Gail Petrie is a Professional Ontological Life Coach and runs a coaching practice where she strives to facilitate the development of excellence through self-awareness in her clients. Gail offers one-on-one coaching, business coaching and workshops (Who Am I? Workshop. Vision Board Workshop and Weekend Retreats.)
WHAT IS ONTOLOGICAL LIFE COACHING?:
As human beings we create our own stories and then live into it as if it is the truth, never examining it, thereby limiting our options to design our lives.
Through shifting your language, mood and physiology, Ontological Coaching helps you to identify the story you have been living in and enables you to create a new one best suited to creating the life you want.
Our values, beliefs, predictions and assumptions, many of which may be deep seated and out of awareness, exist in our Way of Being. Change in these can result in the removal of significant barriers to learning, and the spontaneous development of more effective patterns of communication and behaviour.
Way of Being is a regarded as a dynamic interrelationship between three areas of human existence – language, emotions and body. Coaching in all three areas of language, emotions and body has the potential to be transformative, for it can generate profound learning and deep constructive change.
An ontological coach is a particular kind of coach who embodies the powerful distinctions of the “Ontology of Language”, also spoken of as the “Ontology of the Human Observer”, and who is able to support people in achieving their goals and creating a new way of being. Even though people often know what they want in life, quite often they do not know how to get there. Similarly, they do not always know how to avoid what they do not want. Sometimes, people do not even know what is missing for them. Dealing with this blindness is the job of an ontological coach. They support others to address what is missing for them in the different domains of their lives, relationships, work, family, career and so on.
The role of an ontological coach is not to tell people how to be or behave, rather to assist them to identify and achieve what they desire. Ontological coaching is not a process based on a script known by the coach. It is about enabling others to better serve themselves, expand their possibilities, increase their capacity to learn, act more effectively and better design their future. There is artistry and deep learning in ontological approach.