Become a Certified Relationship School® Coach!

I’ve done a lot of circling and incorporate some of it’s principles in my work. However, circling’s primary focus seems to be about understanding someone in the present moment while continually dropping your agenda. To co-discover and co-explore connection, like a relational mediation. Circling is about exploring connection and helping one feeling deeply seen and understood. It does not offer a map for how to do a long-term relationship, dissolve trauma or emotional charges from the past. Circling offer little to no maps, education or training on long-term partnership or monogamy. It’s not what it’s about.

This type of circling is a small slice of what theThe Relationship School® offers and it falls under pillar 3 of my work.

My work is steeped in the context of romantic monogamous partnerships. It incorporates 4 pillars one must have to thrive in a long-term relationship.

1- Map- the indestructible view. Vajrayana buddhism meets neuroscience.

2-Compass- understanding values, your true north, what you stand for, and how to communicate them

3-Tools- Over 40 relational tools including boundary setting, the 180 (how to dissolve emotional charges and trauma from your past), 5 steps to listening, 3 steps to speaking, non-negotiable needs, how to work through conflict, etc.

4-Fuel- How to create a safe, secure adult relationship using principles from adult attachment and neurobiology. We study the brain and autonomic nervous system in the context of long-term partnership.

My map and model come from my own experience with countless couples and individuals in the context of relationship and partnership as well as I live and breathe this in my own successful marriage of 10 years (together 14) while co-parenting 2 young kids.

Our core class is the class is the 2-semester class your never got in college called The Deep Psychology Of Intimate Relationships and it basically explores how relationships really work and how to do them successfully.

Our next level class is the apprentice program and it trains you to become a certified level 1 relationship coach. Also a 9 month training that starts at $8500.

We also have a larger vision of reaching a million young adults with our work, teaching them how to create safe successful romantic relationships. Every day our mission is aligned with this.

So, there is a HUGE difference between what I’m doing and circling is. Is one better than the other? Not really. I think circling and The Relationship School® are just VERY different and it depends on what your goals are.

Most therapeutic trainings are done in graduate school, typically lasting 2-3 years and cover a wide range of psychology, human behavior, and mental illness. They require you go back into your childhood to address problems. Primarily they are taught from a “medical model” perspective which assumes the client or patient is broken or there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Using the DSMV, you are taught to diagnose and treat symptoms of psychological problems.

Another paradigm that is reinforced is the notion that you stories from the past, particularly about your parents, are one-sided. For example, a therapist might probe into your past and help you see that your relationship issues are a result of your traumatic or neglectful childhood experiences. They reinforce the notion that you’re parents “were not there for you.” and further embed the “story” that you were abandoned or abused and thus colludes to blame your past for your present situation.

There are some excellent therapeutic training programs that seek to resolve specific issues such as trauma. These training programs have a very niched focus and the best of them will help you work with that specific modality. For example, the PACT model of couples therapy is a deep dive into adult attachment, but most of the time you have to be a practicing therapist to join a training like this, which requires 2-3 year masters program beforehand. Another good training is Somatic Experiencing. This training is a “bottom up” training to help you work with trauma very specifically. If you want a trauma specific training, please go back to graduate school and dive into a social work or master’s degree in counseling. 

Here at The Relationship School®, we coach you in the here and now about your relationship life. We believe we have a much wider, and deeper, perspective on the human condition. We don’t see anyone as broken, nor do we reinforce your stories. We challenge your stories and help you see that the greatest lessons in life are found in your pain and we help you see the wisdom in the adversity you have experienced. We use the present moment to repattern your relational way of being and we give you tons of tools and tips on how to coach people around their relationship problems. 

Want to become a coach? Look online and you can find any number of 8 – 12 week coaching programs where you can become a coach, just by reading and studying material on life coaching.

Coaching is growing at an exponential rate because of short coaching programs are a dime a dozen, making it easy for you to “coach” people right away. These types of coaching programs produce very superficial results and do not get at the root issues that lead to lasting change. Instead they seek to change symptoms by helping you set goals and focus on the future, instead of the past.

We use the term “coach” because that’s what the market understands. But in reality, we are deeply soulful healers, helpers, and guides. By stepping onto a “coaching” path with The Relationship School®, you become a “Cultural Evolutionist” because you are evolving the culture through relationship. I’m pretty sure this is the deepest coaching program in the World because it’s run by a former therapist (of 10 years) who is relentless about personal growth and development and constantly working on himself. I’ve tried just about every modality and studied with masters from fields of Gestalt therapy, Sensori-motor psychotherapy, EMDR, Buddhist psychotherapy, Wilderness therapy, Family therapy, Integral, System theory, Men’s work, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Attachment therapy, & The Demartini Method to name a few. So, this training is getting infused with my over 15 years in the professional field working with just about every condition.

I get asked this a lot so I thought I’d speak to it here.

Graduate school takes time and is often good for people who want a very traditional, conventional approach to helping people suffering from “mental illness.” The main goal is to become a counselor or psychotherapist. See above.

Grad school is also for people who want an MA or they are after credentials such as MSW, LPC, or LCSW, etc. This is great for people that want to go work at a government agency that treats people for mental illness (mental health centers, public clinics, women’s shelters, homeless shelters, addiction centers, etc) or a private agency that works with specific populations (privileged therapeutic programs for teens or families, a private eating disorder agency, and addiction treatment centers). If you work for the public or private, you will most certainly be using diagnosis and labeling to treat the patients and clients.

That’s not to say, you cannot open your own private practice, but you will be taking longer than a coaching program to get that up and running. For example, I did a 3 year master’s degree and after graduation I worked for a year in a therapeutic wilderness program as a family therapist, then I slowly started my private practice a year later, while working for various agencies. So I wasn’t seeing private clients until 4 years after my grad program started.

The bottom line here is that graduate school is for people who want to take a traditional route, get credentials, study a wide variety of the human condition and mental health, and graduate as a counselor.