Clarity, Boundaries, and Shared Responsibility

I am a professional coach and mentor focused on supporting personal growth, leadership development, and embodied wholeness. My work centers on helping clients cultivate clarity, capacity, and resilience through reflective dialogue, skill-building, somatic awareness, and nature-based insight.

Coaching is a collaborative, forward-focused partnership. It empowers clients to make conscious choices, take aligned action, and deepen their participation in life and relationships.

This section outlines what clients can expect within my role — and where clear boundaries ensure proper care and ethical integrity.

What Coaching Includes

As your coach, I will:

• Support you in defining goals and navigating transitions

• Facilitate self-awareness, reflection, and insight

• Help you build skills for embodied confidence and effective action

• Provide practices, feedback, structure, and mentorship

• Challenge limiting patterns compassionately and appropriately

• Hold a confidential space for honest exploration

• Respect cultural, ecological, and relational contexts

• Encourage internal resourcefulness, accountability, and agency

We work with your whole human experience — physical, emotional, cognitive, relational, and spiritual — in an integrated way.

What Coaching Does Not Include

Coaching is not:

• Psychotherapy or mental health treatment

• Medical or clinical advice, diagnosis, or intervention.

• Substance abuse counseling

• Recovery from acute addiction

• Legal, financial, or tax advisement

• Emergency or crisis response

If mental health or medical concerns arise beyond the scope of coaching, I will:

• Communicate those boundaries clearly

• Recommend appropriate licensed professionals when needed

• Collaborate with your broader support team if requested and appropriate

Client Responsibilities

Clients agree to:

• Take ownership of their choices, actions, and progress

• Communicate honestly about challenges and needs

• Practice new skills and strategies between sessions

• Seek additional professional support when recommended or required

• Maintain respect for the time, agreements, and process

Coaching is most effective when clients are active participants in their own development.

Confidentiality & Ethics

I follow professional standards of confidentiality, informed consent, and ethical conduct based on recognized coaching guidelines. Information shared in sessions will remain private except when:

• Required by law

• Necessary to prevent foreseeable harm to self or others

• Explicit permission is given for collaboration with other professionals

Clear agreements will be established before work begins.

When Coaching is Right for You

This work is for individuals who:

• Want to grow, evolve, and strengthen their capacity to meet life

• Are navigating meaningful transitions or increasing responsibility

• Seek clarity of direction and deeper purpose

• Value embodied practice, relational presence, and personal accountability

Coaching is not a substitute for therapy, but a complementary path for those ready to engage fully in their becoming.

Our Commitment

A successful coaching relationship is built on:

• Trust

• Honesty

• Shared expectations

• Mutual respect

We walk this path together —
with clarity of role, integrity of practice, and dedication to your evolution.

Primal Life Coaching

Benjamin J. Sanford

www.benjaminsanford.com

benjaminjonsanford@gmail.com

Standards of Practice

(Updated 11/25/2025)

Professional. Ethical. Clear. Aligned.

To ensure clarity, integrity, and professionalism in all of my work, my coaching practice is organized around four essential categories of standards. These standards reflect global coaching expectations (ICF-aligned), responsible ethical commitments, and the administrative structures that protect both you and me throughout our work together.

This document provides an accessible overview of those standards.

1. Professional Standards (download PDF)

How I practice. The frameworks that guide our work.

My coaching is aligned with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) Core Competencies and Code of Ethics — the globally recognized benchmark for professional coaching.

This includes:

ICF-Aligned Practices

• Ethical, transparent, client-centered methodology

• Emphasis on presence, deep listening, and awareness

• Client-led agenda and personal responsibility

• Reflective, developmental, and forward-moving engagement

Scope of Practice

I distinguish coaching clearly from other forms of support, such as:

• Mentoring

• Consulting

• Teaching and education

• Spiritual direction & guidance

• Embodied or nature-based practices

Coaching is non-clinical, non-diagnostic, and non-directive.

Roles & Responsibilities

You are in control. You set the goals and make your own decisions.

I support you. I support your clarity, insight, and meaningful progress.

2. Ethical Standards (Download)

How I uphold integrity, respect, and safety.

Ethics form the heart of responsible practice.

I maintain clear ethical commitments to ensure psychological safety and professional integrity.

Confidentiality

Coaching conversations remain private

• Notes and records are kept secure

• Information is only shared with your explicit consent

• Legal exceptions apply only for safety (harm or abuse)

Safety & Referral Protocol

I maintain boundaries around:

• What coaching can and cannot ethically address

• When issues require a therapeutic or clinical professional

• When safety concerns require referral

• When coaching is paused to protect client wellbeing

Boundaries & Consent

I uphold clear boundaries regarding:

• Power dynamics

• Touch (only where relevant and consensual)

• Embodied, somatic, or symbolic practices

• Group or nature-based experiences

• Cultural and spiritual integrity

3. Legal & Administrative Policies (Download)

Protecting both client and coach.

These policies protect both client and coach by providing clarity, fairness, and transparency in the practical aspects of working together.

Included Policies

• Coaching Agreement

• Privacy Policy

• Terms of Service

• Payment & Refund Policies

• Cancellation & Rescheduling Guidelines

• Liability Waiver (if applicable)

• Media & Recording Consent

These policies ensure clear expectations and mutual understanding.

4. Client Onboarding Process (Download)

How we begin our work together.

Before we start coaching, you will receive:

Welcome & Orientation Materials

• What coaching looks like

• How sessions work

• Communication guidelines

• Your rights and responsibilities

Intake Process

• Application or intake form

• Review of relevant policies

• Signed Coaching Agreement

• Optional participation or readiness forms (if needed)

This process ensures clarity, informed consent, and a supportive, safe foundation for our work.

Download the Complete Standards of Practice Handbook (PDF)

A clean, printable version of everything on this page, organized for easy reference.

Download: Standards of Practice Handbook (PDF)

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My Coaching Philosophy

Participatory • Embodied • Primal

We do not stand apart from life observing it — we are participants within it.
Growth is not something that happens to us; it is something that unfolds through our participation in the world.

At the core of my coaching practice is a simple truth:
You are already whole, already connected, already part of a greater living system. The work is not to become something else, but to remember, reclaim, and realign with what is most true in you.

Coaching creates a generative space — a relationship — where deeper patterns can be seen, new possibilities can emerge, and action becomes aligned with who you are and how the world is calling you to show up. Insight and embodiment move together. We learn by doing. We become through relating.

This approach is primal in the best sense: rooted in the intelligence of the body, the cycles of nature, and the reality that meaning is found not in abstraction, but through lived experience.

Core Principles

• Wholeness Already Present
  You are not broken. Our work draws forth the wisdom, strength, and sensitivity that already reside within you.

• Relationship as Catalyst
  Transformation emerges through connection — with self, others, and the living world.

• Participation Over Performance
  We shift from proving and striving toward engaging and responding with clarity and purpose.

• Embodied Knowing
  The body is not a tool of the mind — it is a way of knowing. Practices ground insight in lived reality.

• Reality as Teacher
  We use your actual life — its challenges, tensions, edges — as the curriculum for growth.

• Development with Depth
  We cultivate increased capacity to meet complexity without losing center.

Approach & Influences

My coaching blends:

• Adult developmental psychology

• Somatic and intuitive intelligence

• Complexity and ecological thinking

• Wilderness and martial practice

• Reflective and philosophical inquiry

• Nature-based and imaginal engagement

Each modality is a lens, a doorway — not the point.
The point is you showing up fully to the life that is already unfolding.

Why This Work Matters

The aim of our coaching relationship is to support you as you:

• See more clearly

• Feel more deeply

• Act more skillfully

• Belong more fully

• Contribute more courageously

Not through self-improvement as a project —
but through participation in your own becoming.

Life moves through you.
Meaning arises between us.
Wisdom emerges in the space we hold.

Coaching is the practice of responding to that emergence
with presence, integrity, and imagination.

Benjamin J. Sanford (→ See Bio)

A Lifetime of Practice. A Convergence of Traditions. A Dedication to Human Development.

My work draws from more than 25 years of training, teaching, guiding, and mentoring across wilderness skills, martial arts, adult development, education design, spirituality, and embodied leadership. What I offer today is the integrated expression of these disciplines—refined through years of lived experience, rigorous study, and guiding thousands of people in the field.

Academic & Professional Training

• M.S. in Learning Experience Design & Educational Technology
  Focus on adult learning, curriculum design, assessment, cognitive science, and online education.

• B.S. Science Education

• Certified NLP Practitioner (Integral Institute – Level 1)
  Training in communication patterns, perceptual shifts, and transformational dialogue.

• CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach (Level 1)
  Foundations in holistic health, stress physiology, and functional lifestyle design.

• Graduate of a 4-Year Wilderness Fusion Healing Program
  Integrative training in somatic awareness, nature-based healing, deep listening, and relational presence.

• Graduate of Landmark Education SELP (Self-Expression & Leadership Program)
  Training in leadership, accountability, communication, and transformative action.

• Robbins-Madanes Training (partial completion)
  Strategic intervention and human needs psychology.

Mentorship, Apprenticeships & Lineages

• Long-term practitioner and mentor in Southeast Asian martial arts, including Indonesian Pencak Silat, with rank and recognition as a Guru.

• Tracker School & Extended Apprenticeship in the Tom Brown Jr. lineage, including advanced skills in awareness, tracking, nature connection, and philosophy.

• Vision Quest Guide & Earth-Based Ritual Training, supporting profound personal and spiritual transitions.

• Art of Mentoring graduate, grounded in the 8 Shields model of deep nature connection and community-based learning.

• Crossfit Coach- Level 1

• Massage Therapy Certificate

• Jin Shin Do practitioner

Fields of Expertise

My coaching and mentoring weave together:

• Embodied learning & somatic intelligence

• Complexity and systems thinking

• Developmental psychology & adult evolution

• Spiritual direction and imaginal practice

• Martial arts discipline & protector training

• Wilderness skills & nature-based mentorship

• Trauma-informed awareness

• Leadership development & creative problem-solving

• Philosophical coaching, dialectic, and reflective inquiry

This multidisciplinary foundation allows me to meet clients with precision, presence, and adaptability, drawing from whichever modality best aligns with their needs and developmental stage.

Real-World Experience

Beyond formal credentials, my work is shaped by:

• Over 20 years as a business owner (Tarzan’s Tree Service / Tarzan’s Wyld), cultivating practical wisdom, leadership, and resilience.

• 23 years of running Tribal Edge Primal Wisdom Center, mentoring hundreds of students through wilderness, martial, and ceremonial training.

• Developing the Evolving Wisdom Project, an integrated framework for rewilding education and cultivating wise mentors.

• Guiding life transitions, initiations, apprenticeships, and men’s work across multiple generations.

• Coaching leaders, educators, artists, protectors, practitioners, and seekers from diverse backgrounds.

A Unified Modality

All of this forms the basis of my unique approach to coaching—a modality that integrates the mind, body, spirit, and relational field, grounded in:

• Deep presence

• Clear seeing

• Embodied action

• Meaningful contribution

I work with individuals who are ready to evolve, embody their gifts, and participate in life with greater courage, clarity, and wholeness.