Heal to Thrive – The 3SUM of Life

A Coaching Model By Ziad Hamdan, Life Coach, SPAIN

Heal to Thrive

My coaching model was born from my own experience.

I believe in personal development and growth.

I made this my daily objective:

Every day is an opportunity for me to become a better version of myself.

Up to now, my life was so intense; especially that throughout my 40 years of experience my deepest value was being open. Open to experiences, Open to people, Open to myself. I never wanted to be put in a box.

Clients:

My clients are like me. I will call them YOU in the coming lines as I am talking here to YOU.

YOU want to grow.

YOU don’t settle for what society tells YOU is “good”.

YOU want to keep learning, keep evolving.

YOU like movement & action.

YOU question YOURself and YOUr surrounding circumstances constantly & consistently.

YOU don’t want to change the world. YOU want to start by changing YOURself. The world, at least the one that surrounds YOU, will follow.

YOU don’t live in a specific country or region. Like me, YOU are “a citizen of the world”.

I personally was born in Lebanon, studied and worked in France for 15 years, currently living in Spain. I have worked in 13 different countries for more than 25 companies in several sectors. I traveled to more than 40 countries which allows me to easily relate to beings in all the corners of the world.

YOUr characteristics are beyond gender, age, specific countries, business sectors, social status (rich, poor, married, single, divorced, etc.), professional background…

YOU can be an employee seeking change,

YOU can be an artist seeking structures,

YOU can be an entrepreneur seeking grounding,

YOU can be a business owner seeking meaning,

YOU can be a leader wanting to strengthen YOUr leadership skills.

YOU all believe you have a huge unlocked potential inside of you.

Objectives:

YOU all have in common YOUr desire & commitment to grow, evolve, thrive & unlock YOUr potential and I can help YOU:

• Find YOUr purpose in life or what I call YOUr “driving priority of the moment”
• Navigate uncertainty with grace & fun
• Embrace change with courage
• Create nurturing relationships, starting with YOURself
• Overcome YOUr limiting beliefs
• Live up to YOUr potential, in the way YOU find best for YOU.

The Model: Heal to Thrive – The 3SUM of Life

I learned it the hard way and my purpose is to make it easier for YOU.

As a consultant, most of my assignments were to help companies grow.

We used to follow a simple, yet powerful 3-steps methodology:

1. we draw a picture of the current situation
2. we set the ambition
3. we define the best way that could lead us to our ambition.

It does make sense.

To know where we want to go, we need to start by understanding where we stand now. Funnily enough, I never thought of applying this methodology to myself although I lacked confidence in my ambition and kept questioning it.

The reason why it is difficult to apply this methodology to oneself is that in our autopilot mode (which represents 97% of our day according to the research), we are blurred by all our limiting beliefs, our daily patterns, our internal saboteurs that are rooted in us from our childhood, even more, from our ancestors.

So the 1st objective of my model which aims to make YOU thrive is to help YOU heal. 

Some might feel annoyed by the verb “heal” (not YOU of course!):

• They might say: “I am not sick to need to heal, I don’t have trauma”
• They might think: “you (i.e. me) are not a therapist to help me heal”

To those I say, I am not a therapist. I am just a coach.

According to the ICA (my school) definition, “coaching involves a dialogue between a coach and a client with the aim of supporting the client to reach a goal. It blends the best concepts from business, psychology, philosophy, sports, and spirituality. But, while coaching borrows heavily from those practices, it is a distinctly different support role from that of a consultant, therapist, or mentor. A coach will be an advocate, a sounding board, a cheerleader, an accountability partner, a truth-teller, and a supporter. He will help his clients to discover the answers within themselves.”

Healing in the case of my model does not refer to the traditional concept of trauma which is defined as being the result of deeply catastrophic events. The healing I am talking about refers to what Dr. Nicole Lepera defines in her book called “how to do the work” as follows:

“Traumatic experiences aren’t always obvious. Our perception of the trauma is just as valid as the trauma itself. This is especially true in childhood when we are most helpless and dependent. Trauma occurred when we consistently betrayed ourselves for love and were consistently treated in a way that made us feel unworthy or unacceptable resulting in a severed connection to our authentic Selves. Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive”.

Pillar 1: heal

The first few sessions in YOUr journey will be used to establish the relationship between us and create a space of trust and harmony that will help you open up and be fully committed to the coaching process with me.

Once you have this coaching space, we initiate the exploration.

It won’t be a straightforward journey. Some sessions will be smoother than others. The objective of the exploration is to raise your awareness of your conditioning (like everyone) in which beliefs and behaviors are unconsciously imprinted in us.

Imagine we have a small shovel and we are trying to transfer as much sand as we can from the sea of your unconsciousness to the one of your consciousness. A laborial process, no?

The main tool that we will use in our exploration is what I call the “3sum of life”.

No, I am not referring here to any sexual act (I am sure YOU did not think that too).

In math (the computational complexity theory), the 3SUM problem asks if a given set of n real numbers contains three elements that sum to zero.

This is the 3SUM I am referring to. The one that leads us to state zero; to the white paper; to healing.

It is the result of the alignment between our heart, body & mind and it leads to healing.

Close your eyes, and imagine for a second that your heart, body, and mind are aligned. Would you feel hate or emotional confusion? Would you have tension, stress & pain in the body? Would your mind experience overwhelm or uncertainty?

This enlightening state of alignment will bring or may I say will be the result of having love in your heart, relaxation in your body, and clarity in your mind.

These 3 elements (our heart, body & mind) are the most precious tools that we have embedded in us and they are interconnected (this is scientifically proven). On many occasions in my life, the biggest challenge I experienced was the result of a misalignment between what I was feeling, what I was sensing and what I was thinking. More precisely, most of the time it was a fight between what I was feeling and what I was thinking, reflected directly in what I was sensing (impact on my body).

And usually, once I used to be aware of that, bringing alignment to the 3 elements through the body brought peace to my heart, body, and mind

Imagine a fight between heart (intuition, gut) & mind (thoughts, conditioning) in a closed room. The body is the thermometer. The more intense the fight, the higher the temperature is, and vice versa. To lower the fight’s intensity, the key is to regulate the temperature. In the 3sum of life, the key to reaching healing is to raise awareness, then activate the body’s regulation to reach alignment. It is only then that we would move to the next pillar of my model: thrive.

Pillar 2: Thrive

Once you have reached the 3sum of life, we would start the exploration phase of what your authentic Self wants in life. You will start to fill the white page of your life. At this stage, all possibilities are open, you can dream big, and you can do magic. Everything is possible. You have the foundation that you need to unlock your highest potential.

In this pillar, we would explore your values, your strengths, the wheel of life, and many other tools (like visualizations, life pilot, etc.) that will help you structure your approach to reaching your full potential. We would strategize, and explore options and I might challenge you to test your commitment to thrive.

The main tool that we will use here is the power tool: Feeling vs. Thinking. This tool will help you move from your thoughts (and all the parasites that could hang on them) to your feelings that are the closest to what your authentic Self wants but that might be difficult sometimes to identify. I will help you raise your vibrations to better trust your gut and be confident in your intuition.

2 Pillars Heal to Thrive 

In theory, the 2 pillars are distinct & sequential, but in practice, the coaching flow will not be a straight line. It will look more like a spiral where the healing and thriving ideas and topics, as well as obstacles, are in perpetual exploration until the magic happens.