Author: newstasis_waavrk

Do Your Thoughts Match Your Goals?

Dissonance is defined as tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements. It looks, sounds and feels like many things, but in the realm of training and performance coaching it is simply unattained potential; which itself sounds like self-doubt and low confidence, feels like failure and looks like sadness, obesity and a lack of life optimization that leaves a human being in a depressed like state.

The solution is very simple, eliminate the unsuitable elements as quickly as possible to restore the harmonious synchronous actions, thoughts and feelings. Doing this will get someone moving forward again in a hurry. This is a skill and it may take time to cultivate, but it is very easy to do and just requires effort and sacrifice.

But why is does this seem like a challenge to so many people? Well, because most have never been taught how to match thoughts to goals and instead allow their goals to become matched to their thoughts.

Make no mistake about it, those two statements are not the same. Linguistically and mathematically they look very similar in to each other, but when the direction of causation is considered it is evident that goals that are based on thoughts and feelings have more to do with recreating the past or keeping things as they are than anything else while thoughts and feelings that are based on goals are about creating a future that is based on something unreasonable and completely new.

Think about it for a minute – if you let your thoughts and therefore your feelings dictate your goals how are they going to be extraordinary? How are they going to be anything other than based on your past or the present moment given that you think what you think and this causes you to feel what you feel? It just doesn’t work like that. If, on the other hand, you take the time to clear your mind and let your emotional state settle, you will create a blank stillness from which to create goals. This affords you the freedom from self-doubt, low confidence, a sense of failure, sadness, obesity and depression. Avoidance or escape will NOT be the primary objective for your goals so you will be free to create ANYTHING you want as a future possibility.

We do a lot of goal setting with our clients and one of the key things we do is try to get our clients to free their minds before we begin to shape things. Without clearing away the existing thoughts (the ones that got them to be sitting down in front of us) we cannot establish the groundwork for the powerful collaborative partnership that yields the highest level of success. Put another way, an average mind creates average goals and average goals create an average life.

During a goal setting session, we encourage the client to create the impossible dream by getting them to let go of the past and the present and project themselves into the future, to a time when ANYTHING is possible. Once we get them into a peak emotional state, what they want for their best life starts to flow out of them and the goals quickly create themselves. There will be some further refinement to establish dates and action items but the tough part of becoming the possibility is over. We anchor the peak emotional state to their goals through the mental linking of success action items to ensure that they are able to return to this place of possibilities at will, but rarely do they ever need more than a few coaching words to keep them on track. When you create goals without referencing that which already is, your brain is free to create thoughts that bring forth a new reality.

On Finding A Therapist

For me it was fairly simple, I just connected with an old friend who I trusted and who was a therapist. I’m an open book of sorts and kind of shamelessly float through life broadcasting myself (or the stories I tell myself about myself) to whoever seems willing to hear them. It worked effectively because I had spend a lot of time analyzing myself, my actions, my expectation and my past to be open to whatever they asked me to consider. Strangely enough, they didn’t say very much that was different from what my last couple of girlfriends, my brother, my dad, Tony and many of my clients have said. What was different was my willingness to hear what was said when they said it because the wall was already crumbling.

Below is a message from a friend who found therapy to be helpful in moving past a relationship challenge about 18 months ago. I found it to be very succinct and accurate.

Therapy is something that is very personal and it’s like hiring a personal trainer, you need to have a certain rapport and confidence in them. I found mine through my group employee benefits with work. The bulk of her work is life coaching with companies and some work on the side for personal type crisis.Also, therapist are very expensive and can cost $200 an hour. This is a big commitment. She has 20+ years experience, so she can set her price. I can certainly provide you with her info – she is in Oakville, however my suggestion would be to look in the yellow pages for therapist that are close to where they live and then ask a set of preset questions – interview style and then pick one to try.

For instance, what is their specialty, how long have they been practicing, what is their approach, do they assign homework, what is their pricing, etc. I know this sounds tedious, but you right away feel like you at least made some sort of best decision. You have to remember that you are telling this person your most intimate stories and need to feel really comfortable with them. It’s like hiring a doctor.

Remain A Student Forever

Steve Jobs closed off his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech with 4 words “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

These four words should mean more to a trainer / performance coach than almost anything else we hear or deal with each day. The reason for this is simple, we are always seeking more information because we remain foolish; we have to be, many of those who need our performance coaching services and training believe they know everything.

Except they don’t know everything, they just don’t know what they don’t know. In essence, they have stopped being students and started to resist the lessons the world and life throws at them.

Let me explain.

Adults should be hungry because they are not old. With the advances in health care, nutrition and the standard of living in Canada, it is not unreasonable to view mid-adulthood as the start of act two of life. You are educated, have careers that afford you more flexibility and disposable income to let them work on self improvement. You have life experience that help you to see that there are consequences to decisions but know that there is plenty of time to address those consequences IF appropriate action is taken immediately. You can and should be hungry for a better quality of life.

But be honest with yourself, you don’t know everything because, if you did, you would be doing everything that is needed to be achieving a life that will bring you unreasonable satisfaction. You wouldn’t be visiting us for training or performance coaching because they would be optimized. So approach us because something isn’t working.

But keep in mind that we are like you.

We are young, foolish and open to learning as much about the our clients, our selves and the universe as possible. The relationships we create are partnerships in the purest sense of the word. Our goals are mutually aligned – we seek clarity, information, wisdom and experience that will allow us to effect and transact lasting behavioral change in others. Our clients seek clarity, information, wisdom and life-changing experiences to help facilitate the creation of optimized behaviors that are concise, deliberate, and repeatable and which move them seamlessly towards a way of operating that allows the body, brain, mind and spirit to function as effectively as possible.

But all of this is possible ONLY when coach and client are simpatico in action, intention and purpose, and this is only possible when each understand that there is much work to be done, lessons to be learned and wisdom to be taught BY BOTH parties. For our partnerships to be truly remarkable WE MUST remain hungry and foolish when it comes to our clients. We cannot create the solutions they need if we do not know their stories and they cannot be a part of the solution if they already know the answers and are closed to the possibility that new and unreasonable results require new and unreasonable actions.

So stay hungry and stay foolish!

Transactional Analysis – Part 3 – Working With Clients

This is the third post about Transactional Analysis and it will outline some of how you would use TA with clients. If you have not already read the introduction outlined in part one or part two, which covered the games people play, considering reading them before you get stuck into this one.

Using TA with clients is an effective way to get them to optimize their performance. It can be a challenge to keep the conversations going smoothly given the level of discomfort people tend to feel when someone is running or has just run a game on them, but it becomes a lot easier to navigate the way through these moments the more often I do it. Since I am acting with my clients best interests at heart, there is little that I can do which is going to violate my integrity. It is now at the point were I just tell them what is about to happen, then point out their discomfort and explain what I have done to their brain / emotional center.

This is both an effective way to build their confidence in my ability to actually help them and it serves as a way to get rid of any clients who don’t actually want to have performance coaching; a strong tendency towards avoiding change or judging what I do as being self-serving manipulation is a non-starter when it comes to a coaching relationship. My feeling is that effective coaches do cause temporary changes within their clients to help facilitate their transformations given that intelligent objective people will try on things to see if they are relevant to their journey REGARDLESS of where it comes from.

When done effectively, there is a seamless transition in the conversation flow in-spite of the fact that it has just hit a pothole.

Here is hypothetical an example from a conversation that I didn’t have last week.

A client wants to drop 70 lbs and their trainer has book them an appointment with me because 70lb is a lot of weight to drop and they know that gaining it in the first place is due to a lack of optimization in their life.

I meet them at the front, do the Clinton hand shake – right hand shake, left hand reaches and holds their right forearm as I say “hello, thank you for coming in to have a conversation with me.” Small talk as we walk towards the office.

I gave her the big chair behind the desk and I take the smaller “client” chair  – I do this because I want her to feel like the lead in the conversation. This messes with the normal dynamic and immediately throws them off. Again, I need to get inside their head as quickly as possible and no opportunity is wasted. “So, what brings you here?” They talk, I listen. Very little ever comes out of this part of the conversation other than a further opening and the building of trust. I am however listening very closely for something that indicates Parent, Adult, Child psychological states. At some point I ask if I can write stuff down. They agree, and I write down stuff that I find interesting.

What I find interesting are pieces of scripts that feel sticky – dogmatic statements that feel accurate but are just stories. Why they feel sticky is either because they say them a few times, they say them more or less powerfully than the rest of the conversation, there is a shift in some aspect of their body language or because I get a feeling that it’s a match on something I’ve heard before (in another conversation I’ve had). “I am a control freak” is a good example because if they were, there wouldn’t need me to set them free, they’d already be doing everything that was needed to have the life they wanted. This statement usually indicates a high level of irresponsibility in critical areas of their life and usually a tendency towards a need be dominated.

After a few minutes I’ll ask them how they are feeling? What has changed in their thinking since they started talking? What the voice inside their heard is saying. The voice inside their head is critical because it is the cause of all of their ineffective actions. They MUST be aware that they hear it because it is the only way they have of quickly accessing their operating system. Many are reluctant to say they hear a voice and instead comment that they are thinking. When I ask them what that is like, do they think in colours, shapes, pictures of words, they always come back to words. This is step one of the breakthrough. There is a drifting from Adult to parent during this part of the conversation and I’ll often go to child when I tell them what my voice is saying. But once they admit that they think in linguistic terms I return to adult and the conversation continues.

“What does that voice say to you when you make the decision that you know you shouldn’t?” The information gleamed from the conversation up until this point is essential for what happens next, which is ultimately dependent upon how they answer this question. In almost every instance, if the person is aware of the voice, it exists as a dichotomy – a good cop / bad cop or angle / devil type thing; with one side saying do it and the other side saying don’t do it. There are lots of theories in this area about what these voices represent and the approach I take is that the devil is the Child state and the angle is the Parent state. The Child state is based on their direct experiential past, the Parent state is based on their observational past. Neither is right or wrong per say, but both are unworkable if lasting change is the objective. Since the goal of TA is to get the person to transact in an Adult state which is set firmly in the present.

The remainder of the session will be spend analyzing the duality of Child / Parent as it exists within their life in terms of the scripts they employee to manage and navigate their life. If the session is successful, they will begin to become aware of the cost of transacting as a Child / Parent and we will work on creating new scripts and methods for operating to alter the thoughts, feelings and subsequent outcome of their manifestation.

It is fair to state that most of the people we work with do not need more than a couple of session to start to become their transformed self given that they have already made the decision to make changes in their life. Some follow-up is needed to ensure that the adjustments have gotten traction but for the most part, when someone is open to a new way of being, the new way of being starts to take over very quickly.

You Are Building Adults – Modeling Success For Successful Children

We talk to a lot of parents because we’re curious about the experience of being one. They tell us their hopes and fears, their concerns about the future and the things that bring them optimism. Over the years, their stories have helped us developed an appreciation of what it means to be a parent. One of the striking facts that seems to jump out is related to the observational learning and the normalization that children do when they seeing their parents doing ANYTHING. This is something that we see in our coaching clients everyday – most of them are doing what their parents did when they were growing up.

Things that parents pass along to their children that don’t serve to optimize development:

Teaching ineffective exercise habits. Active parents tend to have active children. When a parent teaches a child that there is joy in moving, we rarely need to work with them in any way other than to help them achieve peak performance. With a well-established baseline, young people tend to continue to move. They may decide to go as far as they can in a sport or simply become a recreational participant, but the activity habit is sticky and most enjoy the lifelong benefits associated with maintaining an active life. We do however work with a lot of individuals who didn’t have the exercise habit modeled when they were younger and there is a host of issue associated with this lack of movement. It is fair to say that teaching an adult how to love moving is one of the bigger challenges primarily because they have already learned how to love NOT moving.

Teaching children poor eating habits. A serving size is a different thing for every family but it tends to be the same size for everyone in the same family. Lean parents tend to raise children who are closer to their ideal body weight and composition than obese parents, who tend to raise children who are heavier. Families who sit down and eat meals together tend to continue to sit down and eat meals together. Parents who help children view food as the source of nutrition, building material and the occasional treat establish a repeatable and reasonable relationship with food. Those who teach their children that food a reward and that every meal should consist of foods that are enjoyable and easy tend to raise children who are lazy when it comes to their attitudes towards food preparation.

Not teaching children how to not win. Learning how to handle defeat or not being the best appropriately will go a long way in giving a child an advantage when it comes to life. Human beings do most of their learning by making mistakes – trial and error is how each of us learned how to walk, talk, move, etc…. However, at some point we are taught to feel shame for being wrong and this causes us to close-up and avoid the experiences that will produce useful lessons. There is a trend towards eliminating failing grades in schools to ensure that no child endures the lesson of accountability and responsibility until they graduate high school. The impact of missing these lessons can be devastating given that failing in school opens a person up to improved coaching / teaching while failing in the work force eliminates their employment. There is an equally damaging trend toward sports tournaments becoming festivals in which everyone participates and is regarded as a winner. The stigmatization of everyone being the same is likely more damaging to motivation than the consequences of not being the best.

Passing long a tendency to give-up before success or goals are achieved – phrased another way, allowing a child to rely too much on talent or innate qualities to garner attention or positive reinforcement vs. reinforcing their effort. Trying is a skill that will last a lifetime. Looks will fade, other people will come along who naturally better at something, talent burn itself out over time as one ages. If a child never learns the value of putting in enormous effort in order to increase the likelihood of success, they will tend to give-up very quickly before achieving anything in terms of transformation, success or problem solving. Those individuals who are taught to work hard regardless of the outcome will be at a distinct advantage when it comes to achieving ANYTHING.

Now each of these things can be taught to a young person through direct intervention and teaching or they can be taught passively through modeling. Teaching is not the same as doing, so when you try to teach a child these skills, you do not reap the benefits associated with BEING those skills. Modeling tenacity will guide a child towards persistence alone with generating greater success for a parent. The same applies to being an active parent who takes a direct role in food choices; not only will their children learn how to eat more effectively and develop a love of movement, but the adult will enjoy an improved quality of life a boost in vitality that can only come from participating in a health choices.

Ab Recruitment, Women And Cuing

Rachel once said to me “if you really want to do your female clients a favor teach them how to set their properly and get them to be able to do it at any time.” She explained what was involved with it and I imagined a can of beans with Kegels setting the pelvic floor at the bottom, drawing the stomach in to set the obliques, tightening the front and then push out against them with the transverse abdominis to set the diaphragm, and letting the lower back contract as needed to make a strong and stable cylinder.

It takes practice to gain control of each step but it’s doable. My female clients did comment that it felt better, that they liked the tightness in the ab area and that they felt more stable doing whatever movement. I came up with cues to help keep the thought present in their mind so they would always has their core set or be a few seconds away from it. It works great. Well, it works great when people hear what I am saying.

Sometimes people hear something else. I’m not sure what it was they were hearing but it was something that didn’t come across well. With my cycling classes, I throw out a lot of general coaching cues to no one in particular – chest up, shoulders back – it’s just there to remind people that these things are important and to keep doing them or get back to doing them. With personal training any general cue can be taken to be a specific cue, as it should be under most circumstances. If I say chest up it means the chest is down or it is beginning to drop. I can see that it is dropping. The issue with the “keep the abs tight” or “are your abs on?” cues is that they are reminder cues only because I can’t tell most of the time if someone is doing a Kegel when they do DB press.

The break down occurs when I don’t accurately explain and continue to remind the client that I can’t see what is happening inside their bodies and can only see the breakdowns. If they believe that I am saying they are not engaging the core when I cue generally about it, and they are engaging it, their is a shift in focus over to something completely unrelated; which is “why is he saying it then, what could does he mean?”

This occurs more with intelligent female clients than any other group with the only exception being intelligent female athletes who try to fix everything and seek out specific clarification when they are not clear on what I have said. Males tend not to say “but I am contracting my core” and just keep doing it. To avoid this pitfall, I must explain that I am giving general coaching to keep their mind on the goal and not specific coaching given that I cannot experience what is going on in their insides.

Maybe They Can’t Be

This post was written on my phone on March 23rd as I was sitting in my car waiting to go to the Landmark Forum after buying a coffee. It is funny to look back on because the weekend had already started to transform me before I set foot in the building.

I’ve often wondered why a cashier seems to be really nice to the mean person in front of me in line, the one who snaps “adequate” to her smiling “hi, how are you?” berates her for not letting them pay with VISA and barks “whatever” when they say “have a great day.”

My smiling “hi” seems to evoke the same sort of response from her as hers did of the mean person before me. Historically it has been a really challenge for me not to wear responsibility for her replies, but today at Starbucks the beautiful barista demonstrated that it had nothing ever to do with me.

Mean guy was beating off her legendary customer service. She kept it coming at him with happiness, unphased by what he was putting out in an effort to infect the world we share with his dark past. As he slugged away, seemingly more pissed that her spirit didn’t accept his *gift* I though “what is about to happen here doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

Me “hi! How are you?” with the pathologically happy smile that is becoming easier to start and harder to control lately.

Her “great! What can I get for you? How are you doing?” not reciprocating my smile but sharing the same smile she gave away to the mean guy.

This was not what buying coffee, groceries, clothes, etc… right after mean people usually is.

And it dawned on me. It is EXACTLY what is has always been like. It was never about me or them or mean guy personally. It’s about a baseline that is sometimes hard to muster, especially when someone is trying to paint you with their junk and their past.

The decaf coffee was delicious, as only it can be for someone who has just stopped smoking. The lesson was enjoyed more than the coffee!

On Instructing Well

It turns out that I have been teaching a good cycling class for a long time. I haven’t really been sure if I’ll be able to do it in the hours leading up to the start of class, but each week the right words seem to flow out of me; and for this I am grateful. I have taught for more than 5 years and been on stage for 500 or 600 times, spend 1000’s of hours practicing and am moving towards being an expert.

Something odd was happening though, I was getting better and better, participants were saying that they really enjoyed my classes, but it was never clear to me why they were. I always thought it was because I would work hard and deliver a high energy performance. This is part of it, but it isn’t the entire thing – and I’m not sure it is very much of it now. I posted the following to facebook this morning:

If you anchor the feelings of athletic performance, accomplishment, fun and success to your class participants they will fall in love with your classes, your performance and their Group Exercise enrollment. Get them to feel their heart beating faster, the pain in their muscles as they grow stronger. Have them hear their quickened breath and the sound of the room gasping for air. Ask them to look are their hands, arms, legs and the other members of the class to see the sweat and glow of extraordinary effort. Coach them to notice what their highest moment looks, sounds and feels like and start being their most powerful inner voice.

THAT is why I am getting better. My classes remind people of just how great their bodies can make them feel when they are training. I take them on a physical journey that connects many of the things that are what it means to be truly alive – hard work, passion, intensity, fun, crushing limitations, creating and being new possibilities, love of life and existence in the moment – and anchor these to the room, the bikes, and the experience that is a class.

Life gets clearer, a little bit each day!

60 Days Into Act 2

It has been about 60 days since I gave-up smoking, alcohol, sugar, compulsive eating, compulsive anxiety, compulsive exercise and compulsively blaming other people for the outcome of my decisions. I feel better than I have in a very long time. As well as I can tell, I haven’t felt this excited about the possibility of my future since right before we moved to Canada when I was 9. I feel more energized than I have in my adult life. I’m a 39 year old child! Joyful, passionate, fearless, authentic and with a well developed brain, well trained body and a spirit that is grounded in the essence of the universe.

I’m almost 4 decades old and now firmly entrenched in the possibilities of the future that will become my present. There is a growing sense of joy and gratitude for all that I have been through, the people who have come into my life, the experiences we have shared, the joy, the pain, the choices that makes life what it is now and the realization that just because I have been doing something doesn’t mean that I will continue to do it. My future is wide open, loaded with anything.

During a coaching session today, Sean got me to consider the areas in my life that haven’t been working out or for which breakthroughs have not occurred. The only area that hasn’t seemed to get positive traction is in the area of Love, Sex and Romance (SLR). I have noticed that while I do get closer and closer with each relationship, I’m still not getting it effectively; now this isn’t to say that I haven’t found, dated or been in a relationship with my future partner, it’s just to say that to date my track record has not demonstrated a clear breakthrough in-spite of the progress I’m making in other areas of my life.

The coaching in this area is fairly straight forward because if I keep doing the same thing and, until I know what I’m looking for, I cannot authentically make a call on what I want for the rest of my life. My future will be better served if I take a more active role in uncovering what I am actually looking for in terms of SLR. The advice seems accurate because in almost every other area of my life I have tried out a lot of different experiences, fine-tuning each one in an effort to create the possibility of the career, body, friendships, spirituality that will touch, move and inspire me each day of my life.

To this end, I love my friends, I love the jobs that I am doing, I’m extremely happy with my body and health and proud of the spirit that is taking root in my identity. I know with certainty that my least enlightened actions have already occurred and I have learned a lot of lessons from all that I have done. It’s the lessons that I have yet to learn from the things I have NOT yet done that remain, and the goal of the session was to help me see and accept that my breakthroughs are waiting my new and different actions.

It is with a sense of anticipated trepidation that I consider the next moves in terms of SLR. The thoughts themselves don’t cause anxiety, I’m actually excited about the possibility of being more spontaneous and doing things very differently than before. What is perplexing is the unknown – I have no idea what these things will be, and that is part of what act 2 is all about – being the unknown.

My LandMark Forum Part 9 – The 6 Weeks Following

On the weekend of March 23, 24, 25 I attended the LandMark Forum in Toronto. It changed my life in a very profound way. I cannot credit all of the transformation I have and am undergoing on the weekend but it played a big role and remains a new starting point for my new being. I was more than 3 weeks into complete sobriety and the end of my compulsive behaviors and stopping as much as I stopped will change a human being very dramatically. I’ll just say that I was ready for the experience and the timing of the things couldn’t have been better.

My focus has been outstanding! I have a much cleared head that I ever remember and my thinking seems to be more effective. There are fewer open loops in my life because I am being integrity – whenever I realize that I’m drifting off course, I correct it as soon as I can.

My energy has never been better! When I am on purpose and just being, the energy of the universe just channels through me. Gravity seems to decrease and I almost float around. I know I’m off course when my energy level nose dives – time in the car is a lot more challenging than any other moments I live now – this is the opposite to what I was experiencing a few months ago when I would feel more alive when I was by myself driving.

My dreams are wild and anything but normal. This is what I have been expecting. I am not the same person I was before the LandMark Forum weekend. This is a battle going on in my brain to assimilate the world and universe into my antiquated world view. This takes time and each day I am faced with something new and many things that I find scary. I acknowledge that fear that exists, I accept that there is a survival benefit to trying to keep things as they are but that the universe does not remain static even for an instant. Emotions and dreams are the key ways – and are likely the fastest ways – to uncover what is going on in the unconscious mind. When I’m dreaming or feeling, something is matching or resonating with past memories. The nature of the match may not be clear, but there is information being given to my consciousness and it is irresponsible of me to ignore it.

I’m seeing where and why my life hasn’t turned out as I had hoped and as I am being integrity, my future actions become clearer. And some of the possibilities that fantastic – a sustainable relationship with a girl that adds value and enjoyment to both of our lives, being in a partnership that helps cause greatness in both of us – and the path to those possibilities is scary – my path to this moment, while a very real creation of myself, a product of my will for a specific future needs to change because my relationships are not working for me or the girls I date.

Life is scary, dangerous and when I embrace this, I become bold, fearless and indestructible. I speak frankly about this fear now, be it sitting in front of a new performance coaching client, a new or old girl friend, in front of a cycling class, my family, my friends, a stranger. I believe that life is lived fully when we acknowledge this fear and allow it to tune our performance up vs. shutting it down. I’m aware that I’m going to get rejected, have breakdowns, have things not go the way I want, but none of these things matter because they are always there and have always been a possibility. I may not want them to happen, but I grow more when things don’t go the way I had hoped they would. And I live more when I take the chance and start being the possibility of the life I am here to live.