Frank’s Coaching Blog

There is no You and Me.

Bold statement. Here’s one of my deep level premises: On a certain level of our sub-consciousness there is no separation between you and me, there is only - hmmm - let’s call it ‘I’. With ‘I’ I don’t mean what our conscious mind thinks of when it says ‘I’. Because that I is always separate from you. The ‘I’ I’m referring to here is the observer that does not yet live in the adult world. That level is active in babies who just live as observers and have no concept of ‘different people’. A baby learns to recognize its own person as a seperate entity from everything else over time.Let’s assume for now that this level of thought is still active within us, we have just added some more layers on top, like the one that separates persons.Have you ever wondered why people who exhibit a certain ‘negative’ trait can really become passionate in finding and judging the very same trait in somebody else? You’re about to say, hey, come on, you’re just the same! But of yourse you have tact and wouldn’t be so rude. The point is: what you don’t like in yourself, you don’t like and judge in others. We can only see (and judge) traits of others that we have as well, to some extend. I believe that we can’t see others at all, all we see is us resonating with what others exhibit. This is a concept hard to swallow if you’re new to it.

We had a discussion in our Mastermind Mind Group (MMG) recently about how to handle / motivate ourselves best in order to get results. Carrot or Stick?
One member argued that setting up punishments for himself works best. The fear of feeling humiliated, or the prospect of having something to do he doesn’t like is his favourite way of getting things done.
My own take on this is a bit different. I’ve changed in this respect during the last months. The new direction has been enforced by my studies with the ICA, but it began before.

But maybe it’s based on the personality type of a specific person. When you study NLP you learn that there are Towards-To and Away-From personalities. I suspect that you really find these types, like in my MMG, but it could be a learned trait that can be unlearned. Just as I have changed, maybe everybody can in principle.

First I want to make a difference between Tough Love and simple Toughness. Tough Love is being (seemingly) hard on somebody but with the intention to help and support. Like the mother who trains her child to respect cars and the road, and she uses scare tatics. It’s a good thing that a toddler who doesn’t understand traffic and the power of vehicles just fears the road. This is certainly preferrable to having the child explore and play on the road while risking a sudden death.
We can use Tough Love in coaching to help people break through a barrier and earn a new reference about what they are capable to do.
Toughness as I define it here is based on a lack of appreciation of the other person. People who are tough towards others can only be tough to themselves as well.

I’m going to talk on this in my next posts, because this topic is at the heart of being able to help people get to new places. It deserves quite a bit of attention.

Frank

In the class “AC100, UACs, part 2″ that I attended last Thursday, the instructor Angela Bird pointed out that she looks at UACs as attachments. That was a good clue on how to handle UACs.

I’m not sure whether the UAC definition is actually fully compatible with the concept of attachments. Here’s again a part of the definition:

 In a comment on my last blog entry “You’re Always Winning“, Margit wrote:  

I am mulling on the “You’re always winning at the game you’re playing”…what if life wasn’t about winning or losing the game. What if it is just about being in the game? What if we could let go of our expectation and using that as a measuring stick?

This doesn’t mean letting go of our goals, or even putting measurable outcomes on those goals to track our progress. I am talking about an internal shift of letting go.

Thanks again for the comment, Margit. I think the “always winning” wasn’t meant to be understood as a philosophy of the conscious mind in this case. There are people out there who are very competitive and who get into the games they play with the one intention to win them. Letting go of that need could probably make their life a lot easier and more relaxed. That’s all happening on an outer world level, certainly being triggered and led by their inner game.

The game meant in the title of the last blog post is the inner game that is constantly going on in our mind. It’s the neverending play of thoughts and feelings that we experience. And it doesn’t have to be conscious, and it doesn’t have to show in the outer world as taking part in games. In fact, the ICA concept of Underlying Automatic Commitments (UACs) is looking at exactly the same phenomenon. The premise of the UACs is that we are always commited. Even in situations where we hesitate or seemingly don’t do anything there is a commitment of some nature at work. One could probably say that there is no non-action / non-intention at the deepest level of our minds. Having this as a premise can lead to truly mindboggling ramifications (afaic).

The “You’re always Winning” is therefore saying that we’re always on target according to our commitments, whether they are conscious or UACs. Our current commitments are being fulfilled at any moment at a certain level of our mind, even thought we might decide to commit to other things on the conscious level. The game meant here is comprising the UACs.

You’re really onto something with the ‘letting go’ remark, Margit. I wonder how consciously letting go of something can affect UACs. 

Ideas anybody?

Frank

Recently I attended the ICA class ‘Action vs. Delay’ with Merci Miglino, and one of my fellow students said “You’re always winning at the game you’re playing” (thank you for letting us know!). What a profound statement! I wouldn’t want to swear that it’s always true, but I know that in many cases it is. Maybe it can only be understood in the proper context, so here’s a little reflection on it.

I think this fits in remarkly well with the ICA coaching model and the concept of UACs (Underlying Automatic Commitments). The game you’re really playing is that of your UACs, and the one you’re officially playing can be a different one. Let’s call the game you’re really playing the Real Game. 

Our life is steered by our thoughts and feelings, and on a higher level by our hopes, expectations, perceptions, and thinking habits. How we perceive setbacks and how big we dare to think will get us to where we end up. This is the Real Game. The reflection about this Real game, and what we tell ourselves and others about it is the other game, probably what we call ‘our life’. Let’s call it the Perceived Game. At best these two would be aligned, i.e. we’re not BSing ourselves and others, on which conscious or unconscious level whatsoever. It would be interesting to discuss what a perfectly aligned person in this sense would mean in terms of coaching. Would there be any need for coaching at all?

This week I realized that I was playing a different game from the Real Game in regard to one of my software projects. I told myself and others that I’m working hard on it. But everytime I started working on it or even thought about working on it, resistance came up. In the Real world I had somehow different rules from those in the Perceived World. This resistance is telling me something, and I’m not sure what.

Yesterday I was peer coached, and that shed a lot of light on to where the resistance is probably coming from. Despite the hightened awareness it’s still there. And I just assume that according to the Real game rules, I’m actually winning my game. This is kind of a relief, although one that seems slightly perverted to me. It’s a relief because I can’t think of myself as a loser. I’m winning the game after all! Maybe being ok with this is kind of helpful.

Frank

My current coach David Koons as well as one of my great ICA peer coaches made me aware of the priorities in my life. If you lead a busy life it’s rather easy to do what you know you need to do in order to satisfy the needs of your clients, business partners, friends and loved ones. And it’s equally as easy to lose track of your own long term goals and purpose while serving everybody else.

It’s my conviction that serving is the only way to bring live, humanity, and the planet forward a little bit. The question is how we can serve more and in a more natural way. With natural I mean a way that makes full use of our talents and the activities we love to do and enjoy? And - and this seems to be a technical issue - what leverage we can use to make our contribution bigger without having to work much more?

In my own life I’m on the way of living my purpose. However, I’m not there yet. And as long as I don’t take decisive action towards going there, it’s not coming towards me. I can go on serving as usual, and be good at it, but I will not make use of my real potential unless I make some changes. Now here is the hard part: If you have to decide whether to work on your own project that is far from finished and there’s nobody really waiting for it, or whether you care about the pressing issue your client is more or less impatiently waiting for to be solved, makes all the difference between staying where you are and going forward. One could argue that you can first do your client’s project, and then yours. And everything will be fine. According to my experience, the day is finite. And somehow other stuff get’s in the way all the time, and suddenly: end of day. Good night. Ah, I can do that tomorrow just as well. …

It would be a better decision to work on your own stuff first for a limited time, and then go for the client’s projects, because the latter miraculously always get done. There’s the priority thing.

Have you ever noticed that your own project doesn’t feel as real and important as other people’s ones? Have you ever felt like a selfish bastard because you worked away on your own stuff while other people were waiting - I mean at least in your mind they were waiting, in reality they were probably happily whistling a song somewhere.
Now what kind of UAC have we got here??

Frank

After my last post I looked closer into the definition of the UACs, as defined by the ICA. I will cite some core statements from the related document, and then reflect a bit on them:

It’s an universally accepted principle that coaching as it is defined isn’t concerned with the past of the client, but with his oder her present and future. Methods dealing with the past are called therapy, and coaching is all about designing the future. It’s also well known that there are no clear boundaries, but the approaches tend to flow into each other here and there. I would like to make a point for looking at the client’s past, just as I am actively looking at my past in order to find something that actively hinders me to design my future. There is a kind of blockage that stands in the way of action and is rooted in what happened in the past. When people can let the past go, the blockage does often go, too. Incidents, thought patterns, believe systems are all mental artifacts of the past that can constitute blockages, and I will call them unsupportives structures for the rest of this post. An unsupportive structure of the past is still active within the mind. We as coaches can design whatever we want together with the client, the client will probably spend a lot of energy when the resistance comes up that is caused by the structure from the past.What could a coach do when (s)he realizes there’s an unsupportive structure that sabotages any attempts to work on the future?

Three days ago an Uncle of mine died, the elder and only brother of my father. When a death happens in the family or circle of friends, it certainly brings our own mortality to the forefront of our thinking, like it or not. Especially when we are not many years away from the age of the deceased.

Today I listened to two audio books by Robert Ringer, “Action!: - Nothing Happens until something moves“, and “To Be or Not to Be Intimidated? That is the question” (links point to amazon.com).
The latter book was formerly called Winning Through Intimidation.

Ringer talks about how little time we actually have, and that a sense of urgency is actually a good idea. He says (I’m paraphrasing here) “the long run” is not so far in the future, and it usually comes ahead of time. He also points out that we are in the habit of denying death and its inevitability. By making peace with it and accepting it fully, and also accepting that it can happen at every point in time, we have to come up with the question what we want to do here on this planet before it happens. What and how much music is still in us?

There is definitely a place for entertainment, rest, and recuperation. However, taking myself as an example, considering how much time I have spent in my life with time passing activities that meant nothing at that time and will mean nothing in the future, the question that’s kind of sticky is: when I have found a purpose (and I think I have), why am I not working on making it happen 96% percent of the time?

No answer right here, just wanted to get the question out.

Frank 

Recently we had a class “Game vs. Significance”, and the teleclass leader Bill asked us what area or issue there is in our life where we could introduce a bit more game and lessen the significance. More game means more fun, means more motivation, means probably more success.

I first thought: hmm no actually, it’s all a big game for me right now.

But then I realized that there’s one area that certainly carries some unnecessary significance right now. Being a former marathon runner and finisher I have gained significant weight (no pun intended) in the last two years. And weight loss has always seemed like some struggle I have to face. So I procrastinated on it, naturally. Introducing more game to weight loss and exercise could actually do the trick.

I’m currently thinking of ways to go ahead with this by being playful.

Frank 

Today I sat in a café preparing for my PHP 5.0 certification exam. PHP is a programming language for dynamically generating websites, like this blog for example. Sometimes programming offers some insights in how the mind works. I’ve always been interested in how the mind works. That’s why I spent 6 years as a researcher in the department of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at a university. To everybody who thinks AI is an uncanny and somewhat frightening subject, relax! The scientists are far from really understanding what is going on. They may be successful at partially imitating mental processes, but the spiritual realm is not even remotely approached.

I’m disgressing. I was working through a chapter on a subject I haven’t dealt with practically before. I’ve been using PHP for years, but some aspects are new in the version 5 of this language, and they were new to me, too. While other chapters were easy, I found this one hard compared to them. And I wondered why, because the lesson itself is not harder as such. Then I got it. In the other chapters I was dealing with the meaning of the words, the semantics. Even more so, I was dealing with processes I have carried out in my own mind again and again. The words I read were just placeholders for the processes I’m already familiar with. Now with the new chapter, there were no processes attached to the words. Here I was dealing with understanding the syntax of the text first of all, and only had a vague idea what it would mean semantically, let alone in terms of processes.

Now you may wonder what all this has to do with coaching. Getting to it … Recently I’ve heard some truth about the workings of the mind that I had heard before again and again. And I thought I had long got it. Yay yay. But something in me must have changed, because now I got it at a whole different level. Before there were only words and an assumed meaning, and suddenly I had a process that I could attach to these words, which gave them a much deeper and different meaning. Powerful!

When we tell our coaching clients an insight of ours, it doesn’t have to mean anything to them. It’s just words. Maybe they can’t relate at all. No match. If coaching was just telling, the client could as well read a book, which is indefinitely cheaper. ;- ) The art and craft of coaching is looking at the processes through the words, i.e. getting to the processes by looking at the meaning of the words.

In AI this would look like: syntax -> semantics -> pragmatics.

The coach is only actually concerned with the pragmatics of the client’s mind, nevermind the words. And s(he) can only relate the processes/pragmatics if s(he) has discovered them her-/himself! Otherwise it stays just at the level of syntax or semantics. And only when a true understanding happens, then is the coach able to go the way back through meaning to words and verbally grab the clients where they need it. ;- ) 

I guess this is why coaches have to reflect their own actions on a constant basis: to be able to go deep and come up again.

Frank

Had to think about gratitude and appreciation a lot these days. And of course, more info on this would pop up from somewhere as soon as I focused on it. First was a blog entry by Joe Vitale

http://mrfire.blogspot.com/2007/01/you-are-here.html

and then a blog of a fellow coach, Margit the family coach:

http://familycoach.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/happy-right-now

Joe says you can’t go up unless you appreciate where you are. And Margit tells us how the world looks like when you do it. 

I wondered how this simple truth could be conveyed to a client, and the picture of a mountain climber came up. Let’s take a free climber, i.e. somebody using no safety gear. The climber has to be fully in the now and put his feet very carefully. When he puts the foot somewhere in the wall in one moment where he isn’t with his mind exactly where he is with his body, it could prove fatal. He certainly won’t go higher up.

And that is the lesson. Unless we fully appreciate all the things we have and have to do right now, we won’t go up.

Frank

I became aware today that there are assessment guidelines for this blog issued by the ICA, together with criteria and a marking system. Well, my intention is to make the best out of this oportunity, so here is the plan:

Today I spoke with David Koons. Very interesting.

He really made one thing clear to me. Goal setting is setting up yourself for failure. That’s what I did last year. I didn’t reach my goals. And that just sucks.
It’s better to have intentions.

What is the difference between goals and intentions?

Goals constitute a MUST. That’s why we set goals. You want it, and there is only one way that will (seemingly) satisfy you: getting the goal.

The truth is: Often when we finally reach a goal we think “That wasn’t a good goal, I reached it. It wasn’t a goal tough enough. The goal should have been harder”. When we do that, where’s the point in setting goals anyway? We go for the pleasure of getting goals, but we don’t allow us the pleasure when we finally could do so.

What makes goals problematic is the attachment to the goal. Attaching is what our ego does. And our ego is basically the opponent of our Greater Self, i.e. our spiritual part that knows no boundaries or fears, and comes from pure love (in terms of agape - love without an object). The ego is here to keep us secure. It’s close to our body, to pain, to fear, to the reptilian brain, and generally to all material things around us. The ego also manages addictions and bad habits.

What are intentions? By stating an intention you’re putting out a direction. And a preference rather than a must. “I intend to make a million dollars next year”. This intention can steer your action towards the million dollars. But if you don’t get the million dollars, your ego will find less grounds for attacking you.

It’s important to have the right mindset though, and to not just call your goals intentions.

One underlying idea is that you can’t control the world, and therefore not many of the outcomes. You can only control your own actions, your efforts. All other circumstances may come true, and maybe not. By setting intentions you acknowledge this. Intentions go well with the option ‘I intend this - OR something better’. And the something better may not even remotely look like the goal that you so intensely tried to get. You can be satisfied with the outcome even if the intention wasn’t fulfilled.

By setting intentions instead of goals you avoid a lot of mind friction (’mindfrick’ ; -) that would otherwise stress you and get in the way of manifesting something better.

If we assume a universe based on vibrations, intentions work as an attractor and would draw thing to the person intending. The magic occurs when we let go.

Frank

2007 has just started.

I signed up with the ICA in the last days of 2006. To meet the requirements for graduation, all students have to keep a reflective journal in the form of a Blog. This is my Blog. It is intended for myself, my coaches, and also my fellow students.

Leave a comment if you like. I appreciate you.

Frank