Sometimes we feel our life is like riding an out-of-control horse. At other times we might find ourselves unable to reach our goals or find the inspiration we need to achieve our highest potential. Our life might be confusing us with uncertainty about relationships, career, or family. And at other times, we might be wondering about the Big Questions, and striving to find meaning in a world that can seem chaotic and lonely. 
•These are times when a personal coach can make all the difference in the world, by helping us to realize our own strengths, understand our motivations, and chart a course to realizing our dreams•
K and R Creative offers both Life and Spiritual Coaching, as well as the most intensive self-development training program available anywhere:
Metamorphosis.
As we confront life's struggles and
rise toward achieving our dreams, it can be invaluable to have
someone who can lend perspective from outside our circle of family
and friends. Life coaching provides just such a person – someone
who is caring, insightful, and intuitive about your situation.
Together, we'll explore any aspects
of your life that you feel aren't bringing you complete fulfillment,
whether that's your relationships, your career, or your self-image.
I've helped people to start businesses, manifest their dreams, find
their peace with aging or death, establish healthy relationships, and
even to reinvent their lives from the ground up.
Your first session is always free –
this gives us a chance to connect and find out if I'm the coach for
you. If so, we'll begin a journey of new discovery, insight, and
fulfillment as you discover your infinite potential to create the
life of your dreams.
Contact me to set up your free initial coaching session.
Kenton Whitman
715.643.7201
Do you feel that something essential is missing in your life?
Most of us do, and we're also savvy enough to know that our culture's
standard definition of 'success' doesn't add up to living a fulfilling,
passionate life. There must be something more!
Today there are a host of books and
teachers telling you how you can achieve happiness in 8 easy steps.
Kenton Whitman has been offering something different since he started
his
Zen-Inspired Self-Development
website in 2006. Over 100,000 visitors have been guided toward clarity
and understanding, and an international audience now looks to Kenton
for lucid guidance as they approach life. For the first time Kenton is
making his insight available on a one-on-one basis.
Awakening helps us to see,
first-hand, our cultural conditioning, and to experience how our minds
run on 'auto-pilot'. We create our lives based on assumptions and
habits that are largely unexamined. I'll work with you
personally to explore that cultural conditioning, and to discover a
joy-filled, passion-filled approach to living.
The true secret to Living Fully has
been handed down to us from sources such as Vedanta, Taoism,
Zen, and the words of Christ. These messages, however, have been
hidden behind veils of dogma and ceremony. My approach strips
those veils away and makes the secret of Awakening available to
everyone.
The basic idea behind Awakening is
that we are all spiritually 'asleep'. Our minds are conditioned to run
a constant stream of messages that don't serve us -- instead, they
create stress, frustration, and tension in our lives. No matter how
much money we have, no matter how 'good' our life seems, we still live
in fear and anxiousness.
When we 'wake up', we recognize our
patterns of destructive behavior and come to a new understanding of
what gives life meaning. The remarkable secret is that in the end, we
discover that we were already at the destination that we've been trying
to achieve!
Innumerable seekers have told Kenton
that he communicates profound teachings with clarity and ease, using
humor and an intuitive understanding of human nature to make the
journey fun and enriching.
Spiritual Coaching is often done via the
email-only option.
Person-to-person coaching is available on a local basis. Contact Kenton
via email to learn more.
I've always believed that being a guide or a teacher requires two important elements -- a) that we have the know-how to effectively share our guidance or knowledge with others, and b) that we Walk our Talk, and live by example. All of my life I have aspired to those ideals, first as a teacher of wilderness skills, then as a martial arts instructor, and then as a spiritual guide. What most people notice about me is that I almost always wear a smile. It's stuck there, and that's because I've learned some valuable lessons about living life to the fullest. At nearly forty years old, I'm in better shape than I was when I was a cross-country runner at age 18. I've been in the same relationship for 18 years, and people are always asking my wife and I how we can still seem to have 'crushes' on each other after so much time together. Most of all, I enjoy life and all the myriad experiences it provides -- and life has given me some very interesting and growth-oriented experiences.
In 2006, I started a website called
Zen-Inspired Self Development. Little did I know where it would lead me. Though I've kept the site relatively obscure by refraining from marketing or advertising, I still get tens of thousands of visitors each year, and many of those visitors write me to ask how they can find new meaning in their lives, realize their dreams, or to find guidance as they realize their full potential. In effect, I've been engaged in spiritual coaching since the website began.
Meanwhile, I was doing what I always do with my friends and other people whose lives cross paths with mine. Inevitably, I get into conversations and people begin sharing their personal lives, asking me what I think might help them through such-and-such a situation. Remarkably, I found that I didn't have the answers -- they did. My role was simply to ask the right questions, to serve as a guide to turn their attention to their own innate wisdom.
Then came a turning-point in my life. I found myself helping a young man who was facing criminal charges, and the possibility that he'd spend the rest of his life in prison. With the blessing of his family and his psychologist, he and I spent ten days in near-full wilderness survival, without tent, matches, or knife. My goal was to let nature be the teacher, and to help this young man find confidence and direction as his uncertain life unfolded before him. Again, I found myself in the role of questioner -- asking questions that led him to his own realizations about his dreams, his aspirations, and his hopes for changing his future. His story is still unfolding, but I came away from that experience not only having lost quite a few pounds and having contracted Lyme disease (for the second time!), but also realizing that I had something valuable to offer in the form of helping others to overcome their fears and shoot for their wildest dreams.
My decision to offer coaching services comes from a desire to help others discover what I have found in my own life -- that true joy is possible, that it is a beautiful thing to follow our dreams, and that we are stronger, more courageous, and more capable than we imagine. It is my aspiration that I can provide that for every client I work with.
Coaching is currently an unregulated profession in the United States. That means that anybody can set up shop as a coach. To make things more complicated, several organizations have begun to offer coaching certifications -- however, these organizations are also unregulated by any centralized governing body. That means that you could start a certification program yourself, and charge people to receive coaching certifications. So how do you know who is a 'qualified' coach?
To help understand the situation, I'll compare it to yoga. Just like coaching, anyone can set themselves up as a teacher of yoga. Also just like coaching, there are several organizations that qualify teachers. Currently, government regulation for yoga is being brought up as a possibility, as explained in this
New York Times article. This is welcomed by some, but not by others, and I've heard yoga teachers argue passionately for both sides of the issue. The advantages of non-regulation mean that organic or person-based professions can continue to practice traditional or custom-designed programs to attend to an individual's needs. But it also means that you have no guarantee of what you're getting if you take a yoga class. Regulation means that the government will define yoga for us, and many who see yoga as a spiritual pursuit of awakening feel that a government-defined program will attend to commercial issues rather than spiritual ones. The end result is that certification can be a sign of professionalism, but it's not the full answer. There are plenty of uncertified yoga teachers who deliver safe, powerful, and intuitive instruction, and there are some certified teachers who don't. You can only know for sure by experiencing an instructor for yourself.
Now consider coaching. Unregulated, coaches are able to attend to clients on a very personal level, adapting their coaching so that it is most appropriate for each individual. However, it also means that someone who is totally unfit for the coaching profession can charge you hundreds of dollars and deliver nothing positive in return. On the other side of the coin, regulation would hold coaches to certain standards, but would also give the government say in what must, to be effective, be a highly personalized coach/client relationship.
To confuse things further, there is now some talk of government regulation of coaching, which could possibly render either of the two main certifications -- IAC or ICF-- negligible.
In my opinion, the best way to choose a coach is to try them out. Reputable coaches should give you a free initial session so that you can meet and see if you connect. It's important that you feel completely 'right' about your coach -- you should sense from your initial conversation that the coach knows how to listen, how to gently guide, and how to honor your own ability to make life changes. You should also feel that your coach will challenge you to fulfill your potential and encourage you to insight. Your coach should inspire you. You should feel secure that your coach will keep your conversations confidential. Never should you feel that your coach is putting you down, using the coaching experience to aggrandize themselves, or that he or she is not giving you their full and undivided attention.
I've decided to wait and see how things play out with the various certifications available. While I have explored both IAC and ICF certifications, I have a value issue with both processes, and that is that both processes require actual coaching sessions to be recorded and submitted to the instructors. While I can see the value in this, it also seems a breach of confidentiality, and in my opinion all coaching clients should be assured that the information they share is not going to be shared with anyone else -- not the coach's spouse, not their friend, and not strangers, including instructors. Some coaches have indicated that you can get around this by doing faux-coaching sessions with friends who don't share actual personal life details, but this, too, seems to be a fraudulent way to approach the situation. For now, I'd rather remain uncertified and log actual coaching hours which will (hopefully) be able to be applied if and when I discover the right coaching certification for me.
Life and
Spiritual Coaching Pricing:
Your initial coaching session is always free. Finding the right coach
is a deeply personal choice and often is the beginning of a long-term
relationship, and it is my philosophy that everyone should have a
chance to explore that relationship before a commitment is made.
Your free initial session includes either:
A 30-minute phone session – this is an actual coaching session, not
a sales pitch!
OR
A 30-minute IM session if you choose the IM-only option.
OR
A four-email exchange (two from you, two from your coach) if you choose the email-only option.
OR
An in-person meeting if you are local or can travel to the
Menomonie, WI area.
After our initial session, you can
purchase sessions in one-month bundles. You are not held to a
contract, and can stop at any time that feels right to you – however, all payments are
non-refundable.
One Month Bundle Option One:
Four phone sessions (one per week,
approximately), each lasting 45-60 minutes.
Unlimited email access to your
coach.* Price is $200.00 per month.
One Month
Bundle Option Two:
Eight phone sessions (two per week,
approximately), each lasting 45-60 minutes.
Unlimited email access to your
coach.* Price is $350 per month.
In-Person
Option:
If you are local or willing to
travel to Menomonie, WI for sessions, you can replace any phone session
for an in-person meeting at a local cafe. I suggest the Raw Deal or Legacy Chocolates
because of the relative privacy
that the locations afford. Meeting in person is best done during
non-peak times so that we aren't dealing with live music or crowds.
Any number of your phone sessions can be replaced by in-person
sessions for a $30 per session additional fee, and last from 60-70
minutes.
IM Option:
If you are not living in the United States or do not wish to
communicate via phone, you can choose option one or two above and
simply replace the phone session with a 45-60 minute IM session. You
also get unlimited email access to your coach.*
Email Only
Option:
If you prefer to use email only, you will get unlimited email access
to your coach* for $160 US per month.
*Understanding
Unlimited Email access:
You can communicate with your coach on an unlimited basis via email. Often,
writing allows for a level of communication and thought that can't be
found via phone or in-person meetings. However, due to client load,
response time may vary. Your coach will get back to you as quickly as
possible, but at times responses may not arrive until the next day.
Please be patient.
Kenton Whitman
715.643.7201