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Geplaatst door:
Roland
30-9-2010 15:31
Everything at ICA tends to be a great experience. But some teachers stand out even from that. One of them is Alan Seale. In the spiritual community of practice, he suggested a simple but very powerful coaching model.
The starting point in this is a situation. It doesn’t matter so much what the situation is. It could be a personal issue, like: my relationship is over or a professional issue like: I cannot work with this person.
The 4 levels are:
1. Drama. “I said this and that, then he said this, what was he thinking?”. Somebody or something else (maybe the universe) is doing it to you. “Why does this happen always to me”. Feeling miserable because nobody and nothing grants you the right to feel happy is probable here.
2. Situation. “OK, so he said this and that, now how can we continue?”. There is some acceptance. It happened period. Now, how can we fix it? What are solutions to this problem? Maybe there is a tendency to fix it quickly and move on quickly, hoping nobody, including yourself will notice. Or there is stress involved because you “have to” fix so many things.
3. Choice. “Because he said this and that, I’m feeling miserable now. But is that worth it?”. You’re taking responsibility for what happened, at least for the way you feel about it. How you feel about it is a choice. You could choose another perspective or you could not let the unwanted feeling happen. You’re deciding consciously who you want to be in relation to the situation.
4. Opportunity. “He said this and that, what can I learn from it?”. At this level, you’re looking for the gift that’s behind the situation. Everything happens for a reason. Maybe you can or maybe you cannot see the exact reason from this earthly perspective. But in both cases you can go stand on the lookout for the positive effects. In essence, the universe operates in a “good way”.
When I did the NLP course, I was already taught the principles of easily changing my perspective and thus changing the feeling about a situation. This model adds to that. It gives me the concrete perspective I can change to.
Just like every coaching model, the first step is to experience this yourself, as a coach. In a conversation with my coach Charles Benz this week, we came to the conclusion that in certain aspects of my life this is already happening. In these situations I’m able to look at it from a “higher” level. But there are a lot of things happening in my mind that are unconscious. The beauty of being involved in personal awareness on a day to day basis is that more and more of the unconscious programs come to the conscious surface which you then are able to “chunk up” to say it in NLP terms, to let them go to a higher level.
The levels are not sequential by the way. You can go from 1 to 4 to 2 again for example. In the opportunity level you can realize to have a choice and from that you are maybe able to fix it.
As a coach, I think it’s important to listen to a client from level 3 or 4. Only then are we creating the opportunity for our client to go to that higher level.