Creating safe containers in coaching

The bird's nest by Sophie Gengembre Anderson

We create safe containers for our clients when we, as coaches and facilitators, do our own inner work, when we understand our own triggers, when we maintain awareness of our responsibility to our clients. We create safe containers for our clients when we are authentic, when we speak the truth, when we model courage for our clients. We create a safe container for clients when we lead and guide them in the process, when we educate clients about what to expect during our time together.

Our clients are looking to us for many things, one of which is leadership and direction. We create safe containers for clients to explore their lives and dreams and the unfolding nature of their consciousness when we lead gently but clearly and create strong boundaries around the coaching container.

Essentially, a container holds something. It contains something. As coaches, facilitators, and guides, a safe container holds the energy of the session. In order to create and hold safe containers for our clients, we must bring the proper energy into the coaching space. That energy needs to be high vibration. It needs to be energetically clean and open. It needs to be focused, grounded, centered, and strong.

In the Authentic Wholeness Coach Training Certification Program, I teach the subtle art of creating a safe and effective container for the work that happens in coaching and during group facilitation. Part of this work involves bringing the right energy into the coaching space. The other part of the work involves ritualizing the beginnings and endings of sessions and making the boundaries of the container explicit.

Being in right energy as the coach or facilitator involves mental and physical space clearing prior to sessions. In the Authentic Wholeness program, I teach about a dozen tools you can use for this work so that you can establish safe and effective containers for your clients. We also dive deep into the inner work that's required to bring crisp and clean energy into your sessions with clients and how to teach clients to do this for themselves when needed.

Energetically, we want to bring to our awareness the energies of truth, expansiveness, life, and receptivity as well as power, capability, and lovingkindness. One of the resources we draw on in our work in this area is Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David R. Hawkins.

Empathy by A.E. Stallings

My love, I’m grateful tonight Our listing bed isn’t a raft Precariously adrift As we dodge the coast-guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy. I’m glad that we didn’t wake Our kids in the thin hours, to take Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And we didn’t hand over our cash To one of the smuggling rackets, That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark Above us, is not deeply twinned Beneath us, and moiled with wind, And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore As the dinghy starts taking on water. I’m glad that our six-year old daughter, Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son With his broken arm’s high and dry, That the ceiling is not seeping sky, With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous, It’s selfish. It’s not being nice To say I would pay any price Not to be those who’d die to be us.