watch tHe skies

I’m excitedly looking forward to my new car. It should be here this week. Big and shiny and fast and laden with gadgets, whilst still being quite good carbon footprint-wise, I can’t wait.

This will be my second brand-new car. There is something great about a new car, the smell of it and it being so lovely and clean and knowing that no-one has thrashed the car before you do.

So in preparation I decided to give my current car a bit of a valet at the weekend. You know, get all of the stuff like fire extinguishers out, and hoover it up a bit, so that when I swap keys the recipient gets that new car feel, albeit with a second hand car.

So I spent about an hour hoovering the car out, getting rid of all the parking receipts stuffed in to the pockets, and the assorted ipod accessories from the glove compartment. And when I finished, it felt like a new car, and I have since enjoyed driving it far more, and been in a better mood getting in to a lovely clean car every day. After all, this one is only 3 years old, and is a lovely car, it’s no surprise really.

And it just got me wondering, if I had valeted my old car more often, perhaps I would have gotten that new car feeling I love so much on a more regular basis?

Gasping for air, his heart beating furiously in his ears, he collapsed against the short, grimy wall. He strained to listen for sounds of his pursuers over his own rapid breathing. He began to make out the sounds of voices, grunting and growling in the distance. It seemed far away, though he knew that the tunnels and doorways would distort the sounds, and they could be only a few feet away. But he couldn’t run any more. Not for a few moments, long enough to get his breath and think. Running away wasn’t working, they knew the area much better than he.

As his breathing calmed and his pulse quietened, he began to notice how cold and wet he was. Sweat ran down his oil-smeared face and to his stubbly chin. His arm hung limp and lifeless, and he began to feel the sting of grazed knees through torn jeans.

It had suddenly gone quiet. He held his breath. Total silence. Not a splash, not a bark or growl. His heart made itself once again heard, as the beating grew strong and fast in his ears, and he fought to ignore the growing waves of nausea flaring in the pit of his stomach…

Whump.

A low rumbling noise preceded a flash of light as a flare lit the sky, and the broken outbuildings around him. Darkness, his only friend, had been taken away.

In the distance now, voices, shouting, and the barking and cries of hungry beasts.

They were coming. Time to run again.

I talk a lot about coaching and coaching techniques on this blog, and yet I’ve never actually talked about being coached. So I thought I would.

I do this on the eve of my last coaching session for my course, which itself is a coaching course, and as this is a “learning by doing” course, it comes with a number of coaching sessions to help me discuss and overcome any obstacles as I’ve encountered new situations and people.

So over the last year I’ve had quite a lot of coaching of one type or another, and when I look back to a year or so ago I can see elements in me then that aren’t there now. A lot of negativity has been cleared out and I am so much clearer on what I want to do with myself, today, tomorrow and in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted on the blog. And that’s a combination of being mad busy at work (new job) and mad busy at home (active baby), coupled with holidays, weekends away, weddings and all sorts of other stuff.

And so I think in the short term the blog is going to be a little quieter than you are used to. I don’t have as much time to ponder and postulate at the moment!

So I gave my day training course on Questioning and Listening skills for Coaching and it went very well. I got good feedback from my tutor and the students, who all seemed to take something new away to think about.

I was also pleased that I got a chance to put in to practice many of the techniques I’ve learnt in the last couple of years, and that, considering I hadn’t done this before, I was pretty relaxed and wasn’t fazed by any questions. Thankfully I do know the subject quite well and I was careful to only cover subjects that I am knowledgable about. And where I was making suggestions about possibilities (such as whether coaching can truly elicit triple loop learning) I made sure that people understood the limitations of my own experience and presented it as an idea rather than fact.

One of the things I learnt from the session was that putting out a radical new idea to the group at the start of the session really opens people up. I started off with the “map is not the territory” concept, which is pretty mindblowing to those that haven’t come across it, and then opened up a discussion on the impact of this on two-way conversations. Heads were still spinning by lunchtime, and it’s my generalisation that as a result, some of the more awkward students were very participative.

So all in all a successful start (and probably end) to my training career. I was pleased to learn as much from training as being trained. I’m just glad it’s over and I can get on with the coaching again!

Next week I am running my first ever training on coaching-type skills. As part of my coaching diploma I have written and I am co-presenting a one day training on questioning and listening skills for coaching.

Even so, I do feel like a fraud.

Sure, I’ve read a lot of books on the subject and I am a practitioner of all of the skills and concepts that I’m presenting, yet at the same time I am no expert. I am still in the “conscious competence” stage for most of the coaching skills I am training.

Sure, I understand that being able to communicate these skills to others, running exercises to help other people’s learning, is going to help me learn, yet I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s not right for me to be training them.

In many areas I’m becoming very skilled. For example, at the core of coaching is the ability to spot limiting beliefs and be able to help the client step outside of their “map” and see new choices, unconstrained by assumptions that are holding problems in place. In general conversation these jump out at me as if illuminated by neon lights. Which is great, it’s taken me quite a few months to become attentive enough to get to this stage. Unfortunately knowing where to go from that point often leaves me lost for words, wondering which of the many coaching techniques I should apply. That isn’t to say I don’t take the client somewhere, I still get very good feedback about my coaching skills, it’s just for me personally it is affecting my confidence in coaching “awkward” clients and, of course, my ability to demonstrate that which I am going to explain.

Of course this skill will become unconscious in time, I already find this very easy when dealing with “business” problems, it’s translating or generalising that skill in to client situations and being confident to pace and lead the client to a better place that I have to work on.

Some might say I’m being self-critical, I say reflective, and that’s exactly what I created this blog for! If anyone fancies coaching me on this situation, feel free!

You’ve read me harping on about it enough, so why don’t you do a training?

Mark Harris over at http://www.livingawake.co.uk is running practitioner training, some of the details are below, or head over to the website to find out more and make a booking, it will certainly be worth your time to do so.:

What You Will Learn On The Programme:

• What is NLP?

• Who discovered it?

• How does it work?

• How people with life long phobias really can get free in one session?

• How to control your emotions that feel automatic

• How to get into and maintain rapport with anyone

• How to generate in yourself motivation to do those things you have been putting off

• How to communicate you ideas in ways that others will love to hear

• How to fall in love with yourself in such a way that habits dissolve

• How to cope when life seems to be ‘on top of you’

• How to assist others to choose not to be phobic

• Stop smoking

• Cope with stress, anger, procrastination

• Have more choices regarding having depression

• In short, how they can run their own brains for a change!

When and how long is it?

This 12-day programme will equip you with the skills to be an effective practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming. You will experience NLP first hand; the techniques will be used to help you learn.

2007: November 3-4th December 8-9th
2008: January 5-6th February 9-10th March 1-2nd April 5-6th

So I’m particularly looking forward to this weekend, and attending a Self-Hypnosis training run by Adam Eason.

Adam is a foremost authority on Self-Hypnosis, and as such, it looks like we are going to be doing some interesting stuff, such as pain relief, personal reprogramming and lots more.

I usually try to set an outcome for myself before I do something. After all we are goal-seeking organisms, and as such we are much more likely to achieve our goal if we set one in the first place. And my goal for this weekend is fairly simple, to improve my communication with my unconscious mind, to be able to increase the dialogue in both directions so I can make personal changes to my habits, beliefs and values without needing tapes and CDs. After all, surely your unconscious will listen more readily to your own voice than someone else’s.

This should also help me to get in to state for photoreading quicker and more efficiently, as the initial moments of the photoreading process are effectively getting in to an accelerated learning trance with affirmations (self-spoken hypnotic commands)

And it should also help me with my own trancework with others. The easiest way to get someone in to trance is to go in to trance yourself, and this is of course self-hypnosis in one way or the other.

And so who knows next week I might be able to bend steel bars, turn invisible and fly (or at least hover), any of which are surely worth the course fee…!

I was reading an interesting article yesterday about baby talk. That is some of the theories around how you talk to your children and how that affects them. There’s a lot of views on whether people’s “inner voice” in adulthood is very much moulded by the way parents talk to them as children.

Now I make a point of only giving positive encouragement to little Ben. Right from when he was wee, to the strapping 16month old now who seems to understand everything we say to him. And going back to when he first started to react to me, giving some feedback, I would be encouraging, tell him how clever and funny he was and how much Mummy and Daddy love him.

And its interesting because it would get a reaction, it would, despite me knowing better, seem as if he understood the words even from a few months old, and would react accordingly.

And then it dawned on me. Something that babies are really, really good at, is watching and listening. He was responding to something, but it clearly wasn’t the words I was saying.

He was watching me and listening to me. He was reacting to how the things I was saying were affecting me. Because everything we say and do affects everyone in the system. And at a time where Ben didn’t know what words meant, he was able to detect all of the subtle unconscious signals my body was sending out to let him know that these were good messages, messages of encouragement and happiness and love.

And I think we all have that skill to greater or lesser extent even as adults, that empathic ability to pick up on the unspoken emotions of people. And of course we can affect them. Affirmations aren’t things we say to ourselves only, the words we use to others not only affects them, but us too.

So I wonder how different your next interaction could be if you tell them how great it is to see them, heck if they ignore the words they’ll still be affected by how you feel…!

I feel all warm now, come on it’s time for a group hug…..

…it’s WHO you know so often seems to ring true… Opportunities seem to present themselves always through contacts and discussions, and yet with so many adages, it’s not entirely true, is it? I mean you still have to know stuff.

And one of the most useful “stuffs” to know is what you want.

Having a goal in mind should be the prerequisite for any activity. After all it’s a lot easier to measure success when you have a success criteria in mind at the outset. And yet it is easy to bimble through life without any specific outcomes in mind.

So once you know what you want, it is then useful to know who can help you get there, so that “who you know” is only valuable after “what you want”.

Then it is useful to start to build up a network of contacts that can help you get there. Contacts that can:

• Make you feel good
• Mentor you and challenge you
• Give you direct and honest feedback
• Accept you as you are and support you emotionally
• Make things happen
• Raise your profile
• Provide you with valuable information and resources
• Open doors to new networks in your field of interest

I’ve attached a little word document (Build your network) you can use to fill this out if you are interested.

This will give you a good view of the strength of your network for reaching your outcome. And remember, networks are two way… the more networks you belong to for other people, the stronger your own network will be!