COACHING THE COACHES

PART 4

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

Bringing imagination back into a life largely devoid of it is a fascinating and profound process.

I had a client who was a business coach. He worked with entrepreneurs, educators, CEOs, and marketing executives. He was interested in my work on imagination, and asked to receive a few sessions.

I gave him an assignment. He was to write at least a page on each of the following prompts:

“At a traffic light, you look out your window and see a large goldfish at the wheel of a Porsche.”

“The chief astronomer at the Palomar Observatory announces that the moon is a cantaloupe.”

“The inhabitants of South Africa wake up one morning and discover they are floating on an iceberg in the Antarctic.”

When this coach looked at the assignment, he said, “That’s completely absurd.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why I want you to write at least three pages.”

He went away with a stunned look on his face.

The next week, he came back with many pages of notes explaining why it was impossible to do the assignment. Among the notes were a few diagrams outlining a theory of what he called “incremental progress.” Basically, the theory claimed that causes and effects, going back to the beginning of time, were linked in tight chains, and “anything new” was merely the next logical outcome of all that had come before.

I asked him what his theory had to do with the writing assignment.

He said, “It’s impossible to take off from a premise like a goldfish driving a car, because nothing in the entire of history of the world would lead up to that absurd occurrence.”

“In other words,” I said, “you have to start with a real fact, and then you can write pages.”

“Yes,” he said.

I wasn’t sure why he had expounded a theory to explain this, but of course I went along with it.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s pretend I’m a store owner, and I’ve just sold you a toy for your daughter. You, being a careful man, open the box before you leave the store, and you discover it’s empty. What do you tell the store owner?”

“I tell him he’s made a mistake. I say, ‘I didn’t come in here to buy an empty box.’”

“But,” I said, “I’m not a store owner. And you didn’t just pay for a toy for your daughter. These aren’t facts. So how can you tell me what you would say to a non-existent shopkeeper?”

He started to object, then stopped.

“I think it’s about the degree of absurdity,” he finally said. “If it goes too far, as it does with the goldfish, I don’t want to deal with it.”

“You don’t want to imagine it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

More silence.

“It makes me feel foolish,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s something for children to do. I’m a grown-up.”

“All right,” I said, “I understand that. But suppose it’s our secret. I won’t tell anybody, and you won’t tell anybody. You’ll go home and pretend you’re a child, and you’ll do the assignment. Will that work?”

He thought about it. He nodded. “I think so.”

As he walked out of my studio, he was already beginning to see the light.

The next week, he came back with 30 pages. He looked like a man who had just been let out of prison.

Years later, he would tell me it was his “lesson in freedom.”

Now, understand, I wouldn’t have given that assignment to just anyone. The work has to fit the client. The degree of difficulty, as they say in diving competitions, has to be adjusted for the person you’re working with.

But this is an example of how imagination can be brought back in out of the cold.

This client of mine went on, in his life, to make all sorts of positive changes. He felt free enough to imagine his future in new and, to him, unexpected ways. He married, he moved, he built a house, he went full-time into educational consulting for almost a decade, he earned a degree in architecture, he designed buildings and homes, he funded the development of new building materials.

Does that sound like child’s play? Does that sound like absurdity?Does that sound like the inconsequential use of a technique for liberating imagination?

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 3

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

I once had a client, a business coach who told me, “Everybody works inside a system. The only kind of advice I can give people is about how to make their particular system better.”

That’s a legitimate statement, as far as it goes. But it’s like saying, “If you live in a world where people only use their right hands, it’s useless to teach them how to use their left hands.”

A decent operational definition of imagination is: “it’s what exists outside systems.”

When a person wants to access imagination, what does he do?

There is no single answer to that question. With my clients, I use a variety of strategies. Over the course of the last 15 years, I’ve developed a whole series of techniques and exercises that awaken imagination.

When employed consistently, these techniques result in, among other effects, the person finding himself entertaining new ideas that seem to come out of thin air. The person begins to act in ways that are more spontaneous. This doesn’t imply chaos. It implies New, Fresh, Original, Interesting, Unique.

Accessing imagination begins with the thought that common reality and the status quo are simply the starting point for innovation; otherwise, we would still be living in caves and rooting around in barren soil for roots.

So all progress has always depended on imagination as the leading prow. It is blank and robotic obedience that resists change on the basis that all change is bad; this mental state obstructs advancement in any relationship, life, operation, or organization.

Imagination is expansive, far-reaching, experimental, adventurous.

The first move in accessing imagination is considering the possibility that you can be expansive, far-reaching, experimental, and adventurous. Mull that over. Roll it over in your mind. Play with it.

Are you wedded to step 1,2,3.4,5, in sequence, forever the same, without thought, without questions, without hope for something more? Are you? Are you simply and only trying to shore up and solidify steps 1-5? Is that your basic mission in life?

Think of society as a gigantic school. And consider this: if all the education promoted and taught in this school must be imparted as a series of graduated steps in one direction, then how can imagination, as a course of study, be introduced into the curriculum? The answer is it can’t. It doesn’t fit. The deck is stacked. And therefore, all education is going to ignore imagination, and finally people will believe that imagination is a complete mystery—because they have been attending a school all their lives where it is absent from the classroom, where it is never thought about in any depth.

Coaches often take on clients whose basic position about life seems to be: I’m confused. And it appears to be folly to introduce yet another factor (imagination) whose character and very existence might add to the confusion. These clients need rules and stability and very clear avenues of behavior, don’t they?

You, as a coach, should think very seriously about that question, because, in a real sense, your whole future is riding on the answer.

How are you going to direct your client? Where are you going to try to move him? And is that direction going to give him More or Less?

This is a very fertile area of exploration, for yourself and your clients.

Should you, for example, say you’re only interested in short-term results? Should you assume that life offers only a few possible choices, within an already-limited context?

I’ll take this one step further. Sometimes, after repeated efforts to get a client to take effective action, the coach, feeling frustrated, will offer one of the following:

“Keep circling back to the vision.”

“Plug into the passion.”

“Don’t be attached to the outcome.”

“Baby steps add up to a giant leap.”

“THIS is what successful people do.”

“What’s important is the journey, not the destination.”

Remember, this (life and coaching) is just a process.”

“You know, you can achieve your dreams.”

“You need to believe in yourself.”

“You see, you have to change your belief system.”

“Have faith.”

“You’re not seeing how much power you have.”

“If you don’t commit to change, how can it happen?”

“Life is really about the big picture. You have to look at that picture.”

“As you think, so you are. So you have to change what you’re thinking.”

“You need to do more positive affirmations.”

“Change your relationships. They’re toxic.”

“Setting a real goal is the key. Once you have that in mind, you can move toward achieving it.”

“You’re a wonderful amazing human being. Accept that.”

“Get off your butt.”

And so forth and so on.

When uttered as a last-ditch effort to move a client to a better place, these statements reveal a puzzlement about why the client seems to want to hold himself back.

What’s going on? Why is the client stalling at the gate? Why is he making so little progress? Is there a way to surgically remove his beliefs that are convincing him he can’t win?

There is a more fundamental factor at work.

If a human being never moves beyond a kind of mechanical sense of what he is doing in life, he won’t be happy.

If he sees his present and future as trying to fit into a system, or trying to fit into a better system, he’ll never feel inspired.

If he is basically looking to put patches on his life to cover up what he can’t solve, he won’t feel free.

There were moments, in his childhood, when he did feel happy and inspired and free. So what was present then that isn’t present now?

That’s a very important question.

And the answer is, when he was a child, he knew what imagination was and he used it all the time. He used it to enhance everything around him. He didn’t just see a tree, he saw magic with arms and legs and a radiance in its leaves. He didn’t just see a road, he saw a road that curved away into an infinite distance. He didn’t just see clouds in the sky, he saw sailing ships and faces and cities. He didn’t just think of the day ahead as a series of routines, he saw the day as a potentially endless adventure. He wasn’t only living in the present, he was living in the present and the future.

He was living through and by imagination—and therefore, he FELT ALIVE. That’s WHY he felt alive.

Imagination was no mystery. It wasn’t a puzzle. It wasn’t something he had to learn by reading a book.

So, flash forward. This child is now an adult, and he feels frustration. He feels unable to solve the biggest problems that face him. He feels the future should be better, but he isn’t sure how to make that happen.

And you as a coach are going to help him straighten out his life WITHIN THE CONTEXT of his present thoughts and feelings and actions? Really?

Imagination is not a solution to a problem. It is the faculty that makes the obsession for solving all problems fade into the background. It is the leap that puts a life on a new basis.

If you want to help your client in the most basic and profound way possible, you are going to explore the key question: how does a person who once lived through imagination restore that state of mind and consciousness now?

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 2

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

From the start, coaches face a peculiar situation. Their clients want systems.

Their clients are used to systems and want a better one.

But the truth is, most people don’t need a better system. They need to learn how to be spontaneous.

Spontaneity naturally flows as a side effect of imagination.

Imagination is the North Star. It is the faculty that is least understood and least sought after in our society.

People tend to say two things about imagination: it is a mysterious talent reserved for the few, or it is a toy for children’s fantasies that should be purged with the onset of adulthood.

Both of these assessments are completely false.

In coaching clients, whether the subject is personal problems, personal goals, business success, or success in relationships, I have never failed to find that imagination is the missing key.

But you see, imagination follows no system. It can’t be produced by building a machine that routinely turns it out, like pasta. Imagination doesn’t operate according to formulas.

I fully understand that, as a coach, if you teach your client a better system, you may obtain results in the short-term. After a series of sessions, you and the client can walk away from each other and feel happy. But as time moves on, that client will discover his better system is breaking down. Yes, it can be laid over life like a grid, but eventually life will prove to be the winner.

Why? Because, in a real sense, what life is asking for is imagination.

Imagination is the capacity to make quantum leaps and see realities that have not yet been created. It’s the capacity, when deployed, to invent those new realities.

It works in relationships, in achieving personal goals, in discovering new goals, in succeeding in business—in every aspect of life.

Because people live their whole adult lives ignoring and burying imagination, they are going to feel at a loss, when asked to tap into it. They don’t know where it is. Is it in the hall closet, in the attic, in the garage, on the moon? And if they could find it, what would they do with it? Pet it on the head, feed it roast beef, take it for a walk, give it vitamins, play classical music for it?

For 99% of the population, this is an unexplored area. But you as a coach need to know about it. You need to understand it. You need to be intimately familiar with it. You need to be using it in your own life, above all. Every day. You need to be immersed in it. Breathing it.

Ultimately, life is a an open available space for those who live through and by imagination.

For engineers, architects, researchers, businesspeople, teachers, scholars, administrators, husbands, wives, children, workers, artists—for everyone.

The funny thing is, you can be working within the tightest system in the world, and if you deploy your imagination and come up with a solution that is innovative, that makes the system better—people will say, “This is wonderful. Why didn’t we think of it?” They didn’t think of it because they were living inside the system.

On the surface, all human relationships may seem to exist in the framework of a system. But those relationships are actually waiting for imagination to exert a transforming effect, a transforming moment, and then people suddenly brighten, open up, and think, “This is what being alive is.”

So how do you access and deploy imagination?

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 1

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

After many years of laborious research, I’ve definitively proved that life is not a square, not a circle, not a triangle. How’s that for amazing? Life isn’t a rhombus or a trapezoid, either. I was hoping for trapezoid because I like the sound of it, but it just didn’t work out. I tried, I really did. No dice.

Life doesn’t have clean precise borders all the way around it. This is an unfortunate circumstance for coaches who seek to apply a system to their clients. Life has a funny way of thumbing its nose at systems—just when you think you have it all figured out.

Speaking of systems—I once had a client (IQ 150) who sheepishly described his situation to me: As an engineer, he carefully prepared for his first date with a wonderful woman. He arranged a picnic. He settled on a park near a river. He consulted the micro-climate forecast and found the exact spot where they would sit and watch the rowers and the soccer players. He went to the best deli in town and bought the food he thought she would like, and he packed it in a basket with a fine 20-dollar bottle of something that combined the essence of lily and heliotrope. He did all these things…And when he and she finally arrived and sat down on his blanket, boom, pow, zow—he had absolutely no idea what to say…

He added: “You told me imagination sometimes works through constructing absurd situations. Well, I can testify that ordinary life—at least the way I approached it—can be pretty absurd, too.”

Actually, if you can believe it, and I do, this man had worked with a coach to “improve his communication” with women. He had received a first-rate PhD-type education in interpreting signs and signals from women, and responding with clever twists designed to “elicit positive responses.” He had a playbook.

I can only speculate. She offers a blink here, a turn of the shoulder there, 13 different kinds of smiles, each with its own meaning, 40 possible glances…

Coaching is really about taking people out of systems they’re already saddled with.

But some people would ask, “If you don’t have a system, what COULD you possibly have?” As if the only remaining alternative is Outer Darkness.

Well, there is a little thing called spontaneity. AKA, feeling alive.

But how would you teach that? And even if you could, would you be able to sell the idea to a client?

“Spontaneity? I need a system. You know, steps 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.”

The thing is, he already has steps 1-37. And they’re working about as well as a rusted train on broken tracks.

With about as much spontaneity as the Detroit auto industry when Japan and Germany were gobbling up the whole market.

So you have a conundrum. Not a trapezoid, a conundrum.

System? No-system?

What to do?

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

INTRODUCTION

by Jon Rappoport

Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport

In my consulting practice, I’ve worked with many clients who are coaches.

In these sessions, they’ve let their hair down. Some of them have spoken to me about their frustrations, their failed attempts to get clients to change their lives for the better.

I’ve heard the same statements from therapists.

As one psychologist put it to me, “Right or wrong, I feel like I’m holding the magic keys to the kingdom. But when I try to hand them over, my patients look at them and see nothing. Superficially, they understand what I’m saying. But when they walk out the door, they can’t apply these ideas in their lives.”

So I told him we were going to do an exercise.

“Like push-ups?” he said. “Leg lifts?”

I said, “I want you to tell me a hundred completely absurd and ridiculous things you could say to a patient. A hundred pieces of absurd advice you could give him.”

He, of course, stared at me as if I were crazy.

Finally, he said, “And why would I want to do that?”

“Because,” I said, “you’ve got nothing left. You just told me that. So play along. Nothing to lose.”

He hemmed and hawed. He was VERY uncomfortable.

Finally, he started. His first few offerings were timid. He stopped.

“Is that the best you can do?” I said. “I want ABSURD.”

He began again.

It took him a while, but slowly he gathered steam.

…By the time he reached number 50, he was on a roll. His whole demeanor had changed. He was smiling broadly.

By the time he reached number 75, he was laughing and cackling.

While he was pouring out the last 25, he was walking around the room, gesturing, imitating some sort of tinpot dictator.

After the last one, he sat down.

I let a few seconds go by.

“Feeling better?” I said.

“You kidding?” he said. “Like I just got out of prison. What was that all about?”

“It was just a little technique I use on ‘communication professionals’ now and then,” I said.

“Well, it sure worked.”

“It’s just the beginning.”

“Really? You’ve got more of those?”

“I’ve got a million,” I said.

The next day on the phone, he told me he’d slept well for the first time in a year.

“Maybe I need jokes,” he said. “Maybe I should change my practice so all I do is tell jokes. But seriously, where did you get that little con game you played on me?”

“I made it up,” I said.

He laughed.

“Why?” he said.

“Because I knew it would work.”

Silence.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“All will be revealed as we do more sessions,” I said.

“I wish I could,” he said. “But I’m moving out of the country. I’ve got a job at a clinic in Europe.”

I never saw him again.

I knew that little technique would work because I’ve learned something about the human psyche. I’ve learned about what people bury in their subconscious. I’m not talking about “negative material.” Quite the opposite. What’s really buried down there is a fantastically positive and wide-ranging capacity.

This capacity isn’t about “reprogramming” or “a new paradigm” or “a magical code” or “a better belief system” or “a secret idea” or “a dream” or “passion.” It’s much, much wilder than that. It’s been with us since the beginning—whenever that was.

It’s what we’ve been educated OUT OF. It’s what we discard, as if we’re butterflies going back into the cocoon to become caterpillars.

It isn’t the solution to a problem. It’s what can make our old problems AND their solutions obsolete.

And having buried this capacity, we tend not to want to hear about it. We prefer to forget all about it. And when it’s brought up, we profess not to understand it. Or we say it’s useless.

But it isn’t useless. It’s a power that does what the old alchemists were striving for. It does it for the individual, and it can even do it for the human race.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, because I’ve seen the results.

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