Dr Phil Bennett, Life Coach, Growth Coach & Retired Psychologist

To live is to grow and to grow is to live

Hope comes from the possibility of change

and neuroscience provides a hopeful road map.

Becoming more ‘awake’ can lead to growth, altering your autopilot reactions to life.

Relational coaching

Relational contentedness is fundamental to long term health. Our brain (and heart) require human connection and attunement to heal. A well integrated brain is what enables us to create a future full of meaning and connection.
It’s always an honor to walk with someone toward relational goals, hopes, and dreams. 

Relationships hurt us or heal us, so the health of our relationships is vital to our overall health.

Couples can choose to work with myself and my wife if they desire. Hit the button below to learn more about working as a couple with a couple.

Resiliency /transitions coaching

Life is full of transitions, and we need resiliency to manage both unexpected and expected shifts in life. We finish school and move toward a career. We marry or divorce. We retire and wonder ‘What’s next?’ Life is stressful. We experience beginnings, endings, and losses of all sorts as we journey through life and have to set new goals. 

Its never too late to improve tomorrow.

There is beauty to be found in transitions 

growth and mindfulness coaching

For many (but not all) of us its easy to see we are broken; discovering our beauty and the amazing nature of our minds can fuel our change. We can work together to increase your curiosity about why you are stuck, discover alternative ways of living, and move from reactivity where you feel like there is no choice, to taking actions of which you are fully mindful.

I took this photo on a backpacking trip, after climbing the Grand Teton’s Full Exum. This expansive view of the Grand Teton makes me think of what I love to do in everyday life — coach! Coaching is about expanding our view and seeing from new angles, a necessary task for growth and moving toward resiliency. Stress and crisis are always opportunities to pivot toward life. Consider grief and loss for a moment. Losses in life either leave us unchanged, and thus rigid in our approach to life (a path toward death), or crack us open (brutally at times) — expanding our awareness of the world around us. Embracing growth means learning to embrace everything, including loss. Life and loss go hand-in-hand just like our inevitable movement through the seasons; summer leads to fall, and winter leads to spring.

Our culture often encourages us to minimize loss. One loss I often hear minimized is the loss of a pet. Losing a pet can be a massive trauma felt as deeply as losing a child, best friend, partner, etc. Coaching through any loss can help us move toward growth and resiliency. We experience loss. We suffer. We ache. We would never choose to relive the suffering, yet it can also be true that, looking back, we would never want to lose the growth we achieved as we survived our loss and continued to live. We can’t control losses in life. We can only control them if we use them as opportunities for growth. If we embrace it all, we end up with an expansive view of life.

“If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.”

This quote from Bob Dylan is true at even the cellular level of life, new connections between cells keeps us living and growing day after day, and if new connections are not being made then there is cellular death… there’s no in-between, just life or death.