The SEEDING

A Coaching Model By Bart van Grinsven, Life Coach, Business Coach, SPAIN

6-Step Process The SEEDING 

The first years of most people’s lives are determined by spontaneity, playfulness, creativity, learning, and progress. In this stage, we tend towards the things that make us feel good and come naturally. We learn from our parents, extended family, siblings, and friends…

Later, when we enter school life, our learning becomes more institutionalized, following an almost pre-scribed one-size-fits-all recipe. We learn to follow the rules, do things the way we are supposed to, and conform.

This kind of learning often comes at the cost of our creativity and spontaneity. Along the way, we lose connection with our intuition and gut feeling.

Life is exciting, everything is new, and we grow and evolve day after day, year after year.

Unfortunately, along the way, we also lose a bit of connection with what we wanted and why we wanted that.

This feeling can creep into your life slowly or enter with a big bang, and it feels pretty discomforting as it raises questions about the sense of your life, why you do what you do and for whom.

But if you take the time to look closer, this discomfort is a beautiful invitation to explore these questions and find out what a good and purposeful life looks like for you.

Putting your current life and your desires under a magnifier and honestly looking at yourself can be a daunting and overwhelming task. At this point, a good coach can serve you to find the answers, so you can use this invitation to reconnect with that little person you once were, but now with a magnificent backpack of talents, skills, and experience(s) to create a fulfilling life of purpose and meaning on your terms.

Because life doesn’t come with a fixed manual, and everyone is different, this requires a bespoke approach in which the outcome is also unique to you.

SEEDING: So How Does This Work Then?

I have developed a coaching 6-step process called SEEDING. Like the natural world, the seed contains all the necessary information to become a beautiful tree. It just needs to be planted in fertile soil, and with enough care, it will grow to be a mighty tree, providing the conditions and ecosystem for other life to thrive alongside its presence.

Stuck & Search

You are at a plateau in your career or business, and you no longer jump out of bed with the passion and energy you had when you first started. This isn’t strange; the circumstances change, people evolve, and their situation evolves, so it is time to take a closer look at where this feeling of being stuck comes from and what needs to change to spark your life up again.

Explore & Experience

To have an accomplished life, everyone needs to feel a sense of connection, purpose, contribution, and self-realization.

We are all born with talents, qualities, and interests that come naturally to us; this is where we find what Gay Hendricks, author of The Big Leap, calls our “zone of genius”.

It is where you find the things you are effortlessly drawn towards. The problem is that too many people stay in the “zone of excellence”, where you find what others have defined as success, and although you can reach high peaks and outstanding achievements, it can make you feel empty—a bit like having climbed the wrong ladder.

When these thoughts enter your mind, they can shake up your whole world and cause you to question the sense of your entire existence.

The good news is; that nothing is lost and everything to be gained.

Once you explore and map out what made you tick when you were young, what your talents are, the moments in which you are so much in the flow that it feels like any sense of time is vanishing, and connect these all together, you are onto the gold nuggets and diamonds.

What would you do if money wasn’t an issue? Something you’d love so much that you’d even do it for free, maybe, or something that you know would make the world better or improve other people’s lives.

How can you use your existing experience, accomplishments, and network to build this kind of life?

Define & Design

An exciting concept to describe this is “ikigai”. Ikigai is a Japanese term that can be summarised as “why you want to jump out of bed in the morning”.

Once you know your “ikigai”, you can start to design the plan for how this can be matched with your (financial) needs and desired lifestyle.

To find it, you need to clarify these four elements: what you are good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for.

Although the financial part of ikigai isn’t the most important; there are many ways other than financially to create value for you and others; in the case of re-designing your life, we need to pay attention to it too, as the lack of financial means would quickly become a source of stress and discomfort. Therefore it is better to create a sustainable plan that takes the monetary part into the equation from the start.

We can design a plan to accommodate your bigger purpose with your talents, skills, experience, passions, needs, and wants to be mapped out.

An essential component of the plan is the routines and habits. I would say they are vital in being successful.

Routines and habits help you designate your energy towards your goals and purpose and support you when things get rough and complicated.

The first set, and maybe the most important of routines to be looked at, are those that support you as a person. These routines enable you to give the best of yourself day in and day out, no matter the circumstances. They are the foundation of your life. We look at what makes you physically and mentally strong so you are up for the task of living your purpose.

Wherever you go, there you are. Jon Kabat-Zinn

The next set of routines supports your business, creating the circumstances that allow you to make optimal use of your energy throughout the day, achieving what you want to achieve and making steady progress.

Implement

A plan without execution is useless; thus, you are ready for action with the roadmap, routines, and habits. This is the exciting moment you take things into your own hands and work on building that life of purpose and fulfillment.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Lao Tzu

Nourish

Use your self-care and business routines to take small steps towards your goal every day consistently. This is not a race; it is your goal, your ikigai, your life, and it has only one winner, and that is you.

Take good care of yourself and your remarkable dream, relying on your routines(with enough flexibility), and eventually, it will become a reality, one step at a time.

It is important not to want to jump too fast (of course, when great opportunities come on your path, seize them), but to dose your energy wisely; after all, you are in it for the long haul.

Ups are great, and downs are expected and normal, but you are prepared.

The only thing you shouldn’t do is give up.

Growth

This whole experience of finding and living your purpose whilst using what you are good at and what you love inevitably leads to massive growth.

Knowing that you are living your ideals and creating an incredible legacy for the people you care for is one of the most beautiful ways to live your life.

In my opinion, everyone deserves that.

References

The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level– Gay Hendricks – May 2010
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life – Francesc Miralles & Héctor García August 2017