 Coaching
in personal growth and
development"When a person faces a challenge and becomes stuck, he or she may seek the services of a personal coach. Once this commitment is made, the person begins to experience a different, more hopeful, world as his or her perceptions evolve in meeting the personal challenge." John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach Growth and Development are Irregular and NonlinearPractically nothing is known about the essential nature of growth. When we bear witness to the simple sprouting of a bud or leaf, incredible wonders are performed through an intrinsic wizardry that we really have no understanding of whatsoever. A sprout grows damp under the earth. It pokes through weak mud, following the light, gently leaning toward nourishment. The sprout unfurls. With its flesh, it creates stalks, leaves, flowers and fruits. It flourishes through a growing season and withers with the frost. With each moment, the growth of this plant unfolds, following innate design. Likewise, each of us contains a blueprint for the continual discovery of our true nature and purpose. Our innate signature talents are the tools we can use to accomplish our life purpose. Part of us already knows the secret of our life blueprint but it remains unclear for most of us. However, if we allow our blueprint to unfold in its way, carefully encouraging its movements, time and nourishment, we will foster the development of an exceptional life.
Executive CoachingMany corporate leaders are wrestling with trying to get their organizations to innovate through taking risks on-the-job. After years of cost-cutting initiatives and growing job insecurity, most executives don't feel like putting themselves on the line. Add to that the heightened expectations on individual performance, where a one-year term determines a large bonus, managers postpone risky decisions for fear of failure---making mistakes that could lead to innovative successes. That's why it is difficult for executives and their direct reports to make the shift from a play-it-safe corporate culture to an innovation-driven culture. Leaders must pay attention to our own powerful inclinations not to change. This attention may help to discover within ourselves the force of a hidden immune system, a dynamic process reinforced by the corporate culture, by which we tend to prevent change. Dynamic equilibrium within the organization, like an immune system, powerfully and mysteriously tends to keep things pretty much as they are. But if we can unlock this system within the minds of management, the enterprise can release new energies on behalf of new ways of seeing and behaving. We know that when people make decisions, their decisions are not just about rational data weighing of the pros and cons. Emotion is always there below the surface and the executive doesn't recognize how important those feelings are at the time of the decision. Everyone's decision making is emotional...not rational...subconsciously under the control of the limbic or emotional brain not the analytical or neocortical brain. Buying a car, choosing a mate, selecting a new home, following a career path, perceiving how the world works is all decided emotionally. That is why it is important to help decision makers within organizations be emotionally stable, free from the fear of failure, when leading others and making important decisions. When an industry or company is restructuring to survive in the global economy, executives are all driven by the fear of not surviving the transitional period and this fear can adversely affect their decision-making abilities. The turnaround won't be complete until the fear of failure is confronted in the minds of the executive survivors. After a corporate restructuring, it is important to provide newly recruited or promoted executives with access to outside executive coaches who can guide their perceptions to evolve. Mentors and Coaches Guide Your Way ForwardEven though a person undergoes untold millions of individual experiences in his or her life, only a few lessons are usually ever learned. The attainment of wisdom is slow and painful, and few are willing to relinquish familiar views (even if they're inaccurate); resistance to change or growth is considerable. Nevertheless, there remains free choice and therefore a considerable potential for individual mobility and variety of experience, which makes alternate options available. Mentors and coaches are people who guide others from where they are to wherever they want to be. The coaching relationship is all about the person being coached. It is not the coach's work to decide what the person being coached should want but to assist us in achieving whatever we desire. It is the coach's desire that you discover the way to achieve your desires. The coach's work is subtle work; hard to grasp, delicate and capable of making fine distinctions to allow your perceptions to evolve. The coach is always ready and willing to assist in your understanding of something. A coach believes that s/he will help you come to understand who you are and what you do best. Changing the Emotional MindThe following quote, taken from pages 171-172 of A General Theory of Love (Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc), explains how the coaching experience helps the person-being-coached to exchange fears for hope, security for risk-taking: "Many therapists believe that reliance fosters a detrimental dependency. Instead, they say, patients should be directed to "do it for themselves"---- as if they possess everything but the wit to throw that switch and get on with their lives. But people do not learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator, and they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner does not experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates and becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one's shoes. The effortful beginnings fade and disappear from memory. People who need regulation often leave therapy sessions feeling calmer, stronger, safer, and more able to handle the world. Often they don't know why. Nothing obviously helpful happened---telling a stranger about your pain sounds nothing like a certain recipe for relief. And the feeling inevitably dwindles, sometimes within minutes, taking the warmth and security with it. But the longer a patient depends, the more his stability swells, expanding infinitesimally with every session as length is added to a woven cloth with each pass of the shuttle, each contraction of the loom. And after he weaves enough of it, the day comes when the patient will unfurl his independence like a pair of spread wings. Free at last, he catches a wind and rides into other lands." Are You Ready to Allow Your Perceptions to Evolve?Motives for change are most often found to arise spontaneously when the mind is challenged in the face of a puzzle or a paradox. In fact, certain disciplines (such as Zen) deliberately create such an impasse in order to finesse a leap of awareness. An upward movement in consciousness happens when an attitude of willingness opens up the mind to get one unstuck from a difficult position. At such a time is when a person is ready, willing and able to be coached. This is when the person to be coached, or those that live or work with him or her, seek the services of a personal coach. Once the person to be coached makes this commitment, s/he begins to experience a different, more benign world as his or her perceptions evolve. Who we become, as well as what we see, is determined by perception. This implies specific styles of processing and influences all decisions according to its accompanying set of values and meanings. What appears as an important and exciting piece of information from the perspective of one person might be boring or even repulsive to another. Yet, each individual secretly feels that his or her particular experience of the world is accurate. Personal coaching helps the person being coached recognize that s/he does not know how the world works but only perceives how the world works and his or her perception is different from others. Great leaps in levels of consciousness are always preceded by surrender of the illusion that "I know." Frequently, the only way one can reach this willingness to change is when one "hits bottom," that is, by running out a course of action to its end in the defeat of a futile belief system. When life is viewed as a teacher, then it becomes just that. But unless we become humble and transform these experiences into gateways to grow and develop, the painful life lessons that we deal ourselves are wasted. Source: Power and Force, The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.
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