough to succeed in life. You find yourself denigrating your looks, your skills and abilities, as if her words are true about you. As a young, impressionable child, you took on and held your mother’s invalidation through the 2nd chakra, the seat of the emotions. Over time, your energy becomes unable to tell what is yours and what belongs to others. [problem identification]
Today, I’m going to teach you how to work in your chakras to give back negative messaging that isn’t yours, and then how to clear the invalidation that comes directly from you. We’re going to separate your mother’s energy from yours, and return her energy through a wonderful skill called Mine vs. Not Mine. Then, we’ll use the Clearing Emotional Energy skill to release self-invalidation in your 2nd and 6th chakras. We’re using the sixth chakra because of the ways that you’ve described the negative mental spirals you can sink into, and the second chakra because of its role in housing and metabolizing our emotions. [solution identification]
As you practice these two skills together, you’ll free yourself from your mother’s invalidation of you, and the self- invalidation that she inadvertently taught and reinforced in you. As you clear this energy out, you’ll find yourself operating with new levels of self-respect, and you’ll be able to honor and validate Who You Are. [benefit or payoff]
Teach, Guide, Coach
Your role with Teaching Skills to Clients is three-fold.
Teach: You ‘sell the skill’ and teach the client what to do and how to do it. Follow the skill up with an email with a pdf attachment of the skill. Teaching is the sales model you just examined. Problem identification + Solution identification = Benefit or payoff. That’s a very simple, effective sales model, that has nothing to do with revenue or deal-making! [You can use EHI’s branded self-care skills, or purchase a package of skills branded with your business name and logo. You’ll see more about this in the final program communications.]
Guide: Always have the client practice the skills you’re teaching during the client session. Depending on the client, you may choose to teach the skills before you have them lie on the table for clearing work. Or, if they’re always perky and full of energy when a session is completed, you may want to teach the clearing skills then. Either way, sell the skill, then patiently guide them through it. If you need to figure out how to do so, go back to any one of the CLEAR skills, and listen to the mp3 meditation. As you listen, notice the voice modulation, the pacing, the silence, the teaching that occurs during the meditation process. Think about what is important to convey to your clients as you identify skills you’d like them to use in their self-care practice. Be sure to break down the skill into simple steps that you lead the client through one at a time, pausing to allow the work to take place. Your choice of words, naming the emotions, patterns, people are also important. Teach the words, ‘say hello’ to activate the energy for clearing. Use the appropriate skill name so that you’re creating common language between you and the client. If the client is led through the skill while in the office with you, s/he will have more confidence to try it in a meditation at home.
Coach: Every subsequent session is an opportunity to reinforce and coach the use of the skills. When a client tells you a story related to the case, you can ask which skill would be most effective for working on the interaction or experience. You can ask questions about how the home application of the skills is going. you can ask specific questions based on their progression with the work you’re doing together. If you’re noticing significant changes in how their energy is running, or a chakra setting or rotation, you can reinforce their use of the skills and validate their progress. You can coach the client to increase the frequency or amount of time they’re spending clearing, or help them tie together stories that they think are separate and unrelated, and then offer the important skills to manage the client’s reactivity, enrollment, choice or behavior.
Next steps:
Proceed to the next Topic to watch the video to prepare for the Teaching Skills demonstration video.