About Rebecca
Thirty three years of witnessing people seeking to understand and heal themselves, and still struggling to create the change they wanted.
Insight is where change starts.
It is almost never where it finishes.
For more than three decades, Rebecca Brownell has sat across from people at the moment insight arrives. Many of them came to her already frustrated, having spent years in therapy or coaching, with a great deal of insight into their problems and nothing changed.
For some, that moment of understanding was enough, and their lives were different afterward. For most there was a longing for more, and a question underneath it: what do I do with this knowing?
The difference between those two groups is the entire purpose behind this work.
What she concluded
The people who changed were not more disciplined or more motivated. They were not the ones who understood themselves best. Some of the most self-aware people she has worked with were the most stuck, because understanding had become the thing they did instead of changing. It can be a kind of paralysis, and it is comfortable, because it feels like progress. The belief is often: if I understand this, I can work harder to change it, and if I just do and think the right things, I will achieve my goals.
What separated the ones who changed was that at some point they stopped trying to improve the person they had always been and started behaving as a different version of themselves. They stopped trying to change their physical reality and became the person, and the energetic match, for the outcome they wanted. The change usually happened before the evidence arrived, while they were still questioning whether change was possible at all.
Depth, without
making you a patient
Rebecca is a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario and a certified Marriage and Family Therapist through the Canadian Association of Couples and Family Therapy. She is also a founding member and Clinical Advisor of the Sophia School of Psychotherapeutic, Hypnotherapeutic and Integrative Arts. She has been in clinical practice for over thirty three years and works from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
Her coaching practice is separate from that clinical work, by design. The experience is what she brings to it. The work itself is different.
NEEDS: one canonical name for the Sophia organization (your markup gave two), and a decision on whether that line belongs on the coaching site at all.
Why coaching, and why this woman
Over the years a particular woman kept arriving. Accomplished, capable, managing her life well, and not looking to fix anything in her past.
She was stuck anyway.
Most of them had already done a great deal of personal work, often at a deep level. They could tell Rebecca exactly where a pattern came from and why they thought they behaved the way they did. What they could not do was change it. They would set the same goals year after year and not reach them, fall back into old patterns, lose clarity on what they wanted, find themselves self sabotaging, and end up in the same relationships and the same reactions.
She was stuck anyway.
Most of them had already done a great deal of personal work. They understood themselves. They could tell Rebecca exactly where a pattern came from and why they behaved the way they did. What they could not do was change it. They consciously wanted one thing while their beliefs, their conditioning and their oldest patterns kept pulling them somewhere else.
Rebecca became interested in the gap between knowing and becoming.
They did not need more time looking backward. They needed a process for naming what was running underneath, challenging the beliefs that no longer fit, and deliberately building a different internal identity.
Coaching lets her ask forward-facing questions instead. Who are you becoming? Which of the things you believe about yourself right now are actually true? What would change if you started living as the woman you want to become now, rather than waiting until you finally felt ready?
None of this dismisses the past. Our experiences matter, and they shape our beliefs, our expectations and our patterns. But there is a point where understanding where something came from stops being the destination, and the question becomes what you are going to create from here.
Not someday. Now.
In her own words
I love when people are able to connect with and change from
their higher version of themselves, learning to trust their intuition and their natural abilities and to be there for
themselves as they grow.
Discovering who we truly are outside of all of our programming is often a very profound and spiritual experience.
Rebecca's own rewrite, 23 September. Taking out "heal" is right for a coaching brand. The trade is that this is now current writing rather than the sentence she wrote years before this brand existed, so the continuity argument goes with it. Either version works.
The person, not the practitioner
Rebecca grew up on her family's farm near Sudbury, Ontario, and later moved as a teenager to Caledon East to continue the family farming tradition. She has shown cattle, ridden horses competitively, and still golfs with honest effort and fishes with joy. Mostly she is out on four hundred acres of trails with her dogs, in rain, shine and blizzards, and she delights in snowshoeing on full moon nights.
It is a useful background for this work. On a farm you do not wait until conditions are ideal. You listen to the rhythms of nature, stay attuned to intuition, and keep learning. Nature has a way of showing you where to go, if you get quiet enough to listen.
A free ten minute assessment
Stop being almost ready.
The assessment gives you language for the specific pattern that has been running. It is free, and there is no call attached to it.
Or read how the six sessions actually work.
Rebecca Brownell Coaching provides a transformational coaching experience for purpose driven women. This is a separate practice from Rebecca's clinical therapeutic work. Coaching is not psychotherapy, counseling, or medical treatment, and is not a substitute for them.
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