Coaching – In English Archives

Clarity

EVERY TIME I work with someone, whether it’s in a 1-on-1 coaching session or a course, this thing happens.

People come in with a more or less defined ‘goal’.

Maybe they’ve read the NLP rules on how to put down goals and then written them down in a positive, measurable form and so on…

I want to earn X within this year
I want to double my earnings in three years
I want to lose 5 kilos
I want to run a marathon in X hours

and so on.

This apparently makes sense, and is definitely A FIRST STEP in moving from unawareness to awareness.

The problem with this kind of approach to improvement is that while it makes sense in the short term because it gives you the feeling of progress… in the long term it doesn’t generate the kind of satisfaction you would expect in your personal and professional life.

And it’s very difficult to keep short-term goals and a sense of long-term or very long-term direction in mind AT THE SAME TIME.

Let me give you an example.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always had enormous clarity about the lifestyle I wanted to ‘grow up’, mostly related to how my day should be, where I wanted to work, with whom how much and so on. And of course how much I wanted to earn.

Most people have a career goal of earning more money because when they have more money they can quit their jobs and dedicate themselves and have more free time and finally do what they want.

IN THE SHORT TERM this makes sense.

In the long term these people find themselves after 10 years working a lot and MAYBE earning a lot but with less and less free time.

This is why from the beginning I made choices that preserved my free time AND allowed me to earn what I wanted at the same time.
I didn’t lower my financial demands, but I did change my goals.

Sure I gave up some things.

I turned down jobs, consultancies, hires in companies that would have given me more visibility. And not because I didn’t feel like struggling… but because I knew that if I made that decision it would take me far from my direction.

Clarity is a beautiful word, but the risk is that it doesn’t mean anything.
For me, clarity is the ability to keep goals and direction aligned and to continually have them ‘talk’ to each other.

To do this I need to be clear about what my horizon line is.
How far you can ‘see’, while also knowing that every step you take in that direction will make you see a little further.

Lots to see, but this can be a start.

Debunking the myth of the comfort zone

Short post about one of the myth of personal and professional development: the infamous ‘comfort zone’.

You probably heard these statements hundreds of time… you have to go outside your comfort zone.. outside the area in which you are comfortable… miracles happen outside your comfort zone…

There is a presumption that people live in a comfort zone, in which they are well.. and that they won’t get results until they escape from that zone.

I say that it works in the exact opposite way.

You only have to listen to people… and notice when they have their attention on. And if you do it, you will discover that they spend the most of their time in a configuration that is not comfortable at all for them…

Their direction is what they DON’T want, what does NOT works for them… on their problems… They have their attention on something they want to shift and that is external to them… for their life to be acceptable and finally works for them.

And for me this is like having a Ferrari and always driving it with its handbrake setted. If your attention is always on what doesn’t work for you and on what you have to change in order to be happy… that is not a comfort zone but instead a zone of profound inhibition. And from that zone you cannot get real results.

I say that for people to get real results they have enter in their TRUE comfort zone… they have to access a configuration in which their attention is not on what they have to change outside them… it’s not on what does not work.. but it’s on who they are and on what they want to get… starting from the context they are in… professionally and personally.

So.. when you hear this sentence again.. ‘you have to go out your comfort zone’ listen to it with fresh ears… you don’t really have to go out your comfort zone… you have instead to enter in a position in which you don’t perceive anything of what outside you as a problem or an obstacle… but as pure data in the enviroment.. pure data that you can use for you to reach faster what you do want …

And this it what we do with the ReSonance Model.

ReSonance (English)

The scarce resource you have to put your attention on is not your money.

And it’s not your time, either. It’s the amount of attention you have and the ability to orient it where you like.

And it depends on where you put it on how much results you are able to get or not to get.

Every other thing is less important than this.

Because after all you can ask for a loan to get money, and you can ‘expand’ your time hiring people that do things for you.

But the quality of the decisions you take it depends largely on the configuration you took them from – and this determines consequently how you will use that money and that time.

#2 For years you’ve been told that NLP is useful to ‘read other people’s mind’ or to ‘calibrate’ them.
At some level of skills this can be true, but once you’re really expert in reading context before than people.

Otherwise, mind reading is not useful at all.

Did you ever make assumptions that was evident for you and than later appeared to be totally wrong?

Exactly…
So…

Don’t assume facts as true that are not so evident
Not read between lines
Ask exactly what someone means when he is telling you something.

Reading between the lines can give you a false sense of confidence, but it won’t help when the game is about getting more results.

Understanding, manipulation and ReSonance

It’s interesting reading the comments people write when I publish a new post on the blog. I’m always surprised when I realize that people tend to focus on the techniques, on the process, on the ‘how-to-do-this-step-by-step’ instead of focusing on the framework behind the actions.

Because the techniques we use in the ReSonance Model are – paradoxically – irrelevant: they are only a means once the intention and the framework in which we use them are clear.

The ReSonance Model is made to bring someone to perform from an ‘excitatory’ position in which he perceives himself operating in relation to what he wants to obtain in the world… and in which he is able to choose his orientation in the world and the position from which he decides to act.

For this to happen, you must learn how to configure yourself internally in such a way that you can interact with the world around you, in relation to what it’s possible for you… in a state in which there is nothing of what it’s outside you that, when you hold this configuration, you would change.

One of the things that often happens when you are organized this way, you instantaneously have more competences to understand the context you are in.

What do I mean with ‘understanding the context?’

People spend most of their time in a ‘position’ in which, instead of taking data from what is happening outside them and getting informations from these data… what they do is to have unrealistic goals that they think they’ll obtain in the most pleasant way for them…

This is the way they work, and from this position it’s so easy to manipulate them.

Giving them a goal that is attractive to them and suggesting a rewarding way to obtain it.

You need nothing more than this to manipulate people. No other complicated patterns or formulas to reveal why people usually trust some methods, organizations, systems.

You give them an unrealistic and pleasant goal and a way to obtain it that satisfies them. That’s all.

And they literally stop to understand what’s going around them.

You could be in the same situation in which in the past centuries people were sold methods to turn lead into gold.

Or, like in ancient Egypt, when someone claimed to heal schistosomiasis through circumcision.

When you hold the position we talk about in the ReSonance Model, all the cause-effect relations that someone else built for you (all the stories, all the mithologies) instantaneously fade away… because you observe them from a position from which you have a clear perception of your personal mythology… and you can see what’s in there, in your context as the most pure set of data … and it becomes clear to you what’s behind the cause-effect relations that someone else created for you.

From here you are more free to move on .. to go towards what you really want.

Using what works, not what you like the most.

Simone Pacchiele

A coach without experience

As anyone, I received an enormous amount of knowledge and advice from other people. From expert, older ones, or simply from people I paid to give me instructions to get some results.

A lot of times I followed these advices. Sometimes I did not.

And there’s something I find very interesting about how people approach a coach or a consultant.

And that is that often they pay for advices they won’t follow.

They trust you, the pay you good money, they respect you BUT eventually they will do the wrong thing. The exact one they had in their mind before they called you.

Sometime you’ll have the suspect they called you only to hear that what they thought was right.

As coach and consultant, this often happens to me.
And what I learned from this is that you can’t prevent people you coach from doing wrong things. And this is true for students, executives or house-keepers as for the entrepreneur, no matter what is their education or how much money they earn.

Literally, they have to go through this.

Usually people think that when they pay someone for advice they’re only looking for informations – they want to know something that they still don’t know. They think that you give them the right informations, they apply them ad they get results.

It doesn’t work this way. Never.

Because what people really want is to be guided in a process that brings them to see things they didn’t see and understand before.

Once they can see what you see and understand from your experience, they can also understand the solution you want to provide them.

This is the reason why coaching is NEVER only a matter or of techniques or theory.

NLP, Coaching, any other change or personal-development techniques are useless if the coach does not have gained the experience of it in the right, real life contexts.

You cannot earn the coaching diploma and start coaching people. Before, you have to learn how to apply the coaching techniques you learnt in your environment and get results with them.

The same results you claim you’re able to generate for the people you coach.

You must embody the techniques you teach, and it’s very different from studying in the classroom and sell them to your clients.

This is the reason why I suggest to my students that want to work in the coaching/consulting arena… that it’s better for them beginning to coach people in contexts they know very well and where they have a lot of experience and are already successful.

If you’re a good musician and want to do coaching… start coaching musicians

If you’re a good lawyer and want to do coaching… start coaching lawyers

If you’re a good executive and want to do coaching, coach executives.

If you want begin to work as a coach, you have to start coaching with people who have problems you know very well… and that you already solved for you. Something you’re expert about… something in which you earned a lot of experience…

Before coaching other people, you must be in a position from where you can see the path other people must do to get where you are.

Coaching is ONLY the instrument to bring them there. But you MUST have the experience of being arrived there before.

Being a coach, to me, is an ending point for successful people in their area. Not a pleasant alternative for who has never been a star in his job.