Body Image, Self-Love & Sexuality: Empower Your Clients be More Confident in Life and in Bed
How we feel about our body can impact every area of our life – including sex and relationships. That’s why it is so important as a confidence coach to know how to help someone with body image issues.
We are all born into a body, and our body is an essential part of what makes us who we are. Everybody has the potential to experience joy and pleasure and deserves to be seen and celebrated.
How Does Body Image Affect Our Self Confidence?
Unfortunately, we live in a world full of judgements and opinions about how a body is supposed to look. Faced with these intense expectations and cultural criticisms, we start to separate from our body and start to look at it as an object.
When we don’t meet the expectations, we feel deep shame that some core part of us is not ok, not lovable. This is shocking to the nervous system and settles as trauma in the body (and sometimes progresses to body dysmorphic disorder).
Just think about a young child that happily moves and enjoys their body, and then an adult comes in and tells them that their body is wrong. The process of deeper embodiment and deepening the intimate relationship with our body gets interrupted. We lose the rich experience of living in our body. Instead, we look at it in one dimension only – the way it looks.
In our society, it’s pretty standard to view our body from the external observer’s perspective rather than an internal experience. In addition, our culture constantly tells us that only specific kinds of bodies count as beautiful, which creates a huge divide in a person. This causes some people to strive for improvement and conformity, while others decide to quit the race and give up.
No matter what the response is, the one dimensional way of looking at our body creates a split that doesn’t allow us to be in harmony with our body. It also doesn’t allow us to attune to our body, connect with it, feel it, and love it just the way it is.
How Does Body Image Affect Relationships & Sexuality?
In addition to impacting our sense of self, body insecurity in relationships can have a very negative impact. People may feel like they don’t deserve to have a happy relationship unless they have achieved the perfect body.
Your clients might push away partners or potential partners because of their insecurity and low self esteem.
People may also feel self conscious during intimacy and act more as a spectator of themselves in bed instead of a participant. In other words, they may be thinking more about the shape of their body, the size of their penis, or how their body is moving, instead of immersing themselves in the pleasure of sex. A big part of how to be more confident in bed actually comes from the feeling of body confidence.
Confidence Coaching and Body Image Specialization
This is where confidence coaching or body image coaching can make a huge difference. At the Somatica Institute, that’s exactly the reason why we have created a body image specialization as part of our sex & relationship coach training.
In this specialization, you will become a self esteem coach, a body confidence coach, and a cheerleader to empower your client’s reclaim their right to love and pleasure. While this will not be a body image coach certification per se, you will learn a lot about confidence coaching throughout the Somatica Training, and especially in the body image specialization.
Your clients will come to you with questions like “How do I stop being self conscious during intimacy?” and “How do you date with body image issues?”. As a coach, you will need to start from the beginning to help them reclaim their sense of self.
Somatica Tools for Body Image & Confidence Coaching
Here are some of the Somatica tools you will use as a coach to help your clients boost their body positivity:
Deconstructing Social Messages
Body image specialization will teach you to think critically about the messages people receive about their bodies. These can come from social media, the diet and fashion industries, men’s and women’s magazines, porn – and even their own families and communities.
Your role involves shedding light on how people are conditioned to constantly compare themselves – a tactic often exploited by certain industries to drive profits. Your mission is to guide them towards embracing body-positive imagery, fashion choices, and media messages, fostering a healthier and more inclusive mindset.
The Body’s Inner Voice
One of Somatica’s main tenets is helping people learn to tune out the outside voices, and start to listen to the body’s inner voice of wisdom.
When people feel bad about their bodies, they turn down the volume on that inner voice and start to worry about what others think. This can lead to eating disorders or other forms of self-harm.
When you help your clients listen to their inner voice, which means paying attention to your emotions, your desire, your authentic appetite, etc., it will lead them to a much more fulfilling and self-driven life.
Celebrating Pleasure
Our bodies have the opportunity to afford us so much pleasure. Sadly, the focus can be taken away from that pleasure when we don’t love ourselves.
When you are body image coaching, it can be effective to refocus your client on all of the bodily pleasures available to them. This can be a pathway for them to fall in love with themselves, feel sexy and open themselves to love from others as well.
How to Bring Your Own Body Positivity
Being a body confidence coach is part of your work as a sex and relationship coach, and requires that you bring an attitude of body positivity. Oftentimes, this will mean working through your own issues or prejudice about what counts as beautiful.
When you are in the role of self esteem coach and working in an interpersonal modality like the Somatica Method, bringing your authentic appreciation for your client’s beauty and sexiness can help them internalize and experience their own body love!
The Next Somatica Certification Training Starts October 25, 2024!
Join us and let pleasure be your guide to an exciting new career.
Become an in-demand Sex & Relationship Coach and watch your own life transform in the process.
The next live Q&A session is on Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 11am PT