A coaching roadmap
Find your way…
Do you feel stuck, knowing you can achieve more but unsure about the next steps?
In coaching, the client is at the centre and in charge of the process. Where they flow, I as their coach follow.
Sometimes, though, a client seeks out a coach precisely because their flow is blocked. When that happens, I’ve devised a map they can use to get moving. 10 weekly or fortnightly sessions to catalyze you toward your BHAG - your big, hairy, ambitious goal. As your coach, I am 💯 committed to helping you arrive there. Supplemental to the sessions, I am also available by text or e-mail between sessions, so you feel supported throughout the process.
The Coaching Road Map
Introduction: Creating the coach-client agreement, setting the course of the transformation process
Exploration: The Ist-Soll (current vs. should be) situation
Vision: Setting goals and milestones and the first action plan
Drives: Clarify the values that power your goals
The Inner Team: Unite the inner support system for the person you want to be
Stars and Black Holes: Appreciate, balance and control your strengths and weaknesses
Skills: Align your abilities, resources and goals
Stay the course: Anchor strategies for your development
Spread your wings: Reflect on the progress you’ve made, develop strategy for maintaining growth
Fly: Practice being the person and professional you are meant to be
Coaching is not just for contemplation. Each of the steps rounds off with an action plan to turn your goal into reality. The process concludes with options for follow-ups. You can track your progress and take accountability for it. Life is action; emotion is the result.
May the action you perform lead to the well-being you deserve.
Notes from the recovery room
Finding the teaching in illness; just listen.
One of the best parts of being on a "growth journey" is that you can turn almost anything into a teaching. Challenges become stepping stones on the path to insight and evolution. If you've got the right mindset.
The journey
That is how I recently saw my two-week bout of stomach flu.
Nothing reminds you of your body quite like a heaving esophagus. For three days, my life consisted of sleep, stomach cramps and rushes to the bathroom. When the crisis subsided, I was weak and dizzy, making the physical world a dangerous place to be in. All focus was getting through the day, and hoping rest would bring wellness a little closer.
So it is to be sick. The ambitious, visionary self is reduced to the animal body, needing and abhorring comfort at the same time.
🫀 It is in this fully bodily state that we become most aware of the consciousness waiting beneath the surface. In the opening lines of her essay, "On Being Ill", Virginia Woolf muses, "how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light..." Once the robust defenses are down, the fragile consciousness is revealed. How we journey into those lands, and what we bring back, will set the course of our healthy days.
The mindset
What will we discover in those strange lands of the generally suppressed soul?
Well, that is for every person to discover for themselves. The next time you are bedridden, with a flu, for example, that foreshadows a greater darkness, ask the illness:
what would you like to tell me?
Consider yourself a novice at the feet of a master and humbly ask:
what do you want me to learn?
If you are ready to listen, it will speak its secret language.
It is a sensitive endeavour, not for the faint of heart. So – be kind to yourself if you embark on it. Practice non-judgment: illness reveals to all of us information we did not see or want to know. That’s part of the human experience. Be curious: what need or realisation is illness pushing through the “smudged or rosy [window pane]” of our everyday thoughts? These two qualities will give you the compassion that makes the insights easier to bear.
With every realisation comes the possibility of action. As you recover from the embodied and transcendent experience, what action do you want to take to respond to what you have learned? It can vary. Maybe you want more softness; or more grit. More connection; or more independence. Whatever it is, the weakened state will illuminate the meaning and purpose of your health.
These are my imperfect (and hopefully productive) takeaways from the sickroom.
mind management
This blog entry is dedicated entirely to The Commitment Screen, a key passage in Prof. Steve Peters’ game-changing book The Chimp Paradox:The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness. London:Vermilion. 2012.
I respectfully quote the list of questions in full.
The Commitment Screen can stand alone as a series of questions to ask oneself before embarking on a momentous project. It yields much more depth, however, when read and appreciated as the crown of Peters’ entire book.
The Chimp Paradox gives us a broad examination of the mind or psyche. The Human is the person we want to be, and the fact that we WANT to be it means that is what or who we actually ARE. The Chimp is holding us back and getting us to act in ways that go against our deepest and more cherished interests.
Peters anticipates that you, like me, might not resonate with everything he writes. But what does resonate is powerful.
If you would like to answer these questions and pave an actionable path toward your goal or vision, I have also developed a coaching tool called the “Human Alliance” inspired by Peters and years of experience as a Systems and Integral Development coach.
It would be my privilege to work with you. Contact me here.
If you know anyone who could benefit from these questions, please share!
The Commitment Screen questions
from The Chimp Paradox:The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness. London:Vermilion. 2012. (255-257).
Here is a set of questions you can answer to cover the two aspects of the
Commitment Screen. This will ensure that you are fully prepared to take on your
dream.
Is it really a dream?
• How important is this to you and your Chimp?
• Do you and your Chimp really want to achieve it?
• What are the benefits of achieving your dream?
• Are the benefits worth having, compared to the cost of getting there?
The plans and requirements to fulfil the dream
• What plans have you made to achieve this?
• What have you tried in the past?
• If it failed in the past, why was this?
• What are you going to do that is different this time?
• What new strategies have you got for the future?
• What worked in the past?
• Have you made sure that your plans are watertight by letting someone else
check them with you?
• What are the essential, significant and desirable requirements for both Human
and Chimp for this plan to work?
• Have you got the essentials in place BEFORE you start?
Hurdles, barriers and pitfalls
• Have you made a list of the hurdles you have to jump?
• Have you got a strategy to jump each hurdle?
• What will you have to sacrifice?
• What are your plans for dealing with the downsides?
• What stress will you face in trying to achieve this dream?
• What barriers do you think you will have to get round or negotiate on?
• What are your plans to avoid or get round each barrier?
• What pitfalls might you need to avoid?
• How will you recognise the pitfalls as you approach them?
• If you failed to reach your dream how would you feel and how will you deal
with this?
What will keep you going when you face problems?
• How will you deal with failing to meet a goal or target?
• Who have you got to help you deal with issues/problems you might face?
• Is this person clear on why and how they can help you?
• How will you measure progress?
• How willing are you to learn new strategies?
• How willing are you to change your approach?
If you find yourself wanting to give up your dream, ask yourself the following:
• Why do you want to give up?
• Can you change anything before you give up?
• Can you find a different approach?
• Who have you talked it through with?
• What are the advantages to giving up your dream?
• What are the disadvantages to giving up the dream?
• What plans have you got for when you stop working towards the dream?
Some suggestions to help you to stay committed to a plan
• Be realistic with your resources – money and time are not elastic.
• Time management is a skill worth learning.
• Work effectively not just efficiently.
• Prioritise what you need to do and don’t allow yourself to get distracted.
• Doing one thing at a time, where possible, is the best way to give it full
attention.
• Avoid negative people or at least let them know what they are doing (nicely)
and if they can’t stop, don’t involve them.
• Actively listen to advice and where necessary seek it out.
• Indecision is the best energy sapper, so once you have all the information, make
the decision and follow it through.
Key Point
The biggest factor for success is for you to function at your best, practically and emotionally
mindfulness for a vuca world
Quietly, behind the scenes, most of us have a narrative – what I call our “stress story” – on loop, droning on about our impending catastrophe and eventual failure. Often, our jobs exploit our insecurity and we try to compensate by doing more, more, more, until we burn out or break down.
You have value beyond measure in being. Just being.
2022.
How’s it going for you… and can mindfulness really make it better?
Our lives have become more VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) than ever. Current events seem to be squeezing us from all sides. Our society demands that we give more, more, more without offering us meaning or purpose in return. According to philosopher Byung Chul Han, we live in a Leistungsgesellschaft, a performance society, in which our lives are measured by our performance and consumption. Our horizon, therefore, is our success, and so, our worth. Who, what can we turn to when our humanity is reduced to our earning or buying power?
Stop tape.
If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that you have value beyond measure in being. Just being.
The engines of our social and economic order drive that fact far from our frontal cortex. We get so caught up in succeeding (or just surviving) that we merge our self-worth with our productivity and income.
Quietly, behind the scenes, most of us have a narrative – our “stress story” – on loop, droning on about our impending catastrophe and eventual failure.
I have affluent friends who pay for an enviable lifestyle. Beneath their pleasures, however, there is an undercurrent of anxiety and tension around their money – how to make it, keep it and multiply it – that reminds me to be grateful for my modest apartment and career. I have the privilege to find fulfilment in what I do, even in its fluctuations.
There is something profoundly satisfying about striving for excellence: to access your full potential and channel your abilities into a result that benefits others.
But doesn’t it usually seem that your best isn’t good enough? Who do you think you are? Quietly, behind the scenes, most of us have a narrative – what I call our “stress story” – on loop, droning on about our impending catastrophe and eventual failure. Often, our jobs exploit our insecurity and we try to compensate by doing more, more, more, until we burn out or break down.
Is “quiet quitting” the solution? It might be, if you don’t care about your job, your project, your colleagues and professional community.
There is another way of avoiding burnout and reducing stress.
Did you read that line above carefully and with self-care: you have value beyond measure in being, just being – ?
This is a core teaching of mindfulness.
You have value beyond measure because in the ultimate reality of things, your consciousness (some traditions call it soul) is more than your performance and your success and all the trappings of your “egoic mind”.
The practice of mindfulness helps us get distance from the noise that causes stress in our lives. By bringing us back to our bodies and our breath, it reminds us quite simply that we are alive, embodied, present. There is something inalienable in that realization, in that moment.
In the moment. Mindfulness practice encourages us to be aware of what is happening now – your hands are resting on your lap, your chest is rising and falling with your breath, a thought comes up and you observe it arising and dissolving. You remain.
Throughout our day, thoughts come up, they form a story: wish fulfillment or end-of-days dread or blah. This is what Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, calls the Narrative Focus: we tell ourselves stories about absent reality – the past or the future – while not noticing the open-ended present.
In mindfulness practice, we let the story come up with nonjudgment, and we let it go. Back to our breath and body: our somatic experience. Kabat-Zinn calls this our Experiential Focus. Scientific studies have been conducted to trace the brain circuity in the two kinds of foci. “These findings suggest that mindfulness practice develops a broader repertoire of ways of experiencing oneself and influences the degree to which we build stories about our experirences that may eclipse or color the experiences themselves,” Kabat-Zinn writes in Mindfulness for Beginners. With mindfulness, we are present in the moment and open to the experience within and without us.
As a student of literature, I know that a truly great story lends itself to interpretation, it is ambiguous, open-ended. When our stress thinking takes over, stories become closed, rigid premonitions of doom. They drastically narrow the “repertoire of ways of experiencing.” A closed story (good or bad) gets us stuck.
Mindfulness gives us a chance to step out of the story and storytelling altogether. It invites us “home” to our consciousness as the starting place for right action. It is at home that thoughts give way to emotions. If we attend without judgment, we open up to what the emotions are seeking to reveal to us about our basic needs, our consciousness. With self-compassion, we find acceptance. With acceptance comes the power to change.
A lot of stress comes from the feeling that we cannot change what is happening to us. Yet we mentally resist anyway, trying to fix reality so that it finally corresponds to our expectations of it. Have you ever successfully changed reality by refusing to accept it? How did that work in the long-term?
Mindfulness sets us on another track. It gives us the invaluable gift of ourselves – our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions and our tranquility – at every moment. It is the center, the starting point, the real. That change in perception changes our engagement with reality, which then changes the way we influence it. The observer influences the experiment. Your reality depends on the way you observe it; and the way you observe it depends on your state of mind. Mindfulness “is an invitation to take up residency in awareness and dwell here in this timeless moment we call ‘now’ that gives us another dimension of being in which to live, in which to be touched by the world, and through which to touch the world and others in their joy and in their pain, in which to come to our senses – all of them – and wake up to the actuality of who we are” (Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners).
It is conscious simplicity that allows us to live fully in this complex world. It is by being aware of ourselves in the now that we activate our wisest decisions for worthwhile endeavour in life and on the job. It is by regarding the present moment that we are able to be authentic and connect with others in their authenticity. Isn’t it good to come home?
*
Here is a mindfulness exercise given by Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness. There are many others, but this is my favourite.
A slow-motion bath
Allow yourself 30 to 45 minutes to take a bath. Don’t hurry for even one second. From the moment you prepare the bathwater to the moment you put on clean clothes, let every motion be light and slow. Be attentive to every movement. Place your attention to every part of your body, without discrimination or fear. Be mindful of each stream of water on your body. By the time you’re finished, your mind should feel as peaceful and light as your body. Follow your breath. Think of yourself as being in a clean and fragrant lotus pond in the summer.
*
For a brief introduction to Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEMsXYcSdPM
*
Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart