People often ask me how I feel about coaching and I usually respond by saying "I love coaching." I do. I love coaching because I love people and I love communicating at a deep level. I love coaching because it allows me to use my wisdom, my experience, my awareness, my intuition and my coaching skills in service of my client's growth and their transcendence. I love coaching because it affords me an opportunity to experience the opening hearts, evolving minds and growing perspectives of my clients. I love coaching because ultimately it is about love, about service, about compassion and about deep connection. In that space of love, of complete acceptance, of non-judgment, I am blessed by my client's journeys toward their own higher selves and in creating lives of greater ease, greater purpose and greater confidence.

In L.O.V.E I find many of the essential competencies of what I like to call the tools of coaching. L stands for Listen, O for Observe, V for Validate and E for Encourage.

Listening means more than just hearing the spoken words. It means hearing the concerns, the essence, and the beliefs of the client. It means hearing beneath the words. To "hear" in this way requires our full attention, beyond our filters, beyond our expectations and even beyond our brains. It means listening to the silence as well as the words. It means listening to the tone, and the inflection. It means hearing the bigger story. Finally, it means hearing in the moment, not allowing our brains to respond to something in this moment which robs some of our attention for the next. A Shaman once taught me to "listen with the ears of my heart." I find this to be an essential tool of good and effective coaching.

Observing also requires going beyond our external senses in order to be fully present and aware and thereby facilitate greater awareness for our clients. Everything about the client, what they say, what they don't say, what they do, the choices they make in their lives, their emotions and most importantly their energetic presence and responses tell us more and more about who they are. Knowing who they are, their beliefs, their patterns, their values, their gifts and their purpose is what allows us to support them in finding and following their own best choices. Our greatest insights come from being keen observers not just about what our clients say but in how they are responding to their own lives and particularly how they are responding to the space we hold for them in coaching. Our holistic observations of our clients allow us to co create and design with them, an effective road map for the ongoing coaching relationship.

Validating is one of the key ways we as coaches support and respond to what we have heard and observed of our client's. It is the way in which we show the client that we have truly heard them and that we are paying close attention to them and their lives and their issues. We validate by our presence, and by the feedback we give. We validate by the all the ways in which we show understanding. We validate by mirroring. We validate by the compassion and the concern we show for their struggles and challenges. We validate by asking questions that allow them to go deeper, to clarify further and sometimes to change their perspective and point of view. Finally, we validate by honoring and celebrating their progress, their growth and their success's.

Encouraging is another way that we as coach's support our clients growth and self discovery. We do that by attending to the client's agenda and not our own. We do that by reinforcing our client's expressions of their feelings and by our full acceptance of who they are. We do that by recognizing our client's beliefs and values and celebrating and supporting decisions, actions and behaviors which further align our client's with their beliefs and values.

We also encourage by maintaining clear objectives for the client in the coaching relationship and by designing actions that help the client focus and explore their concerns. We promote exploration and we discuss new ideas and approaches. We encourage our clients to challenge themselves and when appropriate we challenge them as well. Finally, we encourage our client's through accountability, by creating plans, establishing goals and following through on them. By doing this we keep the client on track, promote their self discipline and keep the client moving in the direction of their self generated goals.

To me coaching is all about love because love is the essence of true service and coaching is all about service, about growth and awareness and about the evolution of consciousness and the human spirit. It's about caring and believing in each other and in the uniqueness and special ness of each life and each sacred soul. L.O.V.E. Coaching embodies the tools of coaching in a most practical and fundamental way.

The acronym L.O.V.E came to me in a dream or in some state between sleep and fully awake. As I sit here I have received another - Loving Our Very Essence.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep
People are going back and forth through the opening
Where the two worlds meet
The door is round and open
Don't go back to sleep
-by Rumi