Frank’s Coaching Blog

After a couple of months of hardcore business building, it’s time to re-commit to maintaining this blog. In the meantime I’ve done many hours of coaching, which for me still leads to new insights into the workings of the human mind. That is the beauty of coaching. If we can’t see our own stuff because of the blind spot and personal fabrications and pretensions, we at least can see stuff at work in others. And this is also why everybody can use a coach. It’s just so hard to see your own eyes without a refection in a mirror.

Anyway, this post is inspired by Julia’s comment to the last post, who likes to further discuss the ‘pulling’ I described. Here’s again what I wrote:

When we think about the past, we pull it into the moment, because that’s the only spot where we can somehow experience it. And if we think about the future, we likewise have to pull it into the present to ‘experience’ it (I’ve put this in quotes, because we can only imagine the future, and we then experience our imagination).

Let’s look at the future first, because it is easier to validate. 

Que Sera, Sera,

Whatever will be, will be

The future’s not ours, to see

Que Sera, Sera           
                            Jay Livingston (music) and Ray Evans (lyrics)

  We really, really can’t know what the future will look like. We can imagine it, have fears around it, plan it, visualize it, try to escape it, or embrace it. Rarely does it turn out exactly like what we had feared or hoped for.  We could be hit by a car or brickstone tomorrow, or swallowed by the earth. We could have a lucky streak or an incredible amount of bad luck. It doesn’t matter how much we try to secure things and keep them predictable, the future is not ours to see.

Therefore it’s easy to grasp that the future is something we have to create in our minds. It has no existence apart from the one in our minds. It’s not real. It’s an illusion. Everything that happens, happens in the present. Never did a future happen. Only the present moment happens.

And because the present moment is the only point in time where something can happen, the future - and the past - must happen there as well, but obviously only in our minds. 

Imagine a time line. To give any kind of life to the future, you have to pull it into the current moment, because only there it can enjoy some sort of life. We may pretend that the future is actually ’out there’, but it’s only our imagination where it lives. It is not out there. There is no such thing. The ‘No Future’-kids from the 80s said it, but were of course not aware of the fact that there never was a future in the first place.

Now let’s look at the past. We can argue that the past actually has a reality. And more reality than the future ever could demand for itself. At least we have memories of the past, and that proves that it is real. 

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine we have lost all our memories from the past. The skills are still there, but we can’t remember what happened. Like in the movie The Bourne Identity (2002). Like Jason Bourne in the movie we might be plagued by the fact that the memories are missing, but we certainly wouldn’t be plagued by bad memories or comforted by good ones, because there simply are no bad or good ones. The only thing we could do is focus on the moment - and an illusive future.

Whenever we remember something, we use the current moment to re-activate impressions we collected in the past, called our memories. That these memories might even be complete fabrications we regard as real is the topic of another debate. Like in the future, in order to experience the past we have to re-enact it here and now, in the only point in time that is real. And that’s I again what I described as pulling in.

In order to give past and future some sort of reality, we have to pull them into our mind, and borrow to them the only reality there is, the reality of the Here and Now.

The good news for us coaches is that whenever something has this kind of borrowed pseudo-reality, we can let it go. And help our clients to let it go. We can’t let go of the present. That’s the only thing there is. But we can let go the illusions of past and future, and diminish the power they have over us. Awareness of the borrowed reality of past and future is the key to empower the present and lose the demons of the past and fears of the future.

Frank