Help your Client’s Lives to Flow

Help Your Clients’ Lives to Flow

Dave Robson Life & Mindset Coach (United Kingdom)

What if your clients already know exactly what they want — they’ve simply lost touch with themselves? Coach and author Dave Robson makes the case for a deceptively simple tool that can change everything: meditation.

Life can be blissfully simple and stress-free, if you allow it to be. That’s not wishful thinking — it’s a premise Dave Robson has tested with clients over years of coaching practice in the UK. His guiding philosophy is captured in a motto he encountered early in his career: “Do what you love, love what you do.” Simple, perhaps even obvious. And yet, as Robson has found again and again, extraordinarily difficult for many people to actually live by.

The clients who struggle most aren’t the unmotivated ones. They’re the ones who arrive at coaching saying they don’t know what they love, don’t know what their goals are, and don’t know what they’re even meant to be doing with their lives. They feel adrift — and quite often, they’re depressed and confused. For the coach, this can feel like a conundrum. No one’s job is to tell another person how to live their life. And yet the client is sitting there, waiting for direction.

Robson’s read on this? Most of these clients do know, deep down. They’ve either lost touch with who they really are, or they lack the courage to pursue what their heart is telling them. Neither truth is easy to hear — which is why Robson doesn’t say it quite so bluntly. Instead, he reaches for something more subtle. Something that creates the conditions for a person to hear their own answer. That tool is meditation.

“If you are not using meditation as a coaching tool, you are missing a trick.”— Dave Robson

For clients who struggle to identify their goals with any real clarity, Robson finds that meditation cuts through the noise. It promotes laser focus, he says, and opens access to what he calls the “innermost, heartfelt being” — the place where your actual desires live, beneath the overthinking, the fear, and the social conditioning. It lets you hear your calling.

Of course, the moment meditation is suggested, the resistance begins. The most common objection? “I haven’t got time — I’m far too busy.” Robson meets this with a touch of wry wisdom: the Dalai Lama recommends at least one hour of meditation a day, and if you think you haven’t got time, you should be meditating for two. The point isn’t to be flippant. It’s to reframe the resistance as a signal — often the busiest, most scattered minds are the ones that need stillness most urgently.

Heart/mind balance — a better way to think about it

Robson takes issue with the popular idea of “work/life balance.” The phrase, he argues, implies that work exists outside of life — as though the hours you spend working aren’t really living. He prefers the concept of heart/mind balance. Some things are appropriate for the mind to figure out. Goals, however — what you truly want from your life — are matters of the heart. And the heart cannot be reasoned with.

Consider the person whose heart is saying I want to be a musician, but who overrides that instinct in favour of a “safer” route into accounting. On the surface it seems sensible. In practice, Robson argues, they are setting themselves up for lifelong inner conflict. No level of professional achievement will produce contentment, because the achievement isn’t connected to who they really are. If what you’ve achieved doesn’t make you happy, he asks simply: what’s the point?

Follow your heart instead — identify the goal that’s truly right for you — and then let your mind work out how to get there. That sequencing matters. Heart first, strategy second. It may seem counter-intuitive in a culture that prizes logic and intellect above almost everything else. But in Robson’s experience, assuming the talent is there, people consistently perform better and go further when they’re doing something they genuinely love. Logic has very little to do with it.

Get the heart/mind balance right, he says, and the work/life balance takes care of itself. Because once you’re pursuing your true passion, work and life stop feeling like separate things. You’re not counting down to the moment the workday ends so your “real life” can begin. You’re simply living.

The simple meditation method Robson teaches his clients

After years of exploring various techniques, Robson has settled on an approach so accessible that any client can adopt it immediately. It costs nothing, requires no prior experience, and — critically — asks nothing of the ego. Here’s the essence of it:

There’s no effort involved, Robson insists. No skill to acquire. No performance to put on — not even for yourself. The knack of witnessing thoughts without getting caught up in them comes naturally with practice. And when it does, the results can be profound: insight, self-understanding, and — most valuably for the coaching context — the clarity to know what you genuinely want from your life.

That, ultimately, is the whole point. When clients gain this deeper, quieter understanding of what’s going on in their own hearts and minds, they stop second-guessing themselves. They develop goals that are right for them — not goals borrowed from expectation or fear. And that, says Robson, is when the real work — and the real fun — begins.

As the protagonist of his latest book, Big Ben and the Meaning of Life, puts it: “Everything is possible if you dare to dream, and then take appropriate action.” The dreaming is easy. The action is where most people stall. A regular meditation practice, Robson believes, is one of the most powerful tools a coach can offer to help a client find the courage to take that first step — because once you know your first step, there’s no reason to wait.

Source: iCN Issue 53 (Wellness & Holistic Coaching: Well-Being & Balance); page 50

About Dave Robson

Dave has been on a spiritual path of personal development for as long as he can remember, and he knew he had a lot to share.

Eventually he gave up carpentry and trained as a Life Coach and began encouraging his clients to discover their true goals in life, while helping them to realise them. That was when his second book was published, How to be a Popular Crew, once again a non-fiction work, this time about sailing, another of Dave’s passions.

Finally, Dave’s latest book has just been published. It’s a follow-up entitled Big Ben and the Meaning of Life. This is a work for young adults and anyone with an enquiring mind and a lively imagination. It has a distinctly philosophical bent, plenty of humour but also a significant message which coaches and their clients will love – “anything is possible if you dare to dream”. Most of all, it’s a rattling good yarn.

What’s next? Another non-fiction book that will blow Dave’s readers away. Watch this space.

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For more information on Dave’s books, or to join his free weekly group mediation on Zoom, feel free to visit www.dave-robson.com

or e-mail him at info@dave-robson.com

If you want to buy any of Dave’s books, or to join his free weekly online meditation session on Zoom, you can email him at info@dave-robson.com