A Coaching model to help clients arise from the life’s ordeals

1. DANCING THROUGH THE
DARK NIGHT
A Coaching model to arise from the life’s ordeals
Alejandro Fernández Cervantes
Leadership Coach
lafcer@outlook.com
International Coach Academy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alefer

2. WHAT IS THE DARK NIGHT?
• A turbulent passage in your life filled with tribulation. During this passage,
beliefs that you once considered essential, are collapsed. As a
consequence of that, you feel trapped into a plethora of profound
dilemmas full of paradoxes and contradictions.
• Some examples of dark nights can be: Losing your job and not being able to
find another, a beloved one passes away unexpectedly, you find that you
spouse cheated on you, a terminal disease is diagnosed or you experience
a deep spiritual and existential crisis. Those are just examples, what really
describes a dark night is not the outer experience or the conditions that
triggered it, but the inner feeling of your whole world falling apart.

3. THE DANCE THROUGH THE DARK
NIGHT
Feel
Compassion
Seed
Courage
Manifest
your
darkness
Awaken
the Hero
Be at
Wonder

4. Dance Steps Role of the Coach Role of the Coachee ICF Coach’s Competencies at stake
Feel Compassion
Compassionately and empathetically
listen, avoiding judgments. The coach
makes clarifying questions to understand
the depth of the coachee’s sadness and
void.
Unleash catharsis and openly share his
grieve. Complain, get angry, look for
validation, be a victim: anything is
allowed to release contained emotions
about the dark night.
Acknowledgement, Active Listening,
Setting the Foundation, Co-Creating the
Relationship
Manifest your
darkness
To Inspire Inspiring healthy curiosity about
the nature of the experience of the Dark
Night. Uses metaphor and analogy to
help to illustrate a point or paint a verbal
picture about the dark night.
To open to face the night with
imagination and artistic eye. Manifest the
journey by being the poet of his
experience. The final goal of the manifest
dance is to avoid the attempt to explain,
defend and interpret the dark night.
Powerful Questioning, Create Awareness,
Direct Communication
Seed Courage
Using awareness exercises and other
techniques the coach seeds a shift of
perspective about the dark night. Not as
something that needs to be avoided or
running away from, but something that
needs to be faced.
Facing the Dark: Gradually accept the
fact that the dark night initiates him into
spiritual adulthood.
Direct Communication, Create
Awareness, Coaching Presence
Be at Wonder
To acknowledge the coachee for
embracing the wonderful opportunity
posed by the dark night. Be a
companion in this contemplative dance
of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
In this dance the coachee starts to
understand the calling implied in the dark
night. He is open to feel the wonder
about the pregnancy and does no more
than allow to be carried along by it.
Create Awareness, Coaching presence,
Active Listening
Awaken the Hero
Facilitate the process of designing
actions that reflect the new identity
resulting from the dark night.
Embody the new perspective provoked
by the dark night by setting courageous
actions and goals that will make worthy
the difficult passage.
Designing Actions, Planning and Goal
Setting

5. TOOLS TO CARRY IN YOUR BACKPACK
THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT
Tool Description Dance
Re-Engineer your
perspectives
Clinging to the beliefs that want to be destroyed by the dark
night will only increase the risk of depression. The journey
through this emotional swamp is a calling to question our most
cherished views. Using powerful questions such as those given
by this power tool, the coachee can discover new ways to
appreciate his passage through the dark night
Seed Courage
Humor and irony The dark passage represents an enormous paradox full or
irony. This paradox serves as fertile soil to awaken some sort of
black humor that can ease down and relax our resistance to
tribulation.
Feeel Compassion,
Seed Courage,
Manifest Your
Darkness
Art Artistic expression can symbolically represent the
contradictions and paradoxes of our existence. Poetry, acting,
drawing or any creative activity can be useful. The magic of
these techniques is to use symbolic and metaphorical
language to access facets about the dark night that wouldn’t
be coherent at all by our rational conscience
Manifest Your
Darkness

6. TOOLS TO CARRY IN YOUR BACKPACK
THROUGH THE DARK NIGHT
Tool Description Dance
Don’t do anything Modern culture makes us think that the dark night is an
indicator of regression and sickness. Under this
paradigm, we need to keep moving and take action
to overcome it. But what it all we have to do at first is sit
and listen? What if trying to provoke the birth before
time will only worsen the situation? Don’t do anything
else but turning on your awareness and get rid of your
aversion to darkness.
Be at Wonder
Psychomagic
and
Psychodrama
Known exercises like hitting a pillow with all your anger,
or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychomagic which intends
to free our un-conscious energy using symbolic rituals,
can be powerful allies in the journey through the dark
night. In Psychodrama, a trained facilitator recreates
scenes from our sub-conscious in real time, and walks
the protagonist through a coherent interpretation that
brings catharsis.
Seed Courage

7. POWERFUL QUESTIONS SAMPLER
• What if your life’s ordeals are paths to purification rather than mere punishments for our unconscious actions?
• What if we regard the dark times of our life as rite passages to rip off obsolete parts of our identity?
• Are our tribulations real callings to acquire consciousness of our dark side and stop being at its mercy?
• What would happen if our intention to end the dark night is replaced with the intention to contemplate it from a place of wisdom and
awareness?
• What would happen if rather than pretend to expel your demons by repressing them –and therefore making them stronger- you sit down
and have a cup of tea with them?
• Have you considered that darkness is darkness just because you turn your back at it, rather than lighten it with the eyes of your
consciousness?
• What would happen if you regard your dark night as a rebellion from your consciousness rather than a place of depression and trauma?
• Have you considered that the dark night could be a solution to your complex dilemmas that have tormented you for decades?
• What if your dark knight constitutes a way to drain old beliefs that accumulated pain for years? A way to remove the blockage built by
your ego to perpetuate an unsustainable identity?
• If you could change the depressive idea of the dark night, what would happen if you look with deep irony and humor this obscure
passage?
• How would you feel if you look at your negative emotions not as signs that there is something wrong, but as trials to shape a new
person?
• If your dark night could speak to you and tell you that it has come to teach you something, what would it say?