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

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

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

COACHING THE COACHES

PART 11

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

In the summer of 2011, I started the Magic Theater. It is a way to make imagination manifest in improvised dialogues between two people.

They take roles, and they speak to each from those roles. And then, after a time, they switch (reverse) roles and continue the conversation—which can go anywhere.

The precursor of this sort of theater is, most directly, Psychodrama, the brilliant invention of Jacob Levy Moreno.

I sometimes use Magic Theater dialogues in my consulting work.

The range of possible roles is unlimited. Any person, archetype, object, thing, process can be a role. Most importantly, a role that doesn’t exist can be a role. For example, “the gold phantom who owns a drug store on Mars”—who is talking to “the ant who runs the universe.”

Yes, yes, yes, it’s absurd. It’s absurd by the standards of ordinary reality. But if you think ordinary reality is an authoritative yardstick, you should think again. And again.

What happens when a person speaks from a role that “couldn’t possibly exist?” He relies completely on his imagination. He uses it. He lives in it for a short time.

And gradually, his own sense of reality changes and expands. His own experience of his imagination deepens.

Much earlier in this series, I remarked that innovators go outside the system they’re in and bring back new ideas and inventions. Innovators aren’t tied to a system. They can enter them and exit them.

Well, in the Magic Theater, you’re exiting and re-entering ordinary reality and ordinary status quo and ordinary categories of perception. Experientially. Not just intellectually.

You can play Magic Theater in fairly basic terms. A person is having a big problem with his boss at work. Okay, let’s do dialogue. I’ll play your boss, and you play you. Then after that conversation: now you play your boss and I’ll play you. Some interesting things can happen.

On a much more expanded level, we go to roles like “the manager of Galaxy 32-B” talking to “an ambitious shoe salesman.”

Imagination in action.

Having done these dialogues, I can say that one effect is: they tend to dissolve problems by placing them in a far different perspective. Either the problem doesn’t seem so important, or a new workable solution suddenly pops up out of nowhere.

In daily life, we tend to gear perception so that it covers a “standardized” view of people, places, and things. We’re happy with that. We operate within that framework. All is well until we run into a problem, an obstruction, a block—and then the gears don’t mesh comfortably anymore. As time passes, the gears become more clogged, and we develop new problems, and we don’t solve all of them.

But we continue to work within the context of the way we perceive both reality and our lives. Inside that framework, we keep trying to come up with solutions. And, in the process, we lose track of what we really want. We lose track of the direction we would really like to pursue.

In the Magic Theater, we experience using our imaginations in ways we’ve never used them before. As a result, our standardized perception changes. We’re no longer exclusively operating inside that old context. We’re freer.

We can then surpass those problems, and we can see where we most profoundly want to go in life.

Here is a very simple example. I worked with a woman who was a dedicated political reformer. For years, in her work, she had been chewing on a particular problem she couldn’t resolve. Other people had tried to solve the same problem, and they had failed, too. She knew all the strategies, all the approaches, all the angles. She was at a standstill.

So we did a dialogue. I played her, and she played “the person who already came up with the brilliant solution.”

So ridiculously simple, it seemed stupid.

It was very slow going for a half-hour, as we spoke from our roles to each other. Then, the energy began to flow as she really got into her part. In the next hour, she spoke from “the top of the mountain,” with great authority, as if she really had solved the problem—without mentioning how she had done it.

When we stopped, she felt much better, although she hadn’t come up with a concrete plan. Or a vague plan. Or any plan.

A week later, we spoke. She said, “I suddenly figured out a whole new way to approach this thing, instead of beating my head against the same wall.”

A few months later, she called to tell me she’d achieved a significant victory. In a subsequent note, she described her achievement: “It was as if I’d been trying to turn a corner on a street with a tremendous wind blowing right at me. So I went into a building, took an elevator up to the roof, called in a big helicopter, and we flew to the right destination. That’s how it felt. A detour. Instead of steps 1,2,3,4, it was 1,6,7,4. I don’t know why I didn’t see that before. I guess I was locked in. Then I wasn’t anymore. I was in a different space.”

A change of perception brought on by imagination.

The Magic Theater is part of an overall philosophy of imagination. Instead of viewing life and the universe as simply “sitting there,” we view them as an infinite number of potential roles we can play and speak from, in dialogue.

The old Tibetan magicians had exercises in which they would merge with elements in Nature: tree, flower, cloud, river, creature. Well, this is taking that approach from a different angle. You actually play the role of these elements and creatures.

Here’s another example. Working with an executive who was dealing with a company that was falling apart, I tried many roles. He and I played “perfect CEO,” “awful CEO,” “new deep-pockets investor,” “bankruptcy judge,” “brilliant planner.”

These dialogues loosened things up a bit, but no real breakthroughs occurred. So I went much farther out. We played “a talking river of gold under the earth,” “phony CEO of a solar system,” “Fort Knox,” “paranormal magician,” “android following directions.”

What in the world could these roles have to do with his failing company? The roles are absurd. They make no sense. They’re ridiculous. They have no basis in reality. Etc., etc.

But after a few sessions, this man said, “You know, at first, it was like pulling teeth. I felt like an idiot playing these parts. But when I got into it, I felt better. Lighter. And now I’m taking a step back and seeing my company with a lot more clarity. I don’t know why, but I am.”

Over the course of the next month or two, he experienced new ideas popping up all over the place. He started to approach the company with real imagination. Taking nothing for granted. His old categories of locked-in perception were fading away.

He ended up reorganizing the company from the ground up. He put it on a whole new basis. It didn’t look like the old company at all.

That’s how he saved it.

He told me that, a result of our sessions, he had gained new courage, along with greater imagination.

All because he and I did something completely and utterly absurd.

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 10

By Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

You go to the author of a play who, after writing it for ten years, is dissatisfied with it—and you tell him to change a few commas and exclamation points.

How well will that work out?

There is only one reason he’s dissatisfied with the play. In an odd sense, he’s forgotten he imagined the whole thing. If he remembered, he’d realize he could make all the changes he wanted to and that would be that.

He needs to bring back the flexible, adventurous, wide-ranging, powerful, go-for-broke imagination he was originally using, and resurrect it.

There is no way to measure “the amount” of imagination that requires.

Fifty tons? An ounce? Two pounds?

When a person digs a hole for himself and jumps in, and that becomes his life, how deep is the hole?

Who knows?

Imagination is magic. Sometimes the faintest whiff of this elixir is enough to wake a person up.

I’ve seen it happen in an hour. I’ve seen it happen in a year.

Regardless, a person does need to bring “a great deal” of imagination back into his existence, in order to build a different future.

Imagination is a non-material capacity. It isn’t brain cells or electrical transmissions or circuits. It affects the brain, but it is a higher aspect.

What Already Exists is but a tiny, tiny fraction of What Is Possible. All we need to discover is to be found in What Already Exists?? No. That is a fundamental misconception.

Mythologically speaking, we need to replace “the treasure hunter” with “the artist.”

If you staged a horse race between perception and imagination, and you somehow opened up every possible channel of perception along every possible track, perception would still finish second.

Which is to say, imagination and invention can always go farther.

This opens up a new view of metaphysics.

Imagination always deals with what the conventional mind considers impossible.

This is why the exercises I design move a person into imagining “impossible” things. Or as some would say, absurd things.

Which brings me to this: if a person’s view of what he really desires in life is born out of a highly limited imagination, who knows what desires might lie on the other side of those limits?

This is yet another reason why immersing one’s self in imagination is so important. The process reveals desires-for-futures previously obscured.

This is the great adventure.

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 9

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

It would be foolish of me not to comment on the difference between imagination and IMAGINATION.

Just because a person uses his imagination, now and then, it doesn’t mean he is galvanized into achieving his most profound goals.

That’s why I’ve designed so many exercises and techniques; as with any sort of workout, a person gains strength with consistent practice.

Consistent practice gives you IMAGINATION.

And IMAGINATION carries many good things with it: huge quantities of available energy; motivation to take action; keen perception of the status quo as merely one possibility out of a sea of possibilities; innovative strategies; a bracing sense of freedom; unshakable optimism; insight into those who won’t access their own inventive capacities.

In the presence of IMAGINATION, those emotions and habits that are keeping a person firmly entrenched in a deadened life are gradually dissolved, deleted, or put on the shelf.

IMAGINATION is the lost friend or brother or sister who has come home.

You always had it. It was never really lost. It can’t be lost. It is you at your best, at your most alive.

Even love, that quality forever sought, needs imagination to keep making the case for love, to expand its space, to comprehend the depth of intimacy.

We can forever bemoan the troubles and conflicts of the human race and our world, or we can invent a different world, in which the creative power of every individual is given its due.

In the end, it is the individual who can choose the adventure of reconnecting with his own imagination, and it is your work, as a coach, that can help bring this about.

Learn while you teach. Teach while you learn.

Once you’ve climbed far enough up the ladder of your own imagination, you’ll never again feel mired in frustration as you deal with those who simultaneously seem to want Newness and Sameness, progress and entrenchment, happiness and sadness.

You’ll have found your North Star to guide you.

One of the great secrets of imagination is the ALIVE energy it imparts to the person who deploys it. This energy is what was displaced at childhood’s end, when the possibility of all possibilities was deferred, in favor of compromise.

Deeper still is the knowledge that you don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to take up a rigid position as the teacher or the authority or the great dispenser of information. Imagination is the open door, it is not a final set of principles and rules. You are helping others to open that door for themselves. If you can do that, you will have all the knowledge you need. You will have introduced them to their wider and greater lives. And you’ll have found your own.

In the mid-1980s, I interviewed Ted Clarke, a scientist who was working at Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California. Ted played a major role in unmanned space missions.

He told me that, during the Jimmy Carter administration, he’d given a talk to construction-company executives about the possibility of building orbiting hotels.

He asked these men whether they would be interested in such a project. They nearly brought down the ceiling. The suggestion ignited them.

As Ted and I talked, I remarked that a space program of truly huge dimensions could go a long way toward solving the unemployment problem in America. He agreed. He said it could bring the country close to full employment if “our leaders were willing to put credence in their imaginations.”

The technology for building orbiting hotels wasn’t all there, but as Ted pointed out, if the will and desire were sufficient, it could be developed.

He emphasized that, if people were shuttling back and forth to these hotels on a regular basis, watching the sun rise and set among the stars through large ports, they would return to Earth with such stories that, soon enough, the whole population would be energized about “the next big step in the future of the human race.”

For Ted, it was all about stimulating imagination, so we could shake off the doldrums of conflicts and problems and wars, and instead move out into space.

Massively.

There are alternative futures waiting out there for us, palpable and real, so real we can almost touch them; we can shift to new paths, making our former historical conflicts obsolete.

This is called “inspiration in action.”

It isn’t vague, it isn’t a cliché, it isn’t a mantra, it’s the result of bringing the imagination of a person into the foreground of his life, so it becomes the very basis of his actions.

This is a non-mechanical philosophy whose time has come.

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 7

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

If you can do anything for another person in the long run, you can try to induce him to imagine his life in much broader terms than he does now.

You can try to induce him to imagine something beyond the standard categories of what he is supposed to think about.

You can show him that these standard categories are myths and fairy tales and symbols invented by other people and spread by promoters of one kind or another.

Some years ago, I heard from a professor who had many questions about my philosophy of imagination.

I had already sent him a dozen articles I’d written on the subject, and I knew he’d read them, but his questions seemed to indicate he hadn’t.

I realized he was a victim of a malady I’d encountered many times. I call it LTS: Losing the Thread Syndrome.

A person suffering from LTS gets it, and then he doesn’t. He sees something new, and then it drifts away from him. He glimpses possibilities, and then they evaporate.

I did several telephone session with the professor, during which I guided him through imagination techniques and exercises. At first, he found it tough going, but then he broke through.

This was a man who’d spent many years working as an archaeologist in the field, and many more years cataloging artifacts. His forte was dealing with thousands of pieces of data.

After our third session, he said, “So imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“That’s an Einstein quote, “I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And now I finally get it.”

In the ensuing days and weeks, he resuscitated an old manuscript he’d written about a fictional civilization whose artifacts were buried under an ancient earthquake. Writing it had just been “a fun exercise,” as he put it.

But now he saw it in a different light:

By working purely in the realm of imagination to write the book, without any concern for the consequences, he’d actually fleshed out some very important scenarios that could be applied to conducting difficult digs.

In other words, without caring a whit about teaching archaeological field work, he’d made improvements in current systems.

“And,” he said, “I never could have accomplished that unless I imagined and improvised my fictional manuscript. Those good ideas would never have occurred to me.”

He had been cured of LTS. He’d regained the thread.

Many, many years ago, I had a job teaching literature to “difficult kids” in a private school in California. There were four girls in the class who were flunking my course and every other course they were taking.

So out of desperation, and with a glimpse of an idea, I took them out to the playground after school, and I told them we were going to create a country.

I drew rough squares and circles on the concrete, and I said these were the states of the country, and their job was to tell me what was going on in each state, one by one.

I was completely unprepared for what happened.

They began talking excitedly about fashion. What the people wore, what clothes they had in their closets. They described jewelry in cases, furniture in living rooms and on patios. They talked about studios and factories where hats and shoes and dresses were made.

They explained all this in great detail. They were endless fountains of invented information. They were imagining new styles, on the spur of the moment.

Soon, we ran out of states, so I drew more squares and circles on the ground, and they obliged by spontaneously designing more pants and dresses and shoes and hats and cloaks and necklaces and make-up.

Finally, they slowed down, and there were a few states they hadn’t investigated yet.

A girl pointed to a circle and said, “That state is in charge of justice.”

We were silent for a few seconds.

“How does that work?” I said.

And for the next half-hour, the girls and I debated what justice was all about and how it could be achieved. The discussion was very lively and intelligent.

So, for the next month, I worked with them on passages from novels where courtroom dramas were being played out.

I noticed their reading levels magically improved. They were very sharp about the details of these courtroom scenes. They argued like lawyers. They certainly weren’t passive readers.

You could ask, “How does a discussion of fashion on a playground morph into an inquiry into justice?”

There is no strict mechanical answer to that. It happened spontaneously, as many fascinating things do, when you are working purely from imagination. For instance, you realize you’re more intelligent than you thought you were.

And still, this kind of progress is just the first step—because reality, as we train ourselves to see it and believe it, is just a congealing of what we imagine it to be as we operate at one percent of our creative capacity.

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 6

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

Having done an informal survey of business and life coaches/consultants, my conclusion is: the overwhelming number try to work within established systems or protocols with their clients, and these coaches aren’t succeeding in their careers.

I believe there is a hidden reason for this. Their clients, despite what they claim they need, are not having their real needs met.

Early on, I learned that trying to “fix the road” on which clients were walking through life didn’t cut it. It didn’t work. Why? Because a brand new road was called for. A road that moved in a different direction.

But this new road isn’t already there. It hasn’t been built yet. The client has to create it. And in order to do that, he needs something he is trying to disown: his imagination.

In other words, people are working with a paradox. They can glimpse the direction they’d like to take in life, and they understand this is going to require invention on their part, but they don’t want to veer into that part of themselves. They would rather pretend they can operate mechanically and still find the joy of being alive.

Never will happen.

This stark fact throws most people off, and I include coaches.

How do you truly and actually deal with a person who is working against himself? How do you do it?

People are in the position they’re in because they have deserted their own natural talents—talents they used as a child, in abundance, but left by the side of the road once they entered “responsible adulthood.”

And in order to accomplish that desertion, they told themselves all kinds of convenient stories to rationalize their passage into “the real world.”

Think about it. If most of the adults in society still knew exactly what they most profoundly wanted out of life, and still had, at their disposal, the tools and the energy to obtain it, we would be living on a quite different planet.

Something happened. And that something was the offloading of the faculty which can conjure the most remarkable futures, along with the energy to go after them with all cylinders operating.

Imagination does something else, too: it makes you feel ALIVE.

It flowers space and time with possibility.

I’m not talking about a one-time feat of envisioning what you want in life. I’m talking about an overall state of mind (imagination) in which every whiff and glimpse of what you want multiplies new sensations and emotions and energies and images and ideas.

The UPLIFTING.

When you have THAT, you have the constant reason to pursue your dreams. You have a proliferating state of excitement and adventure that doesn’t let the dream become old.

And even when you focus on accomplishing very specific actions, the joy is with you. Instead of stalling because the work is turning you into a mechanical creature, you’re alive in the moment.

Isn’t this the way you want it to be?

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 5

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

Over the past 15 years, I’ve developed many techniques and exercises for clients.

These exercises reacquaint a person with his own imagination—and by extension bring about the realization that status-quo reality is merely one possibility in a sea of possibilities.

Reality is actually far more malleable than we ordinarily believe.

Doing these exercises consistently creates a foundation of confidence in one’s own capacity to create new futures.

An educator once told me, “That wouldn’t work for me. I have to satisfy people like board members and professors and alumni. If anything, I need less imagination.”

I gave him a handful of exercises to do and said, “Look, if you find yourself gaining too much creativity, you can always dial it back and just pretend you’re a pillar of tradition. Your colleagues and constituents won’t ever know the difference. Only you will.”

He thought that was amusing.

A few years later, I ran across him at a conference, and he showed me photos of his new cottage in Spain.

“I paint there every summer now,” he said. “It’s my secret studio. If all goes well, I’ll be having a show next year. I did those exercises of yours for a few months, and I bought some brushes, paints, and canvases, and I was off and running.”

Later, over dinner, he mentioned that his wife, with whom he’d been teetering on the edge of divorce, was now quite happy at home.

“She says I’m no longer a stodgy bureaucrat.”

I’m fully aware that many coaches and consultants work in environments where the only issue is how to tweak a system to make it better. I understand the situation. There is nothing wrong with that kind of work. It satisfies a need. However, at the same time, coaches need to look for opportunities to plant seeds with individuals in those environments who want greater change.

And those individuals do exist. They are peering out from their lives and wondering what they are missing.

But what about the coach? If he is ensconced in a system of his own, he needs to tap into his imagination and find ways to feel more alive.

Creativity in any field of endeavor acts as a universal solvent. It doesn’t so much solve problems as institute new strategies and actions that make those problems obsolete.

The American automobile industry realized this at a very late date. Manufacturers in Europe and Japan were, for several decades, turning out superior cars, the kinds of cars Americans wanted. They were more reliable and efficient, less cumbersome, and the advertising that touted them was designed by younger people who didn’t take themselves so seriously. Meanwhile, in Detroit, the Americans were trying to solve problems with their older models. Somehow they thought that by taking a plodding and methodical approach, they would work out the bugs and regain their leadership role. Instead, some of them went broke.

They were dedicated to their systems and didn’t want any interference from IMAGINATION. How did it turn out for them?

What about the American space program? After missions to the moon that riveted and galvanized the nation, the government decided the next step was flying lower in the sky on shuttles. If the shuttle program was actually, in some mysterious way, an advance over moon flights, the American people certainly didn’t hear about it. No coherent message on that score was ever delivered. The public was left in the lurch.

Again, somebody had a system, and he was sticking to it. A sign should have been hung over the front door at NASA headquarters: NO IMAGINATION WANTED.

I could offer you scores of other examples.

The ancient Roman civilization, borrowing heavily from brilliant innovations birthed in the tiny Greek city of Athens, established itself as the premier technological center of the Western world. Then, grasping at straws (in an abject failure of imagination), its leaders decided the only path for the future was mindless territorial expansion. That misadventure brought about its fall.

How many lives have foundered on the rocks of rote loyalty to outmoded ways of doing things—when what was needed was a strong injection of imagination.

This is your opportunity as a coach, for your clients and for yourself. Realize that, with imagination, new futures can be built and won, without trying to solve problems that were created by systems that had already achieved their goals and were no longer relevant.

The philosopher Santanyana famously wrote, “Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Yes, but even if we know that, yet have no intimate connection to our own imaginations, how can we construct a future that is any different from what has gone before?

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