Ask any experienced Personal Trainer and they will tell you: How you start or finish a session plays a key role in the overall client experience.
With that said, here’s a simple mindfulness practice you can carry out with a client to finish a training session on a positive note.
Or if they arrive somewhat frenzied or distracted, it’s a great way to help them refocus and commit to the session ahead!
The Theory:
This practice can help them unwind, rebalance and let go of worries, concerns and negative feelings that accumulate throughout the day.
When we cultivate and amplify positive feelings, we benefit from their nourishing effects on our body and psyche.
In investing in regenerating energy, we can help balance our nervous system and add to our emotional energy reserves and DHEA hormonal bank account.
In doing so, we increase our overall resilience.
Resilience is the ability to:
Adapt more easily to change
Bounce back and recover quicker after hardships
Replace resistance with a sense of ease
Increase your capacity to prep before stressful situations
Maintain a positive attitude
Resilience helps you to:
Prevent the negative impact of ongoing stress
Create more secure relationships
Increase your ability to trust your intuition
Achieve your goals despite obstacles
Stay focused under pressure
With regular practice, positive mood states become increasingly familiar, promoting increased physiological efficiency, mental acuity, and emotional stability as the new normal.
Advice
Note feelings don’t have to happen to us, we can also create them! Put another way, we don’t have to wait for life to work out the way we want, we can feel good now.
Also, we all have emotional reactions, but we also have a choice about our emotional response (standing in our authentic power!). Through exercise, nutrition, and mindful practice, we can build a new emotional baseline over time and access positive states more readily.
Focusing on appreciation before going to bed at night can lead to more regenerative and rejuvenating sleep and reduce the carry-over of negative thoughts and emotions into the following day. So once learned, clients can practice this technique anytime, anywhere.
The Five Steps:
- Guide clients to breathe slowly and deeply in through their nose and out slowly through their mouth
- Instruct them to activate a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in their life.
Here it is important to genuinely experience the feeling of appreciation, as opposed to merely calling up a mental concept or image.
To assist with this, help clients create a Gratitude List: People, places, things, experiences that they appreciate.
Or a Values List: People, places, issues, things that matter to them, that they value or treasure.
- Encourage them to make a sincere effort to sustain these feelings of appreciation, care or love. Hold that intention for one to two minutes or longer.
- When they catch their mind wandering, gently focus back on their breathing and reconnect with feelings of care or appreciation.
- As they complete the experience, ask them to remain receptive to any intuitive guidance they now feel.
Encourage them to reflect on whatever they quietly sense without needing to tell you what it is.
The three key elements of this technique are slow nasal breathing, feelings of appreciation, to radiate & sustain these positive feelings.
Because of its active emotional focus, it produces a physiologically distinct state from that induced by most relaxation exercises (whose main aim is to lower arousal levels).
Finally, the right music may also assist the practice of this technique!
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Noel Lyons
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