Thoughts on OTOA Creative Life Coaching

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