COACHING THE COACHES,
PART 16
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport
One of the imagination exercises I’ve developed is called Life Story.
I don’t use it very often, but when it fits a client, it can produce remarkable results.
It’s a dialogue in which I play the part of an interviewer. I ask lots of questions about the client’s life and history—and the client’s job is to make up a life he never had.
A completely fictional past and present.
“Where did you grow up?”
“On an apple farm in Oregon. My father was a winemaker who switched to apples after he became an alcoholic.”
“Were you a good student in school?”
“I never went to a formal school. I was taught by a local poet. At age five, I was registered in kindergarten, but on the first day I got into a fight with another boy, and I was brought in front of the principal. He and my father were already enemies. He had claimed my father cheated him on a property sale. So he expelled me from school. I was elated that I didn’t have to go back there. On the way home that afternoon, a bee stung me. I was walking through some brush, and I tripped on a log. I was lying on the ground in puddle of water, and as I got up, a bee landed on my arm and stung it…”
The more specifics the better.
An invented life.
The interview can go on over the course of a dozen sessions, hour after hour.
When people do this exercise thoroughly, they begin to realize the life they actually have can be changed. Can be re-imagined and created.
This is yet another illustration of how powerful imagination is. You make up a life, and you see clearly how the life you have now, which operates with less creativity, can be launched in a new direction.
A principle emerges: that which has more imagination trumps that which has less imagination.
“So you say your sister ran off and married a horse trainer? And she went to law school and became a prosecutor? What cases did she try?”
“There was a fairly well-known murder trial in Missouri. A man had gone into a market looking for his friend. The friend wasn’t there, the clerk told him. So the man shot him three times. The whole town was horrified…”
“And you flew out to help her, you say?”
“Well, she had a boyfriend who was running a small trucking business, and when my sister won a popular conviction against the killer, the boyfriend started getting lots of new clients. I went there to drive a truck for him for a few months. I needed a job. I was just out of college, and I was being turned down by employers, because I’d led protests against the war in Viet Nam…”
Bit by bit, piece by piece in the interview, a person builds up a life he never had.
In ordinary life, many people lie to try to escape situations they feel are intolerable. In Life Story, a person fabricates a life and then he can go on to imagine a new future and actually create it as a truth.
Jon Rappoport
A former candidate for a US Congressional seat in California, Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. He has written articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. The author of The Ownership of All Life, Jon has maintained a consulting practice for the past 15 years. He has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, and creativity to audiences around the world.