True North: Safe sane coregulation
Co-regulation is a full format communication skill that’s rooted in your own self regulation and awareness, defined by your personal and professional boundaries and directed by curiosity and discernment. These things are accessible to all of us with practice. - Ericka Thomas
Transcript
True North is co-regulation
Within the KGI program I teach co-regulation as a full format communication skill that’s rooted in your own self regulation and awareness, defined by your personal and professional boundaries and directed by curiosity and discernment. These things are accessible to all of us with practice.
Co-regulation on its own is simply how our nervous system influences and is influenced by others.
This is a very important understanding for fitness professionals because the success in the fitness industry depends on your ability to connect with people, to build trust and rapport. Ultimately all wellness businesses are businesses or relationships. And of course all relationships are built on communication, relationships of any kind but especially in terms of trauma informed work.
Cultivating skills around how we communicate, how we read other people, is one way we can expand our professional credibility and elevate our authority across any format. You may have heard the saying “no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” This is exactly what our goal is when we are trying to hold space and offer safe co-regulation.
There are a lot of ways we communicate with other people.It might seem like we need to be different at the front of the room or in a coaching relationship than we might be when we interact with friends or family, but it’s not. Not really. Even when we aren’t speaking, we are always communicating when we are with others and when we’re alone we’re constantly communicating with ourselves.
Of course verbal communication is the main way we communicate with others. What we say is definitely co-regulating. But we also communicate kinesthetically or physically through our body language and facial expressions even to how physically close or far we stand to people. And we communicate energetically as well that can be channeled through body language but also the tone of our voice, eye contact and posture as well.
We use all of these subconsciously all the time. But if we bring intention and attention to them we start to elevate our communication into the trauma informed tools we can use anywhere.
SO lets explore 3 trauma informed principles that you can use to affect co-regulation between you and everyone you come into contact with so you can literally meet them where they are.
Read the room.. Basically I’m talking about becoming aware of the energy, mood, levels of calm or fear activation of the people/person in front of you. That discernment is a skill that you can practice and you may need to actively develop by staying fully present in the moment, actively listening and noticing what’s going on with the folks in front of you including the things they aren’t saying. This is tough to do if you aren’t facing your class or actively engaging the person in front of you. And then meeting that energy and checking in from time to time to help them stay present.
That brings us right into the skill of Directing Awareness. Directed awareness is a skill coaches can use to help others notice what is going on mentally physically and emotionally without the filter of judgment, competition or expectation. How do you do that? You approach judgment with curiosity, expectation with experimentation, and competition with challenge and permission to change. Because ultimately in any format, transformation and change happens at the edge and finding that edge is sometimes difficult to find let alone approach. We have lots of edges. Yes, physical edges but also mental, emotional, spiritual edges.Edges can be scary,Not only that but they can shift from day to day.
Through Directed Awareness we arrive at the 3rd principle in all trauma informed communication and integration and that is establishing many paths with clear permission. This requires very open 2 way communication. Depending on the format this might look different. In some formats it makes sense to start a class or session with a check in even to the point of asking participants what they want out of their session. This give you as the coach direction in the ways that you cue for the things they want. For example if your students show up to your yoga class and ask for core work you can cue everything from the breath to the flow to the final relaxation from an awareness of the core. While you might add some actual core postures it doesn’t necessarily mean you're limited to crunches. Other types of formats you might need to be more creative. For example, a boot camp class with now check in time at all your directed awareness cues might include if then freedom phrasing. That means If you are looking for this then try this, Freedom phrasing is a skill you learn in Kinetic Grace Integration. It’s a way to offer options without judgment and lets students build awareness of what’s going on in their body and create/control their own experience.
These concepts are the practical aspects of co regulation in the fitness framework but they are applicable outside the gym. Awareness is critical. The more we build our own awareness the more we actually crack the door open to our intuition. Not only of what we need ourselves but of what the people in front of us need.
Intuition is one of those things that gets socialized out of us early on. We’re taught to just “get over it” to ignore or minimize our gut feelings to the point of putting ourselves in dangerous situations, we’re taught to “just be nice”. And then when it comes to our own wellness, first we’re taught that so much of our own bodies, including the sensations we feel, are shameful and embarrassing and therefore need to be changed, shaped, molded into something else in order to be loved and accepted. These messages over time can become so deeply ingrained in us that we lose all touch with our intuitive knowing. What I mean by that is what the body knows it needs. Make no mistake your body knows what it needs. And the same is true for your students. But they have lost contact so they are coming to you for direction to reestablish that communication to find their results.
So I’ll tell you a story of how that showed up for me. During a weekend TRE workshop I experienced a very powerful reaction after a series of 4 TRE sessions. I was flooded with this intense rage attached to a story that happened to me when I was in Kindergarten that I hadn’t thought about in years. It triggered a lot of anger and resentment at pretty much everyone and I remember driving home and crying and not being able to stop and then all of a sudden I started humming to myself. No tune. Just humming. Creating this vibration at the back of my throat and through my face. And the feelings started to dissipate and my rational brain started to come back on line.
We had just spent the weekend learning about the vagus nerve but no one had specifically told me that if you hum that’s a way to turn on the parasympathetic NS. I knew breathing techniques could do it from yoga but this was different. This was my body soothing itself without a prescription. This is what I mean when I say intuitive knowing. Getting out of your own way and letting what needs to happen happen.
Co-regulation can’t happen without safe self regulation. It all comes back to the ABC’s. I talk about this in the episode entitled Self centered trauma informed. If you missed it, be sure to circle back. Awareness boundaries and connection lead to that intuitive knowledge. Without being able to trust what we feel on the inside of ourselves we can fall into a very common trap personally and professionally. That trap of trying to be everything to everybody. Which is exhausting and overwhelming on every level.
What we’ve discussed today are important communication skills for fit pros in the wellness industry but more importantly they are human communication skills.We can't control anything about what other people do but we can control ourselves with a better understanding of how we can influence others.
I hope you found this helpful! I truly believe that fitness professionals can have a profound impact on the world. What you do is important, no matter what format you teach. If you’re looking for resources to help you get started I have a free guide to holding space for trauma informed fit pros on my website. Savagegracecoaching.com This guide is one of the first steps into safe co regulation, so check it out.
Until next time stop working out and start working in.
Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.
Savage Grace Coaching is all about bringing resilience and burnout recovery. Especially for overwhelmed entrepreneurs, creators and coaches in the fitness industry.
Schedule a free consulttation call to see if my brand of actionable accountability is right for you and your business.