I offer coaching in the form of hypnosis and meditative skills as well as mart-arts coaching through Rebel Budo, my training in the Washington DC area, and informal coaching on many of the technology resources that you’ll find me blogging about here.
About My Life Coaching
Being at the right place at the right time, I overheard an off-the-cuff comment about Tony Robbins in April of 1995 that led me on a path of constant study of life coaching techniques, NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis. These new skills allowed me to integrate the ancient meditative skills learned I learned starting in my youth in ways that have proven effective, elegant and simple for myself and my clients. (You can see the long story below)
Here are just a few of the most common subjects I’ve assisted with using coaching, hypnotic and meditative skills.
- Smoking Cessation
- Weight Control
- Relief of Stage Fright
- Athletic Focus and Utilizing “The Zone”
- Sales Skills
- Relaxation
- Test Jitters
- Study Skills
- Athletic and Artistic rehearsals using hypnotic trance skills
- Learning Persuasive Hypnotic Communication
My Perspective
There’s nothing better than the feeling of going to bed each night knowing that family is cared for, the the people around you are safer because you are there and that you are serving your community. That’s my first assumption about you: that you care and want the best for yourself and those around you.
My personal coaching is based on the assumption that you are trying your best or are trying to get there, and that you recognize the desires and needs for positive changes, and you know, or at least suspect, that a coach can be a useful tool for you to use.
My group coaching and seminars are based on the idea that you feel like your group or company could use a boost in some area, you’ve heard about coaching and maybe you or some company you know has even had a positive experience already. You’re looking for a fresh perspective and you hope for something other than the tired old same messages.
What’s It All About?
Self-help, self-hypnosis, persuasion, self-coaching, covert hypnosis… you can use all of those things. I an coach you effectively using all of those skills and teach you just the skills you need to achieve goals on your own, without any of the extra fluff out there.
I’m told that it’s customary to have some bullet points outlining the things that you will learn. So here they are. Just remember, this it is partially about the specific techniques, and it’s mostly about developing a mindset that encourages fluidity in your thinking, quicker and more creative problem solving skills, and confidence that you will persevere through tough times.
You will learn to…
- Get Grounded and Focused!
The first step is to get a firm command of your goals and perceived challenges. Working to create clear, well defined outcomes, you’ll continue with a stronger sense of purpose. - Get Creative and Find Your Tools!
Take a step back and away to get a big picture view of the situations and the changes that are about to happen. You’ll know what tools you’ll need to reach your goals and live your dreams. - Do Big Things and Embrace Life!
Confidently moving forward with solutions and experiments to gain ground and make big changes - Deftly Handle Challenges!
Smartly and elusively avoiding and overcoming obstacles and allowing potential trouble to blow right past you so that you can reach your destination. - Integrate, Adapt and Succeed!
Incorporating all of your previous learning into a new way of resourcefully reaching goals and overcoming challenges. Using techniques in your own new ways.
Another one of my goals is to offer you originality. Will everything you learn from me all be original? No. I’ve been too influenced in incredibly positive ways by some great coaches and leaders in the field of personal coaching to be totally independent of their ideas. I consider this a good thing. There are some standard methods and philosophies that need to be in a practice like this. What I will offer you are my perspectives, old school methods mixed with new techniques that you will find refreshing and pragmatic.
How are you feeling?
Some People allow themselves to be ruled by work life, aggressive drivers, doldrums, other people’s whims, and the status quo. The first step then is to start to make good choices and to think more openly and strategically. From there, after you’ve moved from mediocre to clear and ready, you are then positioned to step up from feeling boring and dull with few resources into a life of opportunity and greatness.
Ethan is simply the most effective and helpful coach I’ve met. He can be considered a master at helping people discover solutions. As a model of personal integrity, he respects the individual needs and values of others and gently helps people to find their own answers inside of them. I wholeheartedly recommend his coaching to anyone who genuinely wants to make their life better.” – Michael Giles, Life Coach
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My Start with Life Coaching
The long story
How I acquired a love of personal coaching technologies started with a situation of being at the right place at the right time, and a little bit of eavesdropping. First, I’ll tell you about how it interested me in the first place.
I initially grew up in a pretty poor neighborhood in Lynn, Massachusetts. Ever heard of it? If so, don’t hold it against me. I was a pretty hyperactive kid and my mother was eagerly looking for a proper way for me to focus my energy. In 1978 I was six years old and I had an older cousin who was enrolled at a Karate school one city over. Thinking that this might be a good way for me get exercise as well as learn to participate in a group activity in a structured environment, she scraped some money together and enrolled me at that school as well.
It turned out to be the perfect mixture of personal hard work, teamwork, structure and learning. There was some great philosophy in there as well that promoted more hard work, as well as ideas on being a caring person who helped their family and community.
One thing that always started and finished each class was sitting meditation. Our kids’ class only had to do this for a few minutes at a time, but that sowed the seed for something quite profound that has lasted me an entire lifetime.
This few minutes of meditation is pretty common in traditional martial arts training. We were always told to leave our day’s troubles behind, to concentrate on our breathing and to prepare for class. At the end of class we concentrated on our breathing again and took some time to let the learning sink in and to prepare to take our lessons into our everyday lives.
I didn’t know how much this would effect me in such a positive way as the years passed. I’ll tell you something here: one thing that life coaches, hypnotists, advertisers and Yoga teachers try to get people to be able to do is to change states of mind quickly, in the blink of an eye. These initial meditation periods in my youth laid the foundation for learning to be able to do just that. Sit for a few moments, breathe out some troubles and change your mind. From there, fast, focused learning can take place and you can learn to achieve goals that didn’t seem possible only a few minutes earlier. What a gift!!
It gets a little tricky here though. You see, when you’ve been doing something your whole life, it’s not always easy to see how that skill is special and how it can apply to every area of your life and how it might be used to help others. I continued to study martial arts over the years and could always use that ability to consciously change my state of mind before and after class, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned to alter those techniques in skillful ways in order to apply them to almost any area of my life – and to help others to do the same.
One day in April of 1995, I was at a hotel in Boston, Massachusetts for a martial arts seminar taught by one of our senior most American instructors of an old-school Japanese martial art. I had switched to this art in 1988 and it too had various versions of state-of-mind changing and thought strategy techniques. One thing all of us noticed about this senior teacher is that he is incredibly charismatic. People seem to like him wherever he goes. One evening I overheard a conversation between two fellow students that went like this:
“I don’t get it, why is that people just love Steve so much? It seems like the waiters tonight, the hotel staff, everyone adores him. People just seem to want to do things for him.”
“I dunno, I think he’s into that Tony Robbins stuff.”
“Ah ha!” I thought.
I’d like you now to picture a 23-year-old guy with an idea light bulb over his head. Got it? That’s me. This off-the-cuff comment got me to head straight to Barnes and Noble right after that seminar. I bought Unlimited Power on a Sunday evening and read it in two days. Then I went back and read it again, following the steps that Tony prescribes. It changed my life forever, for the positive. Since then I think I’ve read, listened or watched most of Tony’s works. I’ve learned to apply those initial state-changing skills from my early youth onward to any area of my life. And I’ve learned a great deal more too.
(By the way, to this day I don’t know if Steve was really into that “Tony Robbins stuff,” but I sure do appreciate that moment in time.)
Along with Tony Robbins’ work, I began studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Ericksonian hypnosis. I was absolutely blown away be the elegant simplicity of using words and various frames of mind to quickly move into resourceful mindsets that would allow me to create, communicate and help others. Every time I show someone these skills I’m delighted to see how they change themselves and find new successes in their lives. To be honest, it still surprises me regularly that it can be so methodical and easy to follow.
Expertise
Being an Expert in Personal Coaching doesn’t mean that all of life will come easy. Life is tough sometimes and hard work is still needed. Emotions and emotional situations are real, and there are toxic people out there who will try to bring you down. Using these skills, like me, you will learn how to recognize these things for what they are worth and to better avoid nefarious people. And when life gets tough or those toxic individuals get too close, you’ll be able to let go of those negative emotional states when they’re not needed and summon creative, logical and energized states faster.
Do these claims seem bold? When you follow the steps I lay out, you’ll find these things to be matter-of-fact.
A World of Difference
What sets me apart from many other coaches and what you can get from my coaching in any format is this: results. I get reliable, positive results for myself and my clients.
I started using these techniques for myself and my own personal growth. I’ve read, utilized and reformatted techniques from such diverse sources such as classical Asian martial and philosophical traditions to modern life coaching. I’m quite pragmatically oriented in my daily life, and I do have an affinity for the philosophical and theoretical in my downtime. I confidently explore new and cutting edge innovations in coaching and I’m proud to receive coaching myself. We all should from time to time.
A coach is a handy thing to have around. As we live our busy daily lives and meet challenges as they come along, it’s sometimes tough to think of everything. That’s why bosses hire employees, why we write lists and keep calendars. A coach can be there for you to offer new strategies or to remind you of the resources you already have. We can hold you accountable for meeting goals and standards.
Just like all professional sports players all have coaches: head coaches, batting coaches, pitching coaches, golf swing coaches, free throw coaches, strength coaches, etc, you can use a coach proudly to help you to refine areas of your life and to reach goals that truly enhance your ability to live your life with freedom.
I’d like to work with you, to coach you and to see you thrive in every area of your life. It’s truly an honor that you have chosen to read my words right now.
I’ve heard that “practice makes perfect.” That may be true. As “perfection” is always changing and nearly impossible to come by, I’d like to offer to you that you always, “get better at whatever you happen to be practicing.” So, If you’ve been practicing limiting belief systems, even unknowingly, here is a chance to change all of that.
Continue here and now to practice empowering systems. The more you practice the easier they get, until they truly become second nature.
Here we go. I’m proud be your coach while you feel more alive, get energized and achieve greatness!
