As an OTOA Creative Life Coach one of my primary
roles is to help my clients to
slowly, and incrementally (One Thought
and One Action at a time), begin
to integrate and merge what they
desire to transform and manifest in their
lives, with what they are responsible for as life
sustaining activities and behavior.
During a private session,
a dialogue is begun to identify goals, and then to
design creative exercises that can be
used as a focus for further investigation, by
breaking them down into incremental actions.
However, the point of a
coaching session, or a series of sessions, is not
the completion of a creative exercise, but rather what happens along
the way: the investigation
of the process and relationship to the exercises
is what’s most important,
e.g.: the obstacles confronted, the
questions
that arise, the revelations awakened...etc.
In other words, it is the process we attend to, and this often includes
not finding the time
to engage with, or complete, an exercise.
The coaching and the
seminars that I lead, and the exercises that I design, are all
avenues for learning.
To state the obvious:
- Learning
is a Process.
- Process
is an element of Practice
- Practice
is the backbone of Creativity
The primary objective
behind, change, growth, manifestation and transformation
in any area of our
lives (whether it’s professional, personal or project based)
is to grow our
creative life practice so that, ultimately, it is integrated into
our lives as a
way of being --in fact, as the most realized part of our
nature, i.e., our
purpose.
What we want to avoid is
the feeling that our creative life practice is yet one more
task on our
endless, over burdened, over extended To Do List. If that is the feeling,
then
it is not a creative life practice, because by definition, our creative life
practice
is the thing that reinvigorates, energizes, and connects us to an
abundant sense of self.
I know that coaching sessions themselves, or classes and workshops, can feel
like just
another added thing on the To Do List—another thing keeping us from
advancing a
goal or project. But it is that very anxiety that we want to
untangle, re-contextualize, reset and confront.
I often say that this
work can seem like a paradox where we feel we need
added time to do the
work, but to make the time to do the work we need the
work to make the time!
And it's this little brain puzzle that gets woven into our
mental nest of resistance,
causing us to marginalize the actual value of our
creative life practice more
and more, and override the actual practice itself
by pushing it further and
further away.
In private coaching
sessions, we want to look at what is surrounding the
marginalized experience of
an exercise, or an unrealized goal, so that we
can re-direct undermining and
unproductive patterns of thought & action
one at a time.
In theory, we know that creativity
is a process. However, somehow, creativity
gets equated with product and quantity. This is an insidious and distracting
pattern of thinking,
and one of the many tyrannies of modern life in a
consumer-based society.
What coaching offers is
a dialogue grounded in a system of thought
(OTOA
Creative Life Practice), that helps to bypass these little mental
cul-de-sac’s
(where creativity gets linked with product
and quantity),
and liberate,
enrich, and support forward movement in the far more
productive realm of
CREATION/CREATIVITY. In this way,
the process becomes an element of the
"product".
The process is the journey. The journey is the creative
process in action.
During coaching
sessions, the goal is to slowly and incrementally pull the journey
out of the
margins of our daily life so that, little by little, it is less, and less the
thing that happens AFTER everything else we need to do is complete, and
more,
and more, the vision of the whole.
As I sometimes say: "The
journey is where we're going.”
And yes-- it is easier
said than done, but, essentially, that is why there is a need
for OTOA
Creative Life Practice teaching. It is exactly because it
is not easy, and
because resistance is insidious that I coach, and teach, and encourage, and
awaken, and strengthen the
philosophy of OTOA CLP, because, if
"the journey is where we
are going" we must have the tools for the journey,
and, sometimes, we need a
guide to remind us of where we are along the way.
OTOA Creative Life Coaching sessions are about the journey, not about the product.
I am here to help keep
clients moving forward by offering context and a hand up
out of those sticky
muddy areas of resistance. Together we can look inside
those dark trunks where
we store our marginalized goals, projects,
unrealized visions for
transformation, and take a look at what is undermining
our own quest.
I am not "grading" exercises or results, because there is absolutely no
right or wrong!
There is only
process, as practice, as discovery, as an engagement with self,
and as an
extension of the creative whole.
I
am not reinventing the wheel. I am reminding us that there is actually a method
to what often feels arbitrary, and looking for ways to offer it as metaphor,
such as…
I'm like a gardening
coach, helping others to be their own best gardener of their
own best gardens:
designating small plots of fertile soil for new growth, helping
to select seeds
for their particular geography and topography, identifying weeds,
nurturing
plants that serve the greater whole, and suggesting plants that can
lay dormant
for another season.
~ Gia Forakis
OTOA Founder, Master Teacher, Creative Life Coach, Theater & Visual Artist
Cell Theatre: 338 West 23rd Street.7pm-10pm. 
