As a Practitioner in any of the alternative healing disciplines, from Reiki to BodyTalk and Life Coaching, you’re often faced with clusters of clients facing similar problems or problems in the same arena.
The following model for the levels of personal growth is a life coaching model based on the PEMS Scale – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
In fact, this is exactly why the franchise-model coaching style of Coaches like Brad Sugars and ActionCOACH work so well: the models and teachings they introduce tend to pick up on global patterns, and so will be true for about 80% of people. It’s always the 80/20 rule ☺
One thing you will notice is that even though it boils down to the same problems at the core or essence of the issue, often the applications and understanding of those challenges differ from client to client.
A simple model
The following model is a life coaching model based on the PEMS Scale – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – designed by Chemory Gunko of Life Coaches Toolbox.
The model can help you understand your clients and the level of understanding they’re at, which type of processes to apply, and how best to help them.
Physical
At the level of physical emotions and lessons, you’re dealing with the core basic chemical responses that we all experience in our body.
These instinctive or terrestrial emotions include fight or flight, rage, lust, jealousy, fear and more, and are the base emotions that we all understand and experience. A client experiencing anger management issues would fall into this category.
In addition, psychological and psychiatric conditions that can be treated medicinally, like epilepsy, schizophrenia and bipolar also fall into this category, being chemical situations that are outside of the conscious control of the person.
Physical release mechanisms like sports, meditation, yoga and dancing will work at this level, as will medication in most cases. Energy healing modalities like kinesiology and BodyTalk are also very effective at this level.
Emotional
At the level of emotional lessons and emotions, you are dealing largely with learned patterns and behaviors.
At this emotional level, you play out the behaviors and models you learned from your parents, from society, from your religious structure and ideology, e.g. having your child baptized or sending them to bed at 8pm sharp, because that’s the way it was done when you were growing up.
At this level you’re largely dealing with actual events and memories that tangibly took place in this lifetime and are within the person’s experience to recall. This is also the level where a lot of the mirrors of relationship will come into play.
At this level you’re working with changing belief systems and ingrained behaviours, which are still largely unconscious, and which can effectively be achieved by processes like Resonance Repatterning, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and awareness and understanding.
Many of these clients and those in the physical category will require you to work with them challenge by challenge, as their ability to hold the big picture view will still most likely be limited.
Mental
Once you truly enter the realm of really beginning awareness and understanding, you’re into the mental level of lessons.
Here you’re dealing with intelligence quotient (IQ) and intellect, emotional intelligence (EQ) and conscious communication and focus.
At this level you begin to consciously look at and tackle the world around you, which is the first major step towards spiritual awareness.
Here, you no longer take things as they are presented or verbatim, but you question the things that are placed in front of you, looking for your own answers and the awareness that will lead to understanding and release. In other words, you begin to chase the a-ha moments.
For many clients at this level of understanding, working on their own or with a psychologist, mentor, coach or hypnotherapist will yield enormous benefits, as will structures using scales and question sets. These clients will enjoy processing information mentally and verbally, in a discussion style format.
Mental clients will also enjoy lessons and breakthroughs that enable them with tools and understanding they can further apply to other areas of their life. Clients at this level are also usually open to the idea that there are influencers such as generational patterns, fears and active memories at play.
Spiritual
On the spiritual level, you’re into the realms of consciousness, awareness, intuition and knowing.
On this level, lessons are wide and varied, ranging from karma to spiritual purpose, and for those fast tracking their spiritual journeys and finishing a lot of lessons quickly, you may be out of their fate for this lifetime and into the arena of choice.
Clients on this level will be facing a number of interesting challenges and lessons, from forgiveness to mitigating ego, trials by fire and crises of faith. None of these are easy to navigate, but for those on this journey, the rewards of navigating those tribulations are beyond words.
Clients on this level will enjoy spiritual challenges like working with their intuition, forgiveness work, or even pursuing a doctrine or course of study within the framework of their preferred ideology.
These types of clients will also enjoy meditations and other techniques designed to open their minds and will often require a refresh and strategy to help them stay on track with the basics – a trial by fire often takes away your basic resources, causing you to forget to do the things that keep you going and sane in day to day life.
Walking your talk
When you talk to a client in their language you help them feel really understood.
By understanding the level they’re pitching at and coming from, you can help them in a way that they can process and use to develop themselves further.