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

This is just a concept, a helpful construction that makes our thinking more powerful. And it can also reveal some underlying believes about how the universe works. In my case there is a belief, and I’m not sure how metaphysical it really is: I believe that everyone of us has some kind of purpose, and that this purpose is kind of given to us. I don’t know if it is written into some book before we enter this earth plane, but is surely shows itself.

Here’s how we find out what our purpose is: What enthuses us? What skills do we have naturally? In which fields did we excel without effort? What would we do if we didn’t have money? When do we get into a flow? What has happened to us in our past that left its marks in our lifes, be it ‘good’ or ‘bad’?

One thing I know for sure. when we act in the direction of our Higher Self, we feel ok. We feel that we are making good use of our time and our life. And we are even enjoying the process at the same time.

Frank

So, I thought, why not making that my niche. If you want to overcome something that keeps you from experiencing more freedom in your life, consider being coached by the author. What kind of freedom can you think about?

I’m here introducing the Okey-Dope, the drug that is perfectly legal and makes us high. You can produce it yourself. It’s healthy, and yes, it is addictive.

The recipe? Every morning after waking up and before you get up, make yourself aware of what already right in your life. What’s okay about it? What can you be grateful for? If nothing comes to your mind because you’re leading such a s**tt* life, give some thanks for being able to open your eyes and breath. There’s always something! As a result you will get an instant kick. Enjoy.

Frank

Honestly, the change option didn’t really pop up. I just added it in hindsight. What actually filled my mind was the idea of giving up, and put some stuff to RIP.  At the same time I knew that this was a cheap way out, so hanging in there came in second.

I then did a reframe. A classic one, a textbook example. Within the sea of frustration I was feeling, I told myself that the most important breakthroughs happen usually right after we are just about to give up.

This instantly inserted some hope into the system, and things began to lighten up. This thought helped me to bear with the situation, and I decided to hang in there. Result? Still hanging in there at the time of the post.

Frank

Recently I began to journal losely again. Whenever I feel like it I pull out my Moleskine Notebook and write a couple of line about whatever topic pops up. Suprisingly there’s always something popping up, and the outcome is often creative and of a good quality.

When I was posting to message boards in the past, coaching people or thinking out loud about how I see the world, I noticed something. I didn’t just dump what was inside my head, but I was creative at the same time. After I wrote the piece, I felt a little bit more wiser and insightful than I did before, although everything I wrote just came out of my own head, nothing added. So I should have known everything before, right?

I see this is also a great benefit of coaching. When we tell our stuff and give our Inner Traffic Report, some magic happens that lets us better know what we are about. Some extra stuff is added in the process of reporting and can’t be seen by just observing our thoughts. Frank

Generally I like all kinds ways of dealing with our minds and its complexity. And obviously this method works for people. At least it is cute enough to gain quite a fan community, whether they’re using it or not. Even in the highly acclaimed book Co-Active Coaching I found references to Gremlins.

 
(c) http://www.taminglight.com

Frank

#1 Trick yourself by adding outside structures
#2 Ignore the Mindfrick

Look at my last post with Graham White’s list. These are all examples of #1. But what the heck is Mindfrick?Mindfrick is a term introduced by peakpotentials, and it means ‘mind friction’ (you guessed this, yes?). It’s actually a concept from Zen buddhism, but more modernly named.

So #2 is about letting your mind chatterbox chat and bring up all kinds of thoughts and feelings. When you know what your higher purpose is, then you can ignore most of the chatter and just act inspite of your feelings, thoughts, and moods. It’s different from #2, because in #1 you still work with the resistance, and you find a way around it. In #2 you acknowledge that it’s not real.

Frank

Levels Of Accountability:

Conscience. This works for the things you already are successful at 100% of the time.

Written Record Of The Goal. This works for a new goal that you have only recently become interested in achieving but forget about because it isn’t already part of your life.

Detailed Schedule. This works for simple goals that just need time to get done. Nagging goals can be accomplished by developing a good schedule.

Commitment To A New Habit. If you have the willpower to be accountable to yourself in doing what you don’t enjoy FIRST, you use this.

Commitment To A Program. Find a good solution and implement it, join a gym, do your activity with a partner etc.

Broadcast Your Intent. Tell everyone and talk about it often. You become accountable to the fear that they’ll ask you about your goal and you don’t want to have to tell them you’re failing.

Be Accountable To A Specific Individual. This works for goals you need support in. Chose the person carefully. They have to be 100% committed to whatever system you decide on. If they fail you, you too will fail.

Be Accountable To A Drill Sergeant. This works for goals you need a lot of motivation to achieve. They must be someone who will confront you and force you to do the things you don’t feel like doing. They must be willing to get in your face and REFUSE to take no for an answer.

Be Accountable To Your Currency. Set up a system where you agree (in writing) to a financial penalty (or similar loss of something important) for failing to achieve your goal. Decide on the cost by how much pain you need to motivate yourself to accomplish a goal that you have failed on repeatedly. Give the MAXIMUM amount that it will cost you if you fail to the individual holding you accountable. Agree that it will become theirs (or a charities) if you don’t achieve your goal.

Professional Help. If you don’t achieve your goal for very significant issues you will lose your opportunities, your relationships your health or your life. Ask people who care about you to help you commit. Once you recognize the gravity of your situation, get professional help.

Graham White

When we are hard on each other, there is quite some energy used up on being hard, on being pushy, on finding ways to make somebody feel bad and incomplete. What if we used that energy to go forward without wasting a lot on all the friction?

The question is: Can we be perfectly gentle, energy-preserving, and at the same time effective in getting our goals?

I have no doubt about it. It just takes some other things to be in place, and again others to be missing.

Frank

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.

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

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:

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

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

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

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 

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 

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

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