Author Archives: Jon Rappoport

PART 18, COACHING THE COACHES

 

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 18

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

Many people are involved in the selling of quick-fixes to the population. A pill for this, a pill for that, a pill for everything. A two-hour seminar, after which you’ll somehow become a real estate genius. Having problems with your children? In two minutes, an expert can show you how to restore order to your home. Unhappy with your life? Repeat a positive affirmation for a month and you’ll be cured.

 

These are all, of course, marketing ploys. And they often work—in the sense that the marketers are happy.

 

Such schemes operate at about the level of intelligence of the mythical King Midas, who was granted the power to turn to gold whatever he touched. It never occurred to Midas that his food and his friends and his family would become indigestible and dead.

 

Imagination, which has been the core subject of this series, has many aspects. For example, it elevates and expands a person’s vision of his possible future. In other words, this vision isn’t a one-time shot.

 

If you can inhabit imagination, your most inspiring idea about what to do with your life grows. It widens. It develops new branches. It creates more space.

 

This process brings to light levels of feeling that had remained in the shadows. These feelings match the expansiveness of the vision. Over time, the entire character of a person’s emotional life changes. Which, when you think about it, is what people want in the first place. They want to feel different. They want gloom to be replaced by optimism. They want doubt to give way to confidence. They want cynicism to transform into joy.

 

Imagination gives you the initial idea about a new future, the initial vision. Living in imagination expands that vision. Living in imagination raises the entire level of emotional existence as you pursue the attainment of the vision.

 

This whole process is really the challenge of life, and the coach can help his client meet it.

 

This is, indeed, on a personal level, a revolution.

 

I’ve seen brilliant people settle for a thousandth of what they actually want in life. They apply their intelligence to the art of “fitting in.” Finding a niche. Exploiting a minor possibility. They’re convinced it’s the smart thing to do.

 

What this strategy amounts to is making an assessment of “what society has to offer.”

 

“Let’s see, I can do A,B, C, D, or E. These are the options open to me. Let me choose carefully.”

 

It’s looking at What Exists as opposed to What Could Be Created.

 

And since most people don’t take seriously the idea that they can create anything, they look for a system they can build a career in. A system that’s already there.

 

Having once enlisted in the system, their best efforts, after that point, will involve improving the system, usually in some tiny way.

 

And there they are.

 

This doesn’t make them happy, but they think it’s the best they can do, under the circumstances.

 

And then, as the years roll by, feeling unhappy, they might opt for some quick-fix sales pitch that promises instant gratification.

 

These quick fixes take a snapshot of one little corner of imagination and sell it back to the prospective customer.

 

“Here’s your own imagination—buy it. It’ll make you rich.”

 

For a moment or two, as long as it takes to punch in an 800 number and give credit-card numbers to an operator, the customer is looking at his own imagination and feeling a surge of possibility. A brief tingle.

 

But of course, he doesn’t understand the dynamic of what’s happening.

 

What I’m saying in this series is: let’s start with imagination and name it and describe it, because it’s the wellspring and the fountain and the force and the power that transforms life and emotion. Let’s start there. Let’s not opt for substitutes. Let’s not merely reflect back a snapshot or a symbol of one’s own imagination and call it a product for sale or a service for sale.

 

Let’s begin with the real thing, in all its majesty and variety.

 

If we do that, we soon see that the process by which one creates a future he truly and profoundly wants is ongoing. It’s the substance of a whole life. It’s a great adventure.

 

And the more a person engages and deploys his own imagination, the larger the field of success, the greater the odds of success. Over time, those odds keep stacking up higher and higher, in the person’s favor. With enough work and enough follow-through and enough sensible planning and execution, the result is so gratifying the person looks back and wonders how he could have ever thought of his life any differently—because This Is It.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

The book you want to write

The book you want to write

by Jon Rappoport

December 18, 2015

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

I’ve had several clients who are writers. They decided they had a book in them.

This is a momentous event. I don’t mean realizing there is a book. I mean tapping the keys for the first few sentences of chapter one. That’s when you know it’s happening. You’re doing it. You’re pushing the boat out from the shore.

As your imagination swings into gear, you become aware of the space that sits out there, the space you’re going to fill and shape.

The world has existed for a long time, but the book is a unique event. It’s the world plus one.

Of course, some people will never finish their book. They’ll bog down in details and plans and structure. They’ll convince themselves there is one prescribed way to do the job, and they’ll decide they just can’t produce that pattern.

Through direct instruction or the “shared wisdom” of writing teachers, they’ve bought a straitjacket. It fits, but it doesn’t fit the writer in them. That’s the sad joke. The straitjacket is for a person who isn’t a writer.

I’ve seen this over and over again. Clients tell me everything they’ve learned about writing, and I wonder how they can still possess a drop of inspiration. Saddled with their ideas, I’d give up and go to work sweeping floors.

Of course, I’m not talking about spelling, grammar, or syntax. Kids are supposed to master those basics in junior high and high school. And if they read, they already know something about great writing.

I’m talking about what YOU would do if you were going to write YOUR book. How you would launch yourself.

It’s often said the best advice for a student is, “Write about what you know.” Ah yes. The pearl. Well, that certainly works if a person, in fact, wants to write about what he knows. But many other people really want to write about what they don’t know—or more precisely, what they haven’t imagined yet.

And even if you want to write about your life and past, you’re going to find out imagination is a major part of the process, because words and sentences and paragraphs don’t fit reality like a glove. Good writers can make you believe their words are exact replications of events, but that’s an illusion. That’s their brand of magic.

Even the old hard-boiled curmudgeon, Hemingway, was inventing something that looked like realism. He was hammering out sentences that conspired to produce that flat laconic effect. He had his own magic wand.

How do you convince readers they’re bumping up against actual events? Do you, as the writer, look to the events for help?

Maybe. But WHAT you’ve experienced doesn’t teach you how to dance as well as HOW you’ve experienced it.

And books will help, too. Not manuals. Novels.

The more you read, the more you discover how it can be done.

The art of it.

The ways imagination can operate.

And hopefully, you’ll come to understand that your imagination can move in unique currents.

Then you’ll have the engine and the fuel to start and finish a book.

You’ll have the persistence to work out the details.

It’s not a walk in the park; if that’s what you want, just take a walk in a park. Writing a book is the kind of commitment that expands your understanding of what a commitment is. It changes your life.

Fortunately, I had only one writing teacher during my 16 years as a student. He was a well-known poet and translator. We had several confrontations. One of them was particularly nasty. We ended up cursing at each other. Loudly. However, one afternoon in class, while reviewing an assignment, he took out a poem of mine and read a few words and said, in his dry fashion, “That’s a line of poetry.” I didn’t take a great deal of pleasure from his admission, mainly because I already knew it was a good line. He was a fairly decent teacher; he didn’t hand out much advice. He just let us work. I don’t recall him ever saying, “Write what you know.”

Good lines of writing stimulate adrenaline in the reader. They bypass the usual filters of perception. They awaken the reader to some X quality he didn’t know he had.

At that moment, he isn’t holding a book in his hands. He’s in an unforeseen space that blots out all other spaces.

Most beginning writers want to communicate big ideas. They conceive of these ideas as generalities. Then they spend page after page piling up more generalities like gooey layers of an ungainly cake. Looking at it sitting on the dinner table, no one is happy. Put off? Yes. Repelled? Yes.

The solution to this problem isn’t merely substituting details, because details can also make an unfriendly tower.

A book isn’t a mechanical proposition. It’s a work of imagination. And that means: no formula.

Ah. Who wants to tackle that?

The answer is: anyone who wants to be a writer.

And on the day he sees how to do it, he understands he’s in the most abundant territory in any universe, and he feels alive in a way he’s never felt before.

He isn’t chipping away at a canyon wall with a hammer and chisel, to find a sentence that has light in it. He’s swimming in the great ocean, where rhythm and velocity are endless metaphysical fountains.

When I was 11 years old, in 1949, I read a children’s book that took me away. It said, under the surface, “Do you want to be this?” Six years later, when I realized I would never pitch for the New York Yankees, I said, “Yes.” Recently, I went back and read that book. I had to laugh, because I saw how much I had supplied to the author, how much I’d given him. I had been writing most of his work in my own mind. But that was all right. He brought me the first wave.

Do you want to write a book?

Don’t make the details the big worry. Don’t build a machine out of a thousand facts. You’ll find ways of folding in details in the caverns of your chapters. You will. And yes, you have to, but it doesn’t have to be a burden.

You don’t really have a book in you. You have the capacity to invent a book.

If the prospect of inventing one doesn’t move you, either go on to another line of work or figure out how to find your imagination. You left it somewhere.

Which is like forgetting you’re going to get married. When you walk down the aisle, you’re still catching your breath from the trip you just made to to buy the bunting and the trimming and the serving dish and the big pickles and the carving knife and the ribbon for the box and the shoe brush and the balloons. Finally, you were just picking things off shelves at random. You can’t remember why you decided the marriage was a good idea. Hopefully, you’ll wake up when you say I DO.

One of my jobs is imagination specialist. What a horrible title. It’s a joke because it’s a contradiction. Actually, I play the role of Hermes. I catch people in mid-stride going to a place they’ve somehow lost interest in, and I put things in their way. Strange things. Absurd things. They stop. Then I say, go here, go there, make up this, pretend that, let’s say the world is completely different, and you’re an ant clinging to the edge of a frozen cliff, and here comes a phantom carrying the sun in his hand and he’s going to melt the tundra and you have to give a speech that will save your life. What are you going to say? GO.

Because if a person recovers his imagination, he can write a book. He can do lots of things. He can do anything.

Through a process no one will ever be able to fathom, he can use any event from his past, he can enact fragments of his past that never existed, he can work his way up the side of a wave while standing on the top, he can do all this and more. He can lug up and down the wave suitcases of details and sprinkle them where he wants to.

And he’ll write a book you’ll want to read.

And you can write such a book, too.

Not overnight, but you can do it, if you really want to, if it’s important enough.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

PART 17, COACHING THE COACHES

 

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 17

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

When you look at the lives of most people, you see they’ve settled in. Which is to say, they’ve subconsciously established limits and boundaries, and they live inside that space.

 

When you look at a machine, you can see it’s designed to function within specified limits. For instance, a plane can only fly so fast. And if it slows down below a certain point, it ceases to stay in the air.

 

If you want to extend the capability of a plane, you apply knowledge to it; using that knowledge, you re-build it so it can go faster.

 

But a person is different. What lies beyond his boundaries is not so much knowledge as it is his own imagination. That’s the key.

 

And imagination invents the not-yet-seen, the never-before.

 

Many people feel more comfortable with technology, with machines. Thus all the science fiction about societies where robots have been harnessed to provide the essentials and the luxuries. This seems doable. This seems interesting.

 

Machines, though, are not alive. No matter how many possibilities are imputed to them, they don’t think independently. They follow instructions. They obey embedded principles and systems of calculation.

 

Imagination is alive. It exemplifies life. Its energy is living.

 

We are at the point where choices will be made about what kind of civilization we are going to have. Will it be all about technology? Or will individual imagination finally receive its due?

 

Scientists, by their very nature and training, tend to believe the brain (which they assert covers the entire waterfront of mind, imagination, psyche, soul) operates according to algorithms. Discovering these instructional formulas would put us in control of the brain. The holy grail.

 

This is a delusion.

 

Whatever can be induced by making chemical and electrical alterations to the brain simply trades one sensation for another. Whereas imagination creates realities and futures.

 

Whenever an individual decides to live through and by imagination, he incidentally adds to the possibility of a more positive society.

 

Spinning off from quantum physics, the rise of wild theories like parallel universes and multiple realities suggests that some scientists are actively looking for ways to escape the trap of no-imagination. But instead of searching for novelty within themselves, they export it to the cosmos.

 

What does all this add up to? A person and a civilization can find all sorts of ways to avoid and postpone an era of imagination. But if you look at the tremendous amount of energy employed for such avoidance, you obtain a clue. Burying imagination is hard to do.

 

It’s here to stay.

 

So why not admit it and use it in copious quantities?

 

Why not end the old era of limits?

 

As a coach, you certainly can’t assume your client is aware of all these factors, but you can be aware of them. And that inner surety can propel you to accomplish important breakthroughs in your work.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PART 16, COACHING THE COACHES

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MAGIC THEATER, IMMORTAL LAUGHTER

COAGULATING PERSONALITY, THE MAGIC THEATER, AND IMMORTAL LAUGHTER

by Jon Rappoport

December 14, 2011

A person who won’t play roles is left with the role he has. For various reasons, he’s so in love with it he doesn’t want to budge from it, even temporarily. For example, he fervently believes, in his present role, he knows everything worth knowing.

Or he’s playing a central role of victim, and he won’t vary from that because he envisions losing something important if he does.

Or he thinks reality is tough and nasty and he must have a role to match.

In any case, over time, his persona COAGULATES.

Like a clot.

It may be a beautiful wonderful clot, but it hardens. And there he is.

And when the Magic Theater comes through town, with

222356789456789023456432890 available roles to play, just for starters, he passes on it. He says NO.

Starving man at table. Feast. “Give me bread and water.”

Every person who’s ever had a drug experience or a spiritual insight or a big up of any kind comes back down—and he comes back down because he’s got his coagulated role waiting for him and he can’t be late.

But the thing is, if he’s played a few hundred roles for a few hundred hours, improvising them with other people who are doing the same (Magic Theater), when he comes back down he sees his central role with different eyes. It doesn’t look the same. He realizes he can go beyond it. He can branch out. He can kiss that hard coagulation goodbye.

One thing I learned at this past weekend’s first Magic Theater workshop—the people who show up want to play roles. The people who don’t, don’t. It’s an easy line.

It isn’t about knowing; it’s about doing. And the more you do in the Magic Theater, the more you end up knowing, but what you then know is made of stuff you never could have gotten to otherwise.

It’s instant knowing. Spontaneous. Direct.

I’ve spent enough of my life looking at the coagulation of other people. I’ve learned all I need to about that.

I’m riding out into new territory.

And like everybody else, I’ve experienced enough coagulation of my own, too. It doesn’t really matter what a person produces out of that coagulation of personality, because eventually he needs something else. It’s called freedom. Breathing new air.

Imagination. In the Magic Theater, it lights up all over the place.

Like a comedian with a million jokes, people have a million excuses for staying the same.

Or they can improvise their way to a million new surprises.

It’s an easy line.

Yeah, it’s called freedom.

The Magic Theater, as I’ve written before, is based on Psychodrama, but it’s really something new. It’s an endlessly flowering tree, a rope across a canyon, a rocket to the stars and beyond, a flip into different universes of one’s own making. It’s all created in the moment, in a dialogue between two or more people playing roles. Where it goes depends entirely on the imagination of the people involved.

I suppose you could have boring Magic Theater, if the people are dedicated to boredom. Hey, that might be fun for a half hour or so. Play the most boring creature in the cosmos. So boring the cosmos just folds up in his presence.

But really, Magic Theater is thrilling. It’s funny as hell. Once you pierce the usual strictures of subjects conversation is supposed to be about, it seems you do pretty much end up in comedy. It’s hard to avoid.

We’re all sitting on a joke, after all. We’re sitting on it day after day, and the expanse of that joke is enormous, and maybe it keeps getting bigger and bigger, the more weight we put on. Our sober attitudes are like struts and pillars and connectors and beams that hold the whole universe together in a stern pattern—and the secret is, when we start to play really interesting roles together, the whole tight structure falls apart.

Like Pablo in Hesse’s Steppenwolf (where the term Magic Theater came from), we laugh the whole System into oblivion, and if it still stands after that, it’s just the stage it was meant to be, where we do more and more theater, with more and more imagination.

Endless rich contrary imagination.

Does this ring some kind of bell with you?

Because after last weekend’s Magic Theater workshop, it makes perfect sense to me.

I’ll tell you this. The world is built to impose on us more and more and more deadened and leadened thought and feeling. We can try to solve that by fixing every wrong thing and detail on the planet, or we can come at it from the top and do so much Magic Theater that eventually, as an incidental side effect, the whole deadened and leadened business comes apart at the seams and we’re all holding royal flushes.

That’s the way I intend to go about it.

I’m starting to plan the next Magic Theater workshop. Let me know if you’re interested.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

REPORT ON FIRST MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP

 

REPORT ON MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP

 

THE SIX

 

by Jon Rappoport

December 13, 2011.

 

The first workshop was held here in San Diego this past weekend. I am not going to write the few hundred pages it deserves. Yes, you had to be there. I was a participant as well. I joined in the two and three person dialogues. There were six of us. We spent about ten hours acting out various roles.

 

There’s no substitute for “hours on the job.”

 

There was much, much laughter and hilarity. A lot of the laughter was falling off the chair stuff.

 

One of the most interesting sessions involved people inventing roles of their own choosing and just diving in. I watched one of these dialogues for about an hour, and I developed a tremendous fascination, in part because I couldn’t figure out who two of the people were. But it was more than that. The interplay, the sheer improvisation, the wildness of it—yeah, you had to be there.

 

Spontaneously, at the end, in the last hour on Sunday, two groups who had been carrying on very different dialogues joined up and connected. The six of us invented a super-group whose motives and strategies and plans were preposterously gorgeous. We subverted a corporation, figured out how to take over a country, invented a new religion, launched a film enterprise, appointed a reluctant saint, and that was just the beginning of it.

 

My life will never be the same. Of that I’m sure. The others in the group would have to make their own assessments. I’m quite sure they were surprised by the effects—beyond what they anticipated.

 

Time and time again, I was blown away by the initiative of the people there—how they jumped in and played their roles with power, imagination, and a true ability for expressing the absurd.

 

After a weekend like this, I don’t think anyone can return to his/her central role in life with the same grinding certainty that this is it, this is life, this is all there is. No. We are in different territory.

 

Trying to explain all this is like saying there is a joke that’s very, very funny and ha ha. You not only have to be there to hear the actual joke, you have to be telling the jokes. And we did.

 

Without a script.

 

The workshop wasn’t the purveying of knowledge. It was all in the doing. It was action theater.

 

It breaks the layer of supposition and pre-judgment and conditioned perception. It gets to the real stuff, which is invention.

 

Which is so much more interesting and joyous than “real life.”

 

One of my favorite things about the weekend: no boredom. You start feeling the edges of “sameness” creeping in? Kick the dialogue in a new direction. We did, hundreds of times. And launched ourselves. You want multiple dimensions? Boom.

 

I felt confident in our group. I knew we were in good hands: each others’. This was and is a piece of cosmic relief. And comic relief.

 

My admiration for the other five people grew and grew. Ready, willing, and able.

 

I always knew ordinary life was crazy. The workshop offered living proof. But we were unrolling other worlds and universes in the process. And every new leap implied more leaps. No limits.

 

It’s like the trip you always hoped you’d take one day. The vacation that’s a piece of sheer synchronistic way beyond illumimation FUN. Surprises at every turn.

 

You’re galvanized and riveted and intrigued and inspired by your companions. And they’re inspired by each other and you. Alive moment to moment theater.

 

Dream come true.

 

There are no major and minor actors. Everybody is major.

 

“You expand mine; I expand yours.”

 

I just can’t do it justice. These words are just markers that might point you to clues about the fabulous nature of this enterprise.

 

I see the faces of the other five, I see them spontaneously percolating the new meanings of what it means to be alive—beyond all the sober baloney of illusion and beyond all the programmatic concocted wisdom.

 

I’ll take this New.

 

Yeah, give me some of that. Give me more of that.

 

Anybody with deep pockets out there who’s freezing into a replica of a replica of a replica? Put me in a building and I’ll give away the Magic Theater for the next 20 years, every day. I’ll spawn branch offices all over the planet. We’ll make it into a flood.

 

Meanwhile, I’m very, very happy with my six.

 

Hello, universe: got your number. You’re busted.

 

Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PART 15, COACHING THE COACHES

 

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 15

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

In our society, there is a rite of passage into adulthood. It’s quite simple.

 

A young person decides on a course of action that will considerably diminish his imagination.

 

It doesn’t matter what particular career path is chosen. The basic feature is: it requires “much less imagination.”

 

Every day, thousands of youngsters undergo this rite.

 

Years later, they wonder what happened.

 

But they don’t really think it’s in their best interests to remember what happened; because if they did, they would reawaken the most fundamental core of their consciousness, and they would probably abandon the careers they’ve so carefully crafted.

 

No, it’s better to forget and keep forgetting.

 

But now they’re experiencing problems, and they feel they need help, and they come to you, the coach.

 

That’s the situation.

 

So are you going to try to tinker with and fix “what’s wrong?”

 

Is that your mission in life?

 

“Hi. I’m the tinkerer. I’m here to adjust the lights and check the on-board computer.”

 

If so, how is that going?

 

The dynamic of the situation is obvious. The elephant in the room is not being addressed. On some level, the client realizes it. When he’s fed up, he goes elsewhere.

 

But again, we come back to the paradox. He wants to recover his imagination. But he doesn’t want to. He’d dedicated to living without imagination. But he realizes that’s what’s missing from his life. It doesn’t matter that this push-pull is operating at a subconscious level. It’s operating.

 

What are you going to do?

 

I’ve faced this question many times. I’ve tried all sorts of approaches. In the end, I realized why I was really doing the work: to reawaken imagination. That’s why I was there. The choice, then, became clear.

 

Fortunately, I had vast experience in the area of changing my own life, and that experience had to do with writing and painting. I had seen what happened when I began living through and by imagination. The mists cleared and the questions dissolved. The doubts faded. The energy came back and the thrill expanded. The future opened up.

 

So the notion of working with another person to wake up his imagination wasn’t just a shot in the dark. It made complete sense. It was a radical step, but it made sense.

 

Take that as a clue. What are doing with your imagination? How important is it to you?

 

Some of the greatest developments of the past 200 years have been based on organization, systems, and technology. Put together, they’re a formidable force. However, in the process, something has been lost, misplaced. And people feel that loss. They may not be able to pinpoint its nature, but they sense it.

 

A person looks out at the world and says, “Look at all the technology. Look at all the organization and the systems. In my life, am I going to fit myself into that nexus, or am I going to go with my imagination?”

 

What a no-brainer. In conventional terms, the person picks the winner. He joins the team. He enlists in the system.

 

And then he induces a layer of amnesia about his own creative power.

 

He’s surrendered something vital.

 

He’s made a “this or that” configuration, and he chose.

 

Now, as the coach, it’s your job, should you decide to accept it, to undo that.

 

Your odds of success may seem long. It might appear you’re trying to swim up a waterfall. But you see, if you think that way, that’s YOUR rationalization. That’s the story you tell YOURSELF.

 

Actually, we’re living in a vast sea of imagination, and we’re surrounded by products and outcomes of imagination. And the idea of relinquishing imagination is, from that point of view, preposterous.

 

But you have to know that. You have to know it in your bones.

 

If you do, your work becomes a fascinating challenge.

 

We live in a world that abounds in paradoxes: “I want this but I don’t want this. Things I really want tend to slip away. Things I don’t really want come to me. I’m in the right system, but the system doesn’t give me what I really need. I’m good at planning, but what I plan for doesn’t work out. I try hard. Maybe I need to try less.”

 

This wall of static is transcended and neutralized, to an astonishing degree, by graduating into a realm where IMAGINATION and CREATING are the motive forces, the modes of transportation.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PART 14, COACHING THE COACHES

 

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 14

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t write a few words about conventional high-end business consulting. I’m talking about consultants who can easily demand $1000 an hour for their work.

 

This is the way it usually works, if the program is really serious. The consultant and his team meet with the CEO of a corporation (or his COO) and do an in-depth interview about all aspects and departments of the business. They analyze the company systems as well.

 

Then they draw up a master plan to correct and improve all phases of the operation, from accounting to production to sales to marketing. They find areas of waste and propose ways to eliminate it. They suggest specific upgrades in internal communications. They cover the waterfront.

 

Then they work with the CEO and his top executives to implement the plan, which has been broken down into a long series of steps.

 

It works. Yes, it certainly can work. To a degree.

 

But questions remain.

 

What are the key steps for improving advertising? What creative moves will make ads have real impact with consumers? It’s not just a matter of throwing more money at the problem.

 

How will the consulting team help improve relationships among company executives? After all, they are humans and they have to relate.

 

What about the company’s internal communications? Is upgrading it just a matter of selecting a better computer interface? Or is there a human factor there as well? And if so, what do you do about it?

 

In every company, there are people who shine and produce and carry the load and innovate and improvise. Without them, the business would experience a sudden downturn. How do you nurture these key players? Suppose they sometimes (or often) achieve their success by going outside the company’s inhibiting rules? Do you try to rein them in? What system, if any, can be applied to them?

 

Conversely, what do you about employees who know how to pretend they’re competent, but actually derail every major project by inaction and buck-passing? How do you detect these human roadblocks—and if you could, what would you do about them?

 

What about the company’s hiring policies? How do you actually find people who will somehow make the business move forward faster? Whom are you looking to employ? What happens when you discover that normal tests and scales and behavior profiles are actually counterproductive in evaluating a kind of talent you need? For example, how do you identify designers and engineers who can invent new products that exceed the current standards of the market?

 

And how do you train the bulk of your employees? Do you just give them the odd seminar now and then to make them feel as if you care? How do you train them to do their jobs? Do you want to teach them to become mechanical androids? If not, what are you aiming for?

 

In the area of customer relations, how do you train people who will talk to the people who buy your products? Are you simply looking for employees who follow company policy in this regard, or do you want employees who can show customers that the business actually cares about them? And if so, how do you find such customer-service people, and how do you train them to go the extra mile? Is going the extra mile a system?

 

When you add up all these factors that are often ignored or shortchanged by the consultant team, you discover you’re looking at the difference between succeeding and failing as a company, over the long haul. And in each case, better systems aren’t the answer. There is an X-factor.

 

If the CEO and his top executives, and the consultants they’ve brought in, are all systems people, how will they ever perceive what they’re missing? How will they even see the X-factor?

 

Over and above all this, suppose the CEO is a hard-driving type who made his bones by pushing, pushing, pushing—but now that his company has grown to a considerable size, he’s out of his depth. He doesn’t know how to manage the structure. He can’t deal with people in a way that will make them want to work better and more creatively. He has the opposite effect. What does the consultant team do about him?

 

Or: the CEO is a bean counter. He’s won his job by default, because his predecessors were sloppy and averse to handling details. But the bean counter is inherently cautious. He keeps such a tight lid on things the company falls behind in bringing new products to the market. And the products they do make are dull and unattractive, artless. How do you handle this type of CEO?

 

It turns out a real consultant or coach would have to be able to access his own imagination, in order to find these key factors I’m mentioning, and he would have to use an extraordinary amount of imagination to actually fix what he finds.

 

A whole raft of newer and better systems isn’t going to carry the day.

 

Many consultants are in the business of manufacturing the illusion that their systems are the full answer. That’s what they really do. That’s their skill. Selling the illusion.

 

And it isn’t that hard to sell, because businesspeople (the clients) tend to already believe, with full faith, in systems. That’s their background and training. That’s their predisposition. That’s their fall-back position. That’s what they think and hope a corporation is totally composed of.

 

But they’re wrong, and they pay the price for being wrong.

 

To return to an example I’ve used before, in the 1950s the American automobile industry was propelled by brilliant designers who were out on the edge, working from vision and imagination and trusting that what they were conceiving could be turned out on the assembly line. They were backed up by tremendous engineers, who saw their own task as a creative enterprise as well, and they invented technology that could carry the visionary load.

 

But soon enough, all that spirit, talent, imagination, passion, and futuristic thinking were dampened by a corporate sense that success had to be CONSOLIDATED. Essentially, rote formulas for success were inserted to replace the talent that had really created the victories in the first place—because the men in charge had a fatal blind spot. They couldn’t see imagination, because they had buried it deep within themselves. So they stood on their past and they stood on their profit margins, and they watched helplessly, as their companies went down the drain.

 

Try to consult and coach THAT with a system.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

COACHING THE COACHES, PART 13

 

COACHING THE COACHES,

PART 13

 

By Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

Living through your imagination allows you to discover profound desires you never knew you had.

 

Not living through imagination? You’ll never see those desires.

 

We’re really talking about a philosophy here. It’s based on the difference between What Exists and What Doesn’t But Could Exist.

 

As a coach, you certainly encounter clients who, in their lives, are covering the same ground over and over. They’re mired. They’re struggling to get out of What Already Exists.

 

They want to believe, many of them, that they can move over a few feet and suddenly discover something better that already exists.

 

This kind of hope is part of the problem. In a way, it’s the whole problem.

 

The greater the hope they can exit the swamp and find stable ground a few feet away, the more resistance they have to using their imagination.

 

Why? Because they basically want to trade one piece of What Already Exists for another piece of What already Exists. That’s their philosophy and their psychology.

 

I had a client who owned his own business. It wasn’t huge, but it had lots of moving parts. And every part was a mess. The disorganization was rampant. It was as if he’d set out to complicate and screw up every single thing he possibly could. And in the aftermath, there he was, standing in the middle of it.

 

He was very capable, though. He knew what needed to be corrected. He described every system and every employee, and he recited the solution to every problem he was facing. He was actually trying to fix all these problems. So he wasn’t inert.

 

He confided in me. He told me what he really wanted to do in life. And what he was doing in his business wasn’t even close. It was 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

 

But every time I brought up his true desire, he backed away from it. First, he said, he had to straighten out his company. I understood that.

 

However, as the weeks went by, I saw that he didn’t stand a very good chance of extricating himself, because the strength of his desire for future he really wanted was minimal. His energy was minimal. His enthusiasm was minimal.

 

Whenever I mentioned imagination, he said, “Are you talking about what I’m seeing?” And I would say, “No, I’m talking about what you can invent.”

 

I tried a few Magic Theater exercises. They basically went nowhere. He wouldn’t play roles. He’d stall and ask questions and resist. He wouldn’t do writing exercises.

 

Finally, one day, I said, “What does your wife think about you and your business?” He said, “She hates the business. She says it’s wearing me down. She’s very impatient.”

 

He was basically a man who was sunk up to his neck in What Exists, and what existed for him wasn’t pretty at all. But of course, he wasn’t willing to entertain other possibilities. He had made a stand in the middle of his problems, and if I let him, he would just complain on and on about them. That was his world. That was his universe. He was, in a way, trying to convince me that, for him, no other world could exist. He was determined to play that part and only that part, come hell or high water.

 

He was like an actor in a long-running play who had forgotten life could exist outside his role. He was essentially telling me, “This is it. Convince me there’s anything else.”

 

I figured, why not jump in the deep end?

 

So I began to talking from the point of view of his wife. No intro, no prelude, no explanation.

 

At first, I didn’t lay into him. I just spoke about my dissatisfaction with the way things were going.

 

He was silent.

 

Soon it became apparent to him I was speaking in the role of his wife. He still didn’t say anything.

 

I gradually increased the tempo and the emotion.

 

Still, nothing from him.

 

After maybe ten minutes, he started responding. He couldn’t hold himself back. He entered into the dialogue, as himself—because that was the only role he was willing to play.

 

So we argued. Back and forth, back and forth.

 

This went on for the better part of an hour.

 

He got on a roll. He poured out his frustrations. It was a cascade.

 

I continued to play the role of his wife. I said what I imagined she’d say.

 

Somewhere in the vicinity of an hour and a half, things slowed down.

 

So I flipped sides. Again, without any intro or explanation, I began to play the role of him. I argued my position from that point of view. He caught on immediately and jumped right into the role of his wife.

 

We kept on going. For another hour or so, we kept arguing.

 

Finally, he started laughing.

 

“My mind just blew up,” he said.

 

You’re a good actor,” I said.

 

He laughed some more.

 

By playing his wife, he was wrestling one leg out of the swamp, and he knew it.

 

It was a start.

 

That day was the turning point. Things began to go better. He saw there was some definite emotional value in using his imagination.

 

Eventually, he saw that imagination was his key to the real door he was trying to open in his life. And once he saw it, he responded with great commitment. He did all the exercises I gave him. He entered into the Magic Theater full-bore, playing many roles, even the most absurd ones.

 

He settled on a plan to fix the several biggest problems in his business and sell it. Which he did. He freed himself from the swamp. And then he went on pursue what he really wanted in life.

 

For a time, he kept looking for What Already Exists in various forms, but he dropped that, too, in a matter of months, realizing he could imagine and invent on a very wide scale.

 

This was his liberation.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PART 12, COACHING THE COACHES

 

COACHING THE COACHES

PART 12

 

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

 

 

A general rule of imagination is: it’s easier to cut back from Big than expand from Little.

 

If a designer is working on a radically new automobile design, his chance of success is increased if he starts out with his most extreme version of what that car could look like, as opposed to drawing the current model and then adding features that would make it unique.

 

He can take his most extreme version and scale it back if he needs to. Adding new wrinkles to the old model is usually a flop.

 

This is rarely understood.

 

People like to think in terms of “incremental imagination.” That’s like saying, “Can I parachute out of this plane a little bit?”

 

Take the leap.

 

A client of mine, an architect, was commissioned to design a greenhouse on a large estate. The family wanted “something different.” Of course, the architect didn’t know what that was. He thought his best approach was to start with conventional drawings and add “interesting features.”

 

He tried that. The family wasn’t impressed.

 

So I assigned him the following: make five drawings of greenhouses that are so absurd, so crazy that no one would ever want them on their property, even at the point of a gun.

 

He struggled, but he did present me with the sketches. I could tell he wasn’t happy. So I told him to do five more.

 

This time it worked. In the process of drawing these five in the most bizarre ways he could imagine, he found “a few great ideas”popping into his head. He used those, and from scratch he came up with a quite beautiful and original design. The family took one look at it and approved it on the spot.

 

Another client of mine was a frustrated carpenter. A jack-of-all trades type. Lately, he was having trouble making a living, and he felt stifled in his work. He’d been in the profession 15 years, and it didn’t seem to interest him anymore.

 

We did some of the imagination exercises I’ve described in these articles, and one day he told me he had a new idea. What he really wanted to do was organize and lead tours to unusual out-of-the-way places, all over the world.

 

He began making notes and plans on how he would accomplish this. Meanwhile, we continued working together.

 

A month or so later, he told me he’d scrapped the tour idea, because something else had come up. Opening a restaurant. He’d always loved cooking, especially Middle Eastern food.

 

A week later, the restaurant idea was gone. He wanted to go back to school and get a degree in engineering.

 

I told him to make a long list of careers that didn’t exist.

 

He came up with quite an array of professions, from squirrel grooming, to building mile-high towers of snow, to cataloging stowaways on space cruisers, to setting up a publicly traded company that would advise politicians on how to embezzle campaign funds. There were more than a hundred professions on the list.

 

He told me he felt better about his future, although he had no idea why.

 

A week later, he said, for the first time in his life he felt he could do anything. He’d originally gone into carpentry because he was good at it. He’d never really chosen it with any enthusiasm.

 

We did a a dialogue, in which the two roles were: “soul on an astral plane,” and “salesman for a new life on Earth.” Part of the salesman’s job was to go over possible career choices. This morphed into “man who’d died in a small plane crash” and “extra-terrestrial guide in Limbo.” We each played both roles.

 

That night, he called to say he was going away to his cabin for a week.

 

When he came back, he looked quite refreshed, and not at all frustrated.

 

“The work we’ve been doing,” he said. “It’s been like peeling layers of an onion.” He laughed. “But not consecutive layers. I’ve been jumping around.”

 

He told me he’d come up with the most obvious answer to his problem. He didn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it sooner. He proceeded to talk about his childhood, when his stepfather had taken him on several long trips in his boat. He’d never felt freer than on those excursions.

 

So in the following few months, the carpenter found a partner, and they leased a large space in an industrial district, and he began building boats.

 

He calls it “the dream I never knew I had.”

 

I said, “So maybe the dream was hiding somewhere in your imagination.”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “But all those years I was doing routine carpentry, my imagination was dead.”

 

“But now you brought it back from the dead.”

 

He looked at me.

 

“So that’s what you were doing.”

 

“It works.”

 

“How did you know it would?” he said.

 

“I believe in imagination. And I’ve got a list of all the times it has worked.”

 

Asking a person what he wants is really asking what he wants to create.

 

And asking that to a person who professes to have no clue about his own imagination is far different from asking it to a person who can live through and by imagination.

 

Suppose the universe is there to test our imaginations? It’s like walking into a museum full of paintings. Are you inspired to paint, or do you just want to keep looking at the pictures forever? The universe is a work of art. We can keep looking at it and analyzing it forever, or we can imagine new realities and invent them.

 

 

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.

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com