It might seem a strange idea to propose that you don’t need a coach on a website which essentially is the home of my coaching practice, but honestly– it’s my belief.
We all have a path in life that is our default outcome i.e. the outcome that we’ll experience by the end of our lives without any outside interference. Just like if you let a raindrop trickle down the glass of a window, left to its own devices it’ll follow gravity and reach the bottom.
As well as the gravity that we all know about, the one that says if you drop a heavy object it will fall in a downward direction until it hits something solid, there’s something else that acts in a similarly predictable way in your life, however this force is mostly invisible to you. You can’t see it and you don’t feel it.
I think of it as “Programmed Influence”.
Unlike gravity it comes in two flavours;
i) positive programmed influence, resulting in useful outcomes
and
ii) negative programmed influence resulting in unhelpful outcomes.
The programming starts in childhood between the ages of 0 and 7 years old, where our primary functions are to stay safe and learn to navigate our way in this land of giants and big “stuff”, while avoiding pain and experiencing as much pleasure as possible in our tiny lives.
We live in a land of pure possibility where we experience such delights as sunshine and ice-cream and pets and butterflies and the sensation that mud (or perhaps the stuff you’ve discovered regularly appears in your nappy) makes when you squidge it through your fingers. And possibly even the attractive patterns that result when you use your fingers to apply it to light coloured walls and curtains.
It’s a world that makes us squeal with pure delight.
Sadly, the land of possibility also contains some less pleasant surprises such as broccoli and trips to the doctors surgery for injections, foul tasting stuff on our tongues and the poking and proddings that make up something adults call healthcare.
The little hard drive in our brain is rapidly and hungrily absorbing information via all our senses, and as we develop starts to guide us in making the very best choices, thereby allowing us to grow and navigate our world in safety and comfort: mum didn’t enjoy our last finger painting on the wall and curtains experiment? (understood from her angry face, vocal tone and our tears). Hmmm… A better decision then to keep it on paper next time and only use the paints provided.
No more nappy experiments! Result: smiling mum and cuddles – perfect outcome.
As our little hard drive is rapidly absorbing all this information, something else is happening. We’re being influenced and these lessons are being stored without filtering apart from the meaning that we give them. For example, if one day your cat brought you a little white furry thing to play with and you and the cat had a delightful time trying to catch it as it scampered around, you might not know your mother had a severe mouse phobia until she walked into the room to investigate your giggles of joy and let out a terrified shriek, acting like a wild woman when she saw the mouse.
Your understanding in that second would be that the mouse was something to be afraid of and from that day your actions around mice would be modified, checking for danger. Each subsequent encounter with a mouse being informed by the reaction of your mother (if she had an established phobia she would display fear each time).
All of this data then gets written to the Operating System on your hard drive and as you know the OS isn’t often modified by the computer user. It contains commands which allow programs to work their magic automatically.
So fast forward twenty years and you’ve grown up. You’ve seen plenty of nature programs and you can tell the difference between a mouse and a lion and one day you get invited over for coffee at the home of a person for whom you have an attraction. You arrive and he or she answers the door, looking drop dead gorgeous… with a small white mouse on their right shoulder.
A heartbeat…
You flash back to age 3, scream loudly (sooooo not cool if you’re a guy, trust me on this) and back away, leaving your mystified date to try and explain that this is Arnold and he’s just the cutest thing ever, completely housetrained and even does tricks.
You are not hearing any of this because your fight/flight response has cut in and you’ve got enough cortisol flooding your body right now to run 100 metres in an Olympic best time, with enough left in reserve for five laps of honour at the same record breaking pace carrying a tray of ice-creams.
And then this would-have-been beautiful relationship train-wrecks forever when he/she grasps your frozen hand and places Arnold in it.
Your brain ramps up the threat level to CRITICAL, alarms are ringing in places you had no idea you had alarms as your brain chemistry goes thermonuclear and all reason leaves you along with your paralysis as you automatically catapult Arnold over your right shoulder with the force of a Russian weightlifter thanks to all the fear response chemicals flooding your system.
Your future date screams in panic at the sight of beloved Arnold describing a graceful arc through the air, the scream matches a memory of your mothers fearful scream, your system overloads and you take the opportunity to faint.
What happened here was that you accessed a small piece of data coded as a fear and written to your hard drive years previously. You probably had no conscious memory it even existed –and certainly no idea it was capable of causing such mayhem.
That’s a (slightly extreme) demonstration of how people who are influencers in the early stages of our lives, can and will have, routinely installed beliefs that will influence our lives for many years, sometimes completely without our conscious awareness.
Now, it doesn’t show up often in as dramatic a fashion as our destroyed date story, but most days of our lives, we will all make decisions guided by invisible programmed influences, coded long ago to our hard drives and running without our conscious awareness or permission.
The biggest drawback –is this is how we shape our lives.
In our critical decision making process, we accept restrictions, fears and truths that are actually not a restriction or truth at all, but simply something we misunderstood in our formative years.
And this is where a transformative coach will produce dramatic results.
My job is about identifying these programmed influences from extremely subtle clues and helping you disarm them in order to create a rapid, clear path to your current goals.
I’ve worked with examples of this as diverse as a crippling fear of public speaking, to a very motivated entrepreneur who each time he earned over a million euros in a new enterprise would crash the business within 6 months (in each of three examples he put it down to unfavourable market conditions). I’ve worked with CEOs and tv and film personalities, sportsmen and women and people who felt that life was actually pretty okay, but had the nagging feeling that they could be more, do more and have more if only they took the handbrake off whilst driving their lives.
They all had one thing in common – they didn’t need a coach, to live as they had been, but their lives changed in a massively positive way when their hidden restrictions, fears and blocks were identified and dissolved.
– and there’s one more thing to know:
Their lives didn’t change because of some magic power that I have.
Their lives changed because they rapidly had the freedom to live those lives to their full potential, unencumbered by all those old influences that were running invisibly and holding back an otherwise *genius life.
So you don’t need a coach.
But for those people who want to experience what they are truly capable of, having the right coach will make a massive positive difference to an already great life.
John
ps – * a genius life is my definition of those moments we live to our full untapped potential. When things just seem to flow easily and effortlessly and we create memories that we look back on that have big wow factors attached.
Did I really do that? Soooo Cool!
We all occasionally have those moments.
My job is making sure YOU have more of them.