 I am here today with Chris Kisling, and we're gonna talk about how he as a life coach really helps his clients to transform. And I think we're gonna get some lessons here that are useful for your own personal development as well. Chris, thank you for being here. Sure, my pleasure. Yeah, well, let me share your background with the audience and then we'll get into some of these ideas about personal growth that I think are fascinating and the audience would benefit from. So Chris Kisling is a coach who helps people and organizations that have lost the plot of their own story and the purpose beneath the noise, urgency, uncertainties and wounds and the flux of our overwhelming lives. He helps his clients to connect and to live from their deepest motivations and aspirations, what he calls their still point. Chris has been a teacher from kindergarten through college in terms of the students, a director for a national consulting firm. He's earned six figures and managed high performing teams. And now he spends his days helping people and organizations to see, to heal, to fall back in love with themselves. Chris believes that each of us is on a sacred quest and without exception that our lives are worthy of attention, appreciation and compassion. Awesome. So. That sounds pretty good. I think I need to book an appointment with him. Yeah. Yeah, you can listen to this back and write it down. So Chris, you talk about this healthy tension between being your own best expert on the one hand and not believing everything you think on the other hand. So, tell us what that means. I come to my sessions with this profound respect for the client and their understanding of their experience, how they've been putting things together. And it's super important for them to be heard and to let them, for them to understand that I'm getting them as best I can in the way that they get themselves. But it's also true that they're, however they're putting the problem together and they also come in with some ideas often of what the solution is. Their solution to the problem is often manufactured by the same thinking that created the problem. And so when I was, I was originally trained in a modality that was very non-directive and was all about following the client. And everything I said was based on the last thing the client said. And they were totally in the lead. And then a teacher of mine once said something that rocked my world. He said, don't get too distracted by your client's content. You need to look at them, what they're saying, what's coming out of their mouth is just one part of the whole organism. And you need to look at them in the whole context because it could very well be that they are putting it together in a way that is part and parcel of what's generating all of their pain right now. I had an example of that where a client came to me once and basically when we start talking about their goals at the beginning and hers basically boiled down to, I just need to get with the program. I need to like, I've been letting myself go in all these ways and I just kind of need to get with the program. And the way she said that made me think, wow, this is something she's been hearing for a long time. And I wonder if that is actually the problem. And it turns out that the solution for her was not to grit her teeth and get with the program and muscle through it, it was to relax and get to know and fall in love with herself and move from that place. And so that was just like, she was just parroting things that she had heard from parents or other authority figures. And it was time for her to actually detach from that and step into herself. Yeah, wow, that's, you know, yeah. Because if you were just simply parroting back what the client just said and kind of, well, the client could pretty much journal and do that. I mean, if it's all about the client's content. So I like that you are bringing, yes, of course you are in conversation with them and you're in the flow with them. But at the same time, you're bringing your experience of having worked with many clients and your own training and your own experiences to see more holistically past perhaps the blind spots of the client or what the client is fixated on. There's more to that is what you're saying. And I'm noticing things about them in the room that they're not aware of like, and I'm like. Yeah, right. Sometimes it's just, I remember one session where a client came in and she just would not let me give me an entry point in. She was, she came in, I said, so how's it going? Great, everything's great. And I could tell there was something a little hollow about that, but I just every angle I went at she would not, she just wouldn't give me an opening. And then I noticed at one point, I just kind of let her ramble for a while and I noticed at one point she kept kind of like tugging her shirt and like fiddling with the button. And I finally just stopped and said, I'm noticing that you're doing this and I just wanna ask you what's up with that? And that little thing that I was noticing, it was some kind of protective matter. She just burst into tears and that was our opening and we finally got to what was, she was actually miserable. She was not fine, she was not okay. But just looking for those little things, it's what's his name. I forget the theorist, but he said it's what you call the unoccupied channel that they're not aware of. And so you focus on that or at least you note it and bring something to awareness that they're not paying attention to and that can be your entry point. Yeah, that's really, and you mentioned that the client, the client's goals aren't always what you both end up working on, right? Like you said, oh, the client thinks they need to get with the program. Like what's another example? Like because oftentimes, right? Clients seek out coaches because they want to get a promotion. They want to, they think, I don't know, maybe it's a relationship issue or maybe it's a family issue or maybe that's, but yeah, what's like another example where it's like, okay, they came to you with this, but then you're seeing something more, right? Well, part of it is they'll come in with an initial problem and an initial goal which they see as the solution to that problem. And that's coming from where they are when they start. When they start. And so when I tell them at the beginning, like, yeah, I can help you with that. And they might interpret that even as, oh, that means you're gonna help me achieve this goal. And I might actually have in the back of my mind, yeah, we're probably gonna discover pretty early on that that is not the goal, that that goal is coming from a smaller version of yourself. And as you get a little bit more room and can stretch a bit more and can see a bit farther, you're gonna realize that. But it's important for me, at least, it's important at the beginning for them to feel like I'm hearing them. And so, yeah, I hear that this is really important to you and we're gonna look really closely at that. And I will help you move towards your goal, understanding that it's probably gonna change. And because my big part of what I do is I'm just trying to help people not be the victims of their conditioning and their own little thought traps, but to be able to see and have more and better options for themselves so that they are liberated, they're more at choice. Right, yeah, I think that's a really important insight that to see more options, to choose better, I guess, among the options that are actually available to them instead of maybe a particular goal that they thought was important because of some authority figure in their life or their own ego that might be fixated on one version of success or one version of what good life means. And, right? Yeah, and if we do our work well together, at the end, the field of what is possible for them that they perceive is gonna be bigger and richer. It's like, wow, I never, because they have this idea that they've been, people have put them in this box and they've in some ways accepted those boxes. They're actually multiple boxes depending on who the person is. And when they break out of those and they realize, wow, there's actually a whole lot more available to me than I ever allowed myself to think about. We have those thoughts from way back that come back and quash our dreams pretty easily to protect us. Yeah. And they served us well at one point in our life, but they become obsolete. Yeah, that's really, yeah. And sometimes we forget to update them, I guess, because, yeah, because we're on this track, right? I love the, and often use the metaphor for programming. Like, you know, we have our operating systems and they were built for, they were built a few versions back. Think of like your Windows machine from 10 years ago compared to what you've got now or whatever you use. And they, a lot of our core reflexes and impulses and instincts, the way that we make choices that we moved through our life were formed at a really early age with certain goals of how to take care of ourselves. And they're obsolete now. They were fine then, or mostly fine. Sometimes there's some buggy programming back there too. But even if we have been able to evolve in a lot of ways, there are still snippets of old programming that get activated. And so we're kind of looking for those and like, oh, you got a bug in your machine right there. We need to do some virus cleaning. Yeah. One of the things that you do with clients, I mean, it's like you have an interesting relationship to problems. Like the client might come to you, right? And say, I want you to take away this problem. Like I want to overcome this problem. Like it's a bad thing. I don't, you know, I want to avoid it. I want to, you know, get away from it. But you go, yeah, you do more than that. I mean, yeah. So tell us about how can we relate better or how do you help the clients relate better to problems? Yeah, I don't like to take away people's problems. It's not really my role as a coach. I can't do that. I want to deepen their relationship to the problem because if all I do is like, they come in and I give them a quick fix and they don't understand how we did that and how I was thinking about it, they're gonna be dependent on me every time this thing resurfaces. And I actually want to kind of give them their own users manual. So by the time we're done, they understand, oh, so this is why I was putting things together that way. So to me, the deepening your relationship to a problem is really, it's not about staying mired in your muck. It's about deepening your relationship to yourself and your own motivations. And so one of the best things I can do is to help them make sense to themselves because then they can use that information when as they go forward, as other things come up, like, okay, how am I putting things together? What, and I really do have a fundamental conviction that as a general rule, we make sense. We're not just these piles of idiosyncrasies and random synapses firing. I mean, there are some people that have some problematic brain chemistry but it's a very small segment of the population. Most of us, we make sense and there's, if you look at the whole person and where you've come from and what you've been taught as possible, it's just, it's totally reasonable the way you're putting things together and the strategies you've chosen. And that's really important too because that is one of the doorways to compassion for yourself, which is so important. It's like, yeah, I really was doing the best I could. Even if there's a part of me, a hypercritical part of me that says, why are you doing that? Do you have dumb flakes for breakfast? What's going on? But if you understand, no, this is what I was taught was good cereal. It allows you to be a lot more gentle. Yeah, that's really, and it's so helpful. Well, we often need someone to remind us of that because it's not natural for us to remind ourselves. Yeah, pretty much the conviction that we can never have too much self-compassion. We don't do it nearly enough. We aren't nearly nice enough to ourselves. Right, right, right. Yeah, because we're always trying to get things done improve ourselves and et cetera. Especially those who tend to work with coaches are very passionate about self-improvement. So, one of the things- And I also want to say being gentle with yourself doesn't mean that you don't care and that you don't work hard on yourself. Right, right. But you don't get yourself up. As soon as you start judging yourself, you insert a barrier between you and what's going on and it becomes harder actually to change at that point. Interesting, wow. One of the concepts you teach your clients is self-witnessing, self-witnessing. Now, what, I like that term. What does that mean to you? It's kind of, you know, it's really from kind of a Buddhist-infused meditation tradition where you become aware of yourself as you go through your experience. Because, let's say, this is a recent example for me when the COVID stuff all started and the first time I went to the grocery store and there was just this like electric panic people are rushing and I suddenly found myself like sort of tingling and supercharged and nervous and just like, oh my God, all of my synapses were firing and am I doing this right? Did I get here soon enough? Did I wait? There's not enough hand sanitizer. Are we all gonna die? Am I not taking care of myself and my people right? And so my whole field of experience was filled with all of these thoughts and it was a little overwhelming. And then I remembered, oh, stop. And I named the experience. Chris is having some panic right now. And it's just a subtle move, but it's really important because as soon as you do that, you realize that you're bigger than this experience. Like Chris is having this experience, but we've got this overarching Christmas around us. So you're connecting with a larger sense of yourself and so you're dis-identifying with the immediate experience and it just gives you a little more room to maneuver. And if you remember that the next time, you remember it sooner. And you remember that this thing that's happening that's pretty overwhelming is not all there is to me. I existed before this, I will exist after it. And it allows you to step out of the momentary overwhelm. Yes, yes, it's really great. It's, there's this interesting dynamic where it's like, like you said, when you name the experience, you realize, oh, wait, I can stand back and look at this experience. So that means I am not the experience. I'm like, I'm actually there's something, like I'm a witness of the experience. So that means, oh, I can look at something else or I can pay attention to another part of the experience or whatever. Yeah, so that's really, that's really great. It's just an easy way to dial it back a little bit and remember that you're bigger. And it kind of comes from that thing in meditation where if you get distracted, you just name it like, oh, thinking, oh, you know, feeling great. When you find yourself pulled out of being present. Yeah, it's like, instant, instantly more objective. You're instantly more able to make a choice, like have a choice, right? Yeah, you're more resourced in that moment. Yeah, one of the things that you help your clients with is dealing with strong emotions. I mean, I think most adults really haven't learned well how to deal with strong emotions. Tell us about that. How do you, how do you help them with that? Oh, it's so important. It's the biggest thing is I help them to feel them and I make it okay for them to feel them because a lot of times we're scared of those things whether it's overwhelming sadness or anger. Anger, and a lot of times my own healing journey, at least a big component of it started a few years ago when I went on this men's retreat and they gave us, created this exquisite container where they made it possible for us to really get in touch with our anger in a safe place. And that led to a whole season of healing, a whole bunch of experiences where I got in touch with some rage that I had bottled up for a long time. And ignoring it doesn't help. Keeping a repress doesn't help because it's in there. And so, and the thing you find that often on the other side, almost always on the other side of anger is sadness. So you have to get through the yelling and the anger to get to the tears. So if I notice a client is trying to manage themselves to hold it together, hopefully by that point I've created a safe enough container and I can note it and then give them permission to show it. This just happened. I, just a couple of weeks ago, I've been working with a CEO on an unexpected and difficult transition that happened in our company. And we're kind of seizing this as an opportunity to do a whole bunch of things to kind of have a refounding and reshape the culture. But she came in one day, we met on a Friday and I could tell she was a little like her. I seemed a little wet and she was holding it together. And I said, I see you like you're trying really hard to keep it all together. And she said, yeah, it's really important, because I'm the leader. And I said, we got some really important meetings next week. And so I'm gonna give you some homework for this weekend. And that is I want you to go home and I want you to cry and yell as loud as you need to and as long as you need to, because if you don't, you are going to bring all of that into next week and you are gonna be liable to be triggered and that's gonna come out on all of your people. And it's just really important for you to move that energy. And so we came back on Monday and met and she looked at me and said, I cried for hours this weekend like I haven't in decades. And she said, it just kept coming and kept coming. And I said, I hope you got really petty and voiced all those feelings that are in there. Get it all out so that you're clean inside as we go into this week. And I was just so proud of her. I was like, you get a gold star for your homework. Oh my God, I was so happy. And the benefit of that is that she moved through the week with Grace. And then at the end of the week, this was so moving for me. We had this really important meeting. It went so well. We came into the conference room. She closed the door and sat down and started beeping in front of me. And she said, these are tears of joy. She said, I have been overwhelmed by the amount of support I'm getting from my team. I never expected it. How everyone is rallying around me to help us through this. We're gonna be fine. And I really think that because she allowed herself to get in touch with her own vulnerability, it was the way that she moved through that week that allowed people to pull closer to her because she wasn't trying to wear a mask. Wow, beautiful story, man. Yeah, the power of coaching. One last thing, question I wanna ask you and then we'll move into how people can find you, work with you, et cetera is, you talk about breakthrough versus peek through. Okay, breakthrough versus peek throughs. I think this is significant as why working with someone like you is so helpful. So tell us about the difference between that. This is a great concept that one of my teachers raised. And it's within the context of, so many people will have, like they'll go on a retreat and they'll come back and have this amazing, what they call a breakthrough, like, oh my God, I see it all now, I see all the patterns the way I've always, I've been, my anger at my father has been driving all of my actions, I understand it all and now I'm at peace and I'm telling on myself too, because I've been on retreats and come out with these peak experience and all my, the endorphins are flowing and I'm just full of love and the milk of human insight and compassion. And then a week later, somebody looks at me the wrong way and I'm right back in the same place. And it's not to discount what I saw or what anyone saw during one of those peak experiences, but it's interesting, we call it a peak experience. It's a peek through, not a breakthrough, because the breakthrough only happens when you can bring the rest of your system and your experience along with what your mind is seeing. So insight without action is meaningless. And that was really important for me to grasp because I'm an English major, I love a well-crafted insight and you know, you put it out there and it's something I can do in calligraphy and frame on my wall and it's all there, I've got it. But you gotta come down off the mountain top and get down into the mud of your daily life. And that's where through practice and failing and trying again and loads of compassion that you actually build the muscles for creating change for actually creating a breakthrough. Yes, yes, yes. So if those who are watching this, you know, if you have the opportunity to work with someone like Chris, I think it helps to integrate, you know, the insight you're learning in your life, whatever, you know, books, courses, you know, content and really to integrate that through practices, like you said, Chris, and accountability with a coach and continue deepening and sort of, you know, fleshing out those insights into your flesh, you know, into actual embodiment of it. And that's, and people who work with me, I give them homework. Yeah. Them learning tasks and it can be, you know, writing in a journal. It might be, there's one client, I actually made him for his homework. We went on a fun run together because he would had all this social anxiety and we went with this big group and we had to run along in the middle of this crowd and he had to process out loud with me as he was going through it. And, or one client, I'm convinced that the single biggest thing, he had this amazing trajectory with me, but I'm convinced that the single biggest thing I did and most important was after our first session, I told him, before you come in here, you have to buy a couch because you've been moaning about how you're such a loser of a person because you don't even have a couch in your living room. I don't want to see you till you have a couch. And that became the metaphor that carried him through the rest. He walked in every day and saw, I can buy a couch, I can have people over, I'm a real person. So, so now one thing I want to ask is, you know, with physical distancing, et cetera, I imagine you're working with a lot of your clients virtually. And so you do work with people from all over, you know, country, world, et cetera. And if you need to do a running coaching session or a walking coaching session, you will both be walking yourselves, you know. So, yeah, it's a wonderful opportunity to work with Chris. Those of you watching this, Chris, you know, thank you for being available to people. You love working one-to-one with people. Do you want to say anything about how people should reach out to you or who should reach out to you? What kind of person? What kind of, I mean, we heard some of these stories, but anything else you want to say about that? Just like if you're feeling like life is happening to you and you're not in touch with what you want and your life is not built on what's important to you and what you want, but instead you've kind of, you feel like a pinball inside a machine reacting. I want to help you like stop and we're going to anchor and we're going to figure out what it is that is important to you, what lights you up. And we're going to try to, we're going to build a life around that or a solution to your problem. People come to me with all kinds of issues and, but that's kind of the thinking that underlies the work that I do with them. And a big part of it is doing a really deep dive into what's important to you because we spend a lot of time thinking about our problems and people usually come into me and they're what I call problem saturated. So I want to kind of get them wonder saturated, like look at themselves with new eyes and really appreciate the things that make their life worth living. And so that they can get more of that because a lot of times the solution to the problem is to bring in more of that and create a transformational space that is bigger than the way that they conceived their life before. That was kind of all over the place, but. No, no, that's helpful. So I want to just make sure people know your website, findyourstillpoint.com. Yes. And www again, www.findyourstillpoint, S-T-I-L-L point, findyourstillpoint.com. The links will be in the notes of the video and Chris, thank you so much for the work that you do and for having this conversation. Sure, my pleasure. Thank you so much. It's always great to talk to you. Yeah, thanks.