As a coach I get asked, many times why? Why the need for a coach?
There is a Japanese Koan
I say life is what I make of it, but why then is my I don’t make
me what I say I want?
We have a question for you to ponder. What’s the one and only thing that’s going to make a difference to life working or not?
Action
I’m not talking about any action. I mean the action that gets you to a particular destination, when there is no road or a pathway to that destination, for example – “success”. In whichever way you define “success” with results that match that of your dreams.
When you say ““I” am going to do X”. When X is something bigger for example, increasing revenue, getting to a new position in your career, taking on a challenge and succeeding.
From the moment you utter the words, ““I” am going to do X.” It creates a destination and then you being to look for a pathway or a road to that destination.
But if that destination is beyond you, that is to say you don’t have a path or a map, then “Huston we have a problem”.
Because unconsciously what you do is to try to get there using your familiar maps and methods. But your familiar ways has a problem. They only allow you to go where you’ve already been called “comfort zone” or “my usual.” Not to new destination like “success.”
Because when you say “I,” “me” or “myself” you open up a big can of worms.
Which “I”, “me”, or “myself” are you talking about when you say “I”, “me”, or “myself”?
There is an “I”, “me” or “myself” in you that talks and there is an “I”, “me” or “myself that actions. These two are as separate as the front and the back of your hand.
You are physically and mentally incapable of doing what you said consistently for a long period.
Have a look. When you last said “I will do X” and what result you actually produced. If you are very honest, for most people it is not what they said, it is a version of what they said with a great explanation to explain why not or why it ended up that way. That’s way it is and that’s it.
You have your way of doing (or actioning) everything and you do that all the time with everything you do. So you end up having a discrepancy between your word and the result.
This is why any serious person taking a journey to “success” has to have a coach.
I as coach, create pathways which shows you what actions you must take to get to the destination “success”. I provide tools or distinctions which lights up those pathways. Then as a coach I ask people to follow my instructions exactly the way I ask.
I say to people I coach, doing it your way will give you what you’ve always had, doing it the way this programme is designed will give you what you’ve always wanted. I mean the results you said you wanted exactly as you said you wanted it.
Before that, I like you to consider that you – don’t do anything any other way than your way, always. You pretend to do it in other ways but you do everything your way while pretending to do it the way you were asked to do.
You do the same with listening. I like you to consider that you don’t listen. You have never listened and you never will. You only listen to – what your automatic personal dialogue says that is being said.
I’ll repeat it, you don’t listen, you have never listened and you never will. You only listen to – what your automatic personal dialogue says, that is being said.
It’s like water off a duck’s back for you. Do you know what I mean by that?
If you pour water on a duck’s back it will just drop to the ground and the duck isn’t wet, because it’s feathers are water proof because duck’s feathers have a special oil which keeps it water proof.
Your listening is so much tuned by your automatic personal dialogue, like the oil in the duck’s feathers, everything said to you gets straight past you. What you hear is what “it” says to you about what was said.
You have no separation for “it”. When you say “I”, “me” or “myself” you don’t know which “I”, “me” or “myself” you are talking about. For the most part, when you say “I”, “me” or “myself” you are referring to your automatic personal dialogue. For you this personal dialogue I am referring to as “it” is “you”, “me, “myself” or “I”.
This personal dialogue you have, constantly running, is made up of series of pertinent questions designed to save you from danger? “Is it good, is it bad, is it right, is it wrong, am I ok, am I not ok, do I agree, do I disagree, do I look good, I don’t want to look bad, am I winning, am I losing?” It does it instantly and tell you which it is.
Or to say it another way, I say “x”, you add “y” and you say, I said “xy”! And you act like I said “xy” and you produce “xy” results. And you do that with yourself as well.
So you don’t have results of what I asked you to do or what you said you’d do. You have results of what you said, I said, I asked you to do, and you did your way. Or what you thought you said and what your issues or circumstances dictates you’d do and you did.
You need to understand, you have an “issues and circumstances” based life. Your issues such as, how you feel, your mood, what you know and don’t know, procrastination, anxiety, lack of self esteem, lack of clarity, fear, inability to make right choices or anything else. And your circumstances such as, lack of time, lack of money, lack of opportunities and lack of relationships/connections to help you make more opportunities; always gets in your way from the moment you say “I want” or “I am going to”
If you look at the results you produced so far on your game, your gold medal outcomes, when you said “I will do x” say 6 months ago you’d produce by next 12 months, you are halfway, look at the exact results you wanted, and the result you have?
Really question yourself but watch your automatic personal dialogue right now. It is very reactivated. When reality presents itself your automatic personal dialogue gets very reactivated because it lives in a story. It begins with, “One day I will…”
You are always reactivated or a reaction waiting to happen, like a dog on a dog racing track, you are waiting for the rabbit or you are already chasing after it full throttle.
In life either you are surviving a threat or fighting to win or flying away to avoid getting annihilated. Your automatic personal dialogue is solely responsible for this. But since you have no separation from you and your automatic personal dialogue you think you are it, but your “it” gets very confusing as “it” is very confused.
Because you live in an “is” world. A fixed world. You say this “is” going to be… and your “is” fixes everything solid. And it is like a permanent wall, which limits you from seeing what’s actually possible. Not that it limits you but you have been behind this wall all this time you have no idea anything else exists outside your “is”. Like an undiscovered planet “possibility” or “what’s possible” lives outside your realm, out there somewhere.
And you look at your “I” exactly the same, (this includes when “you” say, “me”, “myself” and “mine”), you know yourself as an identity. An “is” which is fixed. And what you know of yourself as an “is” is hidden because very often it is a negative impression of you.
You acquired this impression of you when you were very young. Because when you were a baby you had no language. You began to learn the language. Everything was great. Nothing meant anything, you were happy and nothing was wrong or bad. Then something happened one day. An incident which shattered this perfection, it either happened to you or to someone near you. You said “Uh oh something’s wrong!” Having a very limited language, you said what was wrong was with you. And you found a way of surviving that or a strategy to avoid that happening and winning. This became your identity. Who you know yourself as.
So you now have two sides. On the one side you know yourself as a failure, and on the other you have a way or a strategy to win this failure so you appear to be a winner. And you do win with this strategy. But there is a lie at the heart of this. So no matter how much you succeed you never feel it is fully satisfactory you need more. Or when things go bad or wrong you go berserk. You try very hard for a short while but then you give up.
All this happens because you permanently live in a mix of collapsed realms. There is a realm called “Facts/things happening”, and there is a realm called “Meanings” and there is another realm called “Reality”. Something happens, you look for a meaning or an explanation to what happened, and then you come up with an answer to why you think it happened. It is not why it happened it is a likely answer, it’s not factual. But this likely answer to what happened creates an actual reality for you, but this is a false or made up reality which only exists in your mind for you and no one else. Then you tell others of this false reality and everyone buys into it so it gets to be a fact or the truth. But it is not what happened. This collapse of realms leaves you with an explanation or a story. And that is what you call “I” or “me” or “myself” and that explanation or story about “I”, or “me”, or “myself” creates your “is”.
So if you get to the facts of what actually happened, the facts, or the story or the explanation is the same as what happened, then the false reality you created drops and you are free.
Now you are separate from your story of “I”, “me”, or “myself”. Now you have “you” as how you chose to create yourself and not a fixed view or fixed personality. You can now chose to be who you say you are from this free space instead of the story. That is freedom. In this freedom you can be your word and know yourself as your word.
In one of my workshops I do a demonstration of this.
I chose someone and give him/her one of my big flip chart pens. I say.
“ Here is my coaching”. (After he/she’s taken it)
I ask, “Now what did you just do?”
(He/she say) “I took the pen”, so I say “you got what I gave you”.
“Did you get a pen and a pencil? They say “No”.
I say “Did you get 2 pens?” They say “no”.
I then say “Did you get anything else other than a pen?” Again “No” is the answer.
“So you got exactly what I gave you.”
“Now if I just gave you this coaching and you got anything else. Who is doing that?”
They say “I am.”
I say “Yes you are doing that.”
“So if we come to the coaching bit, I give you a pen and you take the pen, now what can you do with it?”
They say “I could use it” or “I could write with it”.
Then I say “Or if you are not sure what to do with it, you can ask for coaching on how to use the coaching.”
“This program is me giving you the pen and you taking and using the pen exactly as I gave it to you. If you are not sure ask me for coaching on how to use my coaching exactly as I coached you. Then applying the coaching by taking action I am asking you to take exactly as I am asking you to.”
I know people know that there are certain things they can do for themselves on their own, but when I am coaching. I am asking them to go beyond those knowing ways and do it another way.
People make this mistake in life, more their life grows they expect it to get easier and more in control but the opposite is true, the more life grows, more full and more confronting and more chaotic and more responsibility they face. Not less. But people resist all attempts to expand.
People call that “overwhelm” and “I don’t want to”, or “screw you, you’re not going to make me”, “that’s wrong” or ”I know better”.
Not only that you know everything. You even know what coaching I should give you, because you tell us that all the time under your breath and sometimes it even escapes out. That “knowing” is really getting in your way, not my way as a coach or anyone else’s way.
Your “knowing”, put a barrier between you the coachee and me the coach. And in life it puts a barrier between what you say you want and what you get to have.
And all your “knowing” comes from your past. So you want everything – from doing everything you do the same way you always done ‘em. Because you know that’s how you must do. But that has, and will never give you results you say you really want. Then you look for advice and new knowledge as if that new knowledge is going to give you the results you dream of.
So you say, “what I want is impossible,” “so let’s go and get some coaching or do a course,” and then, you do it your way again. Doesn’t matter who the coach is or it could be God or a priest anyone. As I said before you never get what you want from that. You get results, some powerful results. But that’s not what you said you wanted on day 1 of your venture or your project when you first dreamt of it.
And you keep doing it again and again and again. You don’t have the results of your dreams! You have the results of your explanations and excuses and justifications. All the time.
Like a serial killer has a very just, well argues case for being a psychopath you have a very just, well argues case for not realising your dream. And you buy it and sell everything out for it and argue for it.
By doing it the way you do everything “your way”. It’s a reaction from your past called “I’ll prove you wrong!” or “I am right!” If you have not realized the results you wanted from a coach by now, you will never, only because you do everything “your way”. This is why it is very difficult for people to benefit from personal or business development books. The books are great the person following is “right”.
Because your life isn’t about anything other than proving something to someone from your past you don’t even remember!
So far all the great results in your life you accomplished in your life, you accomplished by doing it the way it needs to be done with your slant on it, all the great results you didn’t accomplish in your life, you did it by doing it your way.
In our coaching programme which is 7 months long, when we say we are up for the 3 promises in this programme, leadership to self, leadership to a team and leadership as a coach/workgroup leader. We mean it and we aim to deliver it. Because we are our word on that. The only way we get to deliver that promise to our clients is by clients doing it the way it is designed to be done. With Integrity.
But if they kept on doing it the way they do everything, proving something and “knowing”. We predict their future; we say “You will have a good result and a great excuse why it isn’t what you really wanted. And an even better explanation of how you are going to do even better now you have done this programme!”
And you really hope it will be, but you also know you are never going to do it, because you never have before. And no one has had guts to question you on that. Or you’d never give that power to anyone.
That is why you have your issues and circumstances, no other reason.
In our coaching we say – “You need to allow your mind to expand and your capacity for doing things and accomplishing things to expand. You can’t fit a big life into a small mind and a small life that is fixed or constrained.” “You have to un-constrain or un-fix your mind and how you have put your life together so far.”
We say to people we coach, from the beginning that “you will not understand the coaching”. That is really the truth. But your mind is not used to doing things when you don’t understand “why”. You are addicted to understanding “why” because you live in a permanent state of fear and waiting to be got at (that is your humanity). So you survive and you fight or fly.
But doing things outside of your paradigm is the exact essential criteria for you to expand. To have the result you said you dreamt.
(We drew a stick figure on the board and a circle around it, and another stick figure outside)
We say, this is you and this is your paradigm. This is me (stick figure outside). So in this room the walls and doors are your paradigm. Describe to me what is outside this room.
The only reason you can do it is because you’ve seen the outside of this paradigm called your room, and if I blindfolded you and brought you in here every time then you would not be able to describe what’s outside this paradigm called your room.
So like that, you have no idea what’s here outside the circle, I do because I am here, outside the circle. So you simply have to do this from out here where I am, if you want to get the results that’s available to you outside your paradigm.
There is a major reason why nothing you have done so far including any coaching or advice you got made any real difference to you beyond the surface in the way you hoped it would.
Because of your machinery. In our coaching we enable people to distinguishing their machinery from day 1 and getting them to a space out of which you actually get to produce remarkable results from time to time. But not fully.
As I said earlier, people are not capable of doing anything but survive and fight or fly and produce substandard results. They want advice or easy answers and for the most part are quite happy with those because there is less work, less bother.
Your machinery is like a black hole, everything gets sucked up and mangled inside of your machinery and then gets spat out as result. And you have an explanation and a justification as to why it is.
In our coaching programme we free our clients from their machinery day after day, layer after layer, but there is so much it takes 7 months.
But before for now you need to get something. A butterfly, has to let go of the caterpillar, and the chrysalis, to be a butterfly. If the caterpillar, is not willing to transform, first from being a caterpillar into a chrysalis, and then from being chrysalis into a butterfly, it will live and die as a caterpillar or a chrysalis. It would think that is all there is.
A grain of rise, has to crack itself up and turn itself inside out, before it becomes and rice plant, then it will have to grow as a plant and produce it’s own flowers and then seed which becomes a grain. It has to keep breaking itself up at each stage unrecognaisably.
If you looked at a butterfly and didn’t know how they became a butterfly you will never be able to tell it came from a caterpillar. Because there is nothing to say in a butterfly it was once a caterpillar.
If you look at a rice plant, if you have ever even seen a rice plant, and you didn’t know it was, you will never be able to tell a grain of rice came from that.
The butterfly’s transformation is programmed by nature, the gain of rice’s transformation is programmed by nature, yours is too but you have something the butterfly and the grain of rice don’t have.
So what do you have that the butterfly or the grain of rice hasn’t got?
“Language”.
You have language. That is your problem.
The language you have is not “your” language. It is the language you “inherited” as I explained earlier, from when you said “uh oh!”
That inherited language is only designed for surviving and fighting or flying not fulfilling your dreams.
That language programmed you to survive and fight or fly at all cost. That language is not interested in success. If it were you would already have the results you dreamt.
So for you to become real and grounded as results you meant when you dreamt them or when you first uttered those dream results, you will have to destroy the language of surviving, fixing, fighting and flying.
But you don’t have any other language other than surviving, flying or fighting.
You cant do that, because you have an “I”, “me” and a “mine” and you have an “is”.
But you got to get who is this “I”, “Me” or “Mine” or “Myself” you keep talking about?
Precisely who do you mean when say “I”, “me” or “mine”?
We begin a journey called “Life Works” to discover that “I”, “me” or “mine” outside your machinery which allows you to match your dreams to actual results.
That is why you need a coach.