The coaching, wellness, and healing industries tend to use the terms “Breakthrough” & “Transformation” a lot – and interchangeably –  when they are marketing to clients.

However, most practitioners don’t actually know and intimately understand the difference between a breakthrough and a transformation, let alone how to yield both.

When you don’t know the difference between a breakthrough and a transformation, this is where bottlenecking can happen in your client’s progress towards their goals. This is where self-sabotage can start to creep in AFTER you think you’ve already “worked it through” with your client. This is where your client can start to feel like they’re just not moving forward in the ways they would like.

When you don’t know the difference between a breakthrough and a transformation, you as the practitioner lose the ability to navigate your clients towards their goals in ways that feel easeful and in flow.

So what IS the difference between a breakthrough and a transformation?

A BREAKTHROUGH is when you support your client to understand, become aware of, see, sense, or feel a new piece of information – a new idea, a new feeling, a pattern they hadn’t seen before, a way of being, etc.

Breakthroughs are awesome (obviously!). We want to have our listening and questioning and creating awareness and visioning skills, as well as our Befriend Your Fear, Re-Wiring Negative Thought Patterns, and others, in tip-top shape in order to support clients to have breakthroughs.

We need breakthroughs in order to move forward towards our goals and towards our evolution. Plus, they are so darn sexy! It’s the best feeling in the world to have a breakthrough and understand, see or feel something new.

But all that being said…at the end of the day, Breakthroughs are actually useless if they aren’t moved forward towards transformation.

Practitioners and Clients can sometimes become addicted to the sexiness of breakthroughs and never move on to the deeper work of transformation.

A TRANSFORMATION is real and long-lasting change – in our habits, in our thinking, in our feeling, in our perceiving, in our actions, in our ways of being, in our ways of relating.

Breakthroughs are a step on the pathway to change and transformation, but only part of the story.

We support our clients to create transformation when we have the specialized techniques to take the new breakthroughs that come up for our clients and help them apply that new information persistently and consistently until real change on the cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and somatic levels occur.

And when this happens….wowee!…it’s pretty magical.

This is when your clients start to remember you as a seminal person on their path.

This is when your clients start to not only achieve goals more consistently but with way more energy left over.

This is when you get to really feel that special satisfaction in knowing that your clients aren’t just making the best use of your work together and that you are in your highest purpose.

It definitely takes mastery of skills and techniques to be able to co-create breakthroughs AND transformations with your clients.

But the first step is to know the difference and to DECIDE that you are the type of practitioner who isn’t willing to settle for breakthroughs only, that you are the type of practitioner who is committed to co-creating real and long-lasting change with your clients. That you are the type of practitioner who has the gravitas to hold space for the deeper change. That you are the type of practitioner who isn’t only interested in the “sexy”, but also in the process of how human beings truly evolve and step into their highest expression.