This week, I’ll be sharing the rest of the best of what I heard while facilitating the Six Keys to Becoming a Supercoach teleclass series featuring the core faculty of Supercoach Academy…
- If you missed part one, you can read it here.
- You can now download all 6 hours of this audio program for free here.
Key Four: Observing the observer
How do you do you?
I began working with Jen Louden in 2006, shortly before the publication of my first book. I didn’t really understand how she did what she did at the time – I just knew that I found our conversations endlessly fascinating and curiously reassuring.
Having gone on to study some of the ontological basis for her work, I particularly enjoyed hearing her both demonstrate and explain the idea that since the observer always effects the observed, the most powerful place to intervene with our clients is at the level of self as observer. In other words, if who you are being as an observer changes, what you are observing (your finances, your relationships, your health, your life) changes right along with it.
There are essentially three elements to this:
Your body – what you are seeing, hearing, and doing in your body
Your mood and emotions – the emotions you are experiencing and the background mood in which you are experiencing them
Your language- The kinds of things you are saying to yourself right and the background story into which they are being spoken
To make this a bit more tangible, let’s say you have the goal of losing 30 pounds in the new year…
When you think about that goal, your breathing may shift into your chest and your shoulders may tighten. You might notice your gaze narrow as your whole body sighs. While you might not know exactly what to call your emotional state, “heavy” feels like a pretty accurate description, and in the background you sense equal doses of hope and despair.
“Here we go again,” one voice inside your head begins to mutter. “I’m not sure why I bother.”
A question I have found useful for myself in this kind of work is as follows:
If you were hiring someone to help you reach your goals,
is the you you are being in this moment the person you would hire?
As our understanding and awareness of who we are being in any given moment grows, our capacity for re-inventing a more powerful observer and re-creating our lives grows along with it.
Key Five – Understanding the source of subjective experience
A philosophy I have always subscribed to in my work with others is to “do what works”. This may seem obvious, but from the very beginning I have come across people who refuse to alter their approach from client to client, preferring to hammer each nail, screw, or wing nut that comes their way and wonder why some of them are just “too stubborn to change”.
What I love about Ali Campbell’s approach to NLP, coaching, and change is that it all begins with a simple premise – that everything we are experiencing in our lives is a function of the state of mind we are in, which in turn is a function of our subjective experience. Since everyone’s subjective experience is different (hence, subjective!), there’s no point in trying to generate a one size fits all approach to transformation and change.
Here’s an excerpt from his soon to be released book, Just Get on With It:
| So what I’d like you to do, at least for the rest of the day, is to allow yourself to become aware of your thoughts and to treat them as just thoughts, not as a call to action or a statement of fact or anything other than stories that the little storyteller in your head is making up for you. Sure, they might be true, but they may just be complete nonsense. You don’t need do decide which yet! They are just stories, just thoughts, and you don’t need to do anything with them except know they’re not real.Here’s a tip and a trick that really helped me. Every time I noticed that I was caught up in my thoughts, I would use the following little mantra: ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about…’ such as, ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about having too much to do’ or ‘Ah, that’s just a thought about my deadline for this book.’ And you know what? It totally takes the sting out of them.What you are in effect doing is dissociating yourself – and your feelings – from the randomness of your thinking. You are making each thought a nominalization, a ‘thing’, and its much, much easier to disengage with a ‘thing’ than with a thought that is presented as a fact. |
Key Six – Fear is irrelevant
Fear is a fascinating subject because it lies at the heart of so many of the challenges we face in our daily lives. While Steve Chandler might argue that his expertise on the subject comes from having been so frightened of so many things for so much of his life, I know him as one of the most courageous proponents of fearless living working on the planet today.
The simple truth is, if you are going to expand your life beyond its current confines, you are going to encounter fear. The question is, what will you do with it when it shows up?
When you are frightened… you use fear as a trigger to shut down, play small, take your ball home, and not play anymore.
When you are courageous… you use fear as a cue to move forward, feeling the fear and doing it anyway, recognizing that whatever happens, you’ll handle it.
When you are fearless… you go from “whatever happens, I’ll handle it” to “what could possibly happen?” You see that your well-being is not dependent on having what you want, and you proceed confidently in the direction of your dreams, knowing that that the worst thing that could ever happen to you is just a thought – generally speaking a thought about whatever it is you think is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.
For me, the most important question we can ask ourselves is not “how should we respond in the face of fear?”, but rather this:
What would you do if fear was irrelevant?
In other words, if fear wasn’t something that meant “hold back” OR “go forward”, what would you do today to begin (or continue) creating the life of your dreams?
Have fun, learn heaps, happy exploring, and a very merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it!
