In my work as a professional coach and personal trainer I’ve had the opportunity to experience a wide range of clientele, from those who have hired me to help them lose weight and gain strength, to serious multi-sport endurance athletes on their way to compete in an Ironman triathlon, golfers who want to lower their handicap and improve their swing, to pre and post-natal mothers who wish to get back into shape. I’ve held fitness and motivational camps for women and have worked with people who are rehabbing from surgery.
Along the way, I’d always felt that there was something missing. This feeling came most often when my clients would hit a plateau, stop making progress, or when an old nagging injury resurfaced. Sometimes the feeling came when I found myself frustrated with the excuses and complaints that my client had for not showing up for their workout or for not following a prescribed training plan.
With all of my education, including a degree in Exercise Physiology and Kinesiology, and several certifications by highly recognized organizations in the health and fitness industry, not to mention all the continuing education I’d gone through I seemed to be stuck. How could I guide my clients to total fulfillment, to realize their dreams of a healthier body, a breakthrough race, their best round of golf or just a more balanced life? Certainly more functional exercises weren’t the answer. Yoga, pilates and massage weren’t doing it either. And neither were those visits to the physical therapist, chiropractor or nutritionist.
I knew that there had to be a missing link to the equation of guiding a client towards transforming their body, health and life. My search for that missing link began with my studies in movement based healing arts at Tamalpa Institute in Marin, California. There I began to learn about the bodymind connection. How we hold on to unresolved emotional conflicts and stress in the cells and tissues of our bodies. I learned how our bodies are really just containers of our life experience and that the way we move our bodies and move in our bodies is an expression of both our deepest struggles and our deepest aspirations. My studies at Tamalpa seemed to crack to vault, bringing me closer to that missing link. I now had an awareness and understanding of what was underlying those experiences with my clients such as the plateaus and the recurring injuries that had seemed so elusive to me before. My attempts to bring even bits of this information into my work as a personal trainer and triathlon coach was challenging to say the least. Let’s face it, a client doesn’t come to a personal trainer to analyze how their body is expressing the emotional struggles they’ve had in their life. I was becoming more dissatisfied with my work as a personal trainer and triathlon coach because I felt incongruent. I felt that I wasn’t giving my clients what I knew could help them break through those barriers. But the truth is, I wasn’t really ready at that point in time to go there with my clients. I still had some work to do on myself and there was more for me to learn before I could connect the dots to that missing link.
After studying at Tamalpa, I decided to enroll in a life coaching certification program. At that time life coaching was unheard of, and I was sure that this would qualify me and give me everything I needed to put the pieces together. Not only did I enroll in this program, I also started working with a coach myself. For the next two years I began to learn and acquire the skills and tools that would enable me not only to empower myself, but that would also enable me to teach these to my clients. It was like personal training for the mind! I began to understand what the difference was between being a coach and being a trainer. It was at this point that decided I wanted to test out a way to combine my skills as a personal trainer and coach. I started an ongoing women’s fitness and motivational program which I called Fitness Quest. I spent two more years leading Fitness Quest guiding women of all ages and all body types who all had different goals towards transforming their bodies, health and life. I learned a lot in those two years of Fitness Quest. I discovered that I had definitely honed my leadership skills and my ability to inspire and motivate participants. My work felt more congruent with who I was, which was fulfilling. But within me I knew that in order to truly transform myself or to help my clients transform, something deep within needed to shift. I wasn’t quite sure what that was until I happened to stumble upon a flyer for a lecture called “Biology of Belief” given by a renowned cellular biologist named Bruce Lipton.
What happened next marks the point my personal journey of finally connecting all the dots. I attended Bruce Lipton’s lecture at a bookstore in Santa Cruz, California. The the audience had completely packed the bookstore as Lipton gave a captivating two-hour presentation on the biology of belief, which also happened to be the name of the book he was promoting. In that presentation, he demonstrated how the new science of epigenetics shows that all the cells in our body are affected by our thoughts. Lipton weaved his personal journey with his scientific discoveries and all of the roadblocks and repercussions into an amazing story . Towards the end of that night, he talked briefly about the importance of beliefs in regards to our health and wellbeing and mentioned something about this field of ‘energy psychology’, which in his studies he had found to be one of the most efficient and effective methods for changing our beliefs.
As soon as I got home, I began to search online for more information about energy psychology and was quickly lead to a site on emotional freedom techniques or EFT. I immediately knew that this was it! This was the missing link. Within a short time I began a home-study course on EFT and then went through the three levels of training to become an EFT practitioner. I currently still assist many of these courses under the guidance of Master EFT practitioner Lindsay Kenney in the San Francisco bay area and have become a board member of the National Alliance for Emotional Health.
Since that time, I’ve created a system that has integrated the skills, tools and techniques of my entire journey. EFT is one of the primary techniques I use because it works at the level of our beliefs and belief systems which are held in the subconscious mind.
What I discovered during my journey is something that has been taught through the centuries by ancient wisdom masters and is just beginning to hit the radar of the world of health and fitness: Our beliefs are what enable or disable us from having the body we want, experiencing health and wellbeing, having a breakthrough race performance or experiencing a balanced and fulfilling life in general. In the health and fitness industries, there aren’t many trainers coaching their clients belief systems. There aren’t many coaches (ie triathlon, running, cycling) coaching their athletes belief systems. There is a dire need in our industry to become aware of the impact of both our own beliefs and the beliefs of our clients. It’s crucial that we begin to understand the science behind a belief, and learn from those scientists who have forged the way in this new science of epigenetics like Bruce Lipton, Candace Pert, Masuro Emoto, Lynn Mc Taggert, Donna Eden and many others if we are to continue our work as professionals who change the lives of our clients. We must acquire a new set of skills, a new set of tools and techniques that allow us to excavate through the inner landscape of the subconscious mind, the place where our deepest struggles and our deepest aspirations live. Ten years of my own search for that missing link has brought me right here, to these words I’m writing on this page. This has been the unfolding and evolution of my own journey to this point. You too, are on the journey. In a similar, but uniquely different way, you’re uncovering those pearls of wisdom and truth for yourself.
Inner State Coaching is my small contribution to the field of health and fitness in which I’ve invested my entire professional life’s work. My deepest desire is that in it, you’ll find something that is evolutionary, transformative and life altering and that you can share it with as many people as possible.
January 15, 2008
Lisa Engles
