On Coaching, Quantum Mechanics, and the Optimist as Career Coach
Question: Coaching is a way to help someone…
a) win the game
b) develop a side career and income in sports
c) find or stay on their own path
d) build new realities
This is not a test. It is but a few of the probable outcomes you can achieve when coached. But how does someone see the end game or find “that” solution to change their current perceived outcome to one that is favorable?
While listening to Kimberly Wiefling, a Senior Scientist, Consultant and Author speak on “How to Get Out of Your Own Way: Optimism as a Career Strategy”, I got an idea… Actually I had 8 ideas. Wiefling’s hour long seminar was so inspiring that I blogged 8 different and diverse articles on the car ride home narrating into my cell phone’s voicemail.
From Wiefling’s talk, I found 6 key strategies to develop that “winning attitude” that enables us to conceive new solutions as goals to achieve. The key is to envision a new reality in order to create it.
Create a reality? Yes. To actually shift your world view and situation from a pessimistic or often fatalistic one where everything looks like to doom and gloom, “How am I ever going to get out of debt?” to one of optimism, “what opportunities does this present me?”
Here are 6 optimistic approaches to coach yourself towards developmental solutions to your life challenges and work issues:
1) Think big, take a chance.
2) Ask yourself, what does this make possible?”
3) Be aware of the patterns.
4) Take action.
5) Write down your goals.
6) Share ideas with a generous listener… … and then some more.
1) Think Big, Take a Chance.
One of the biggest fears in life is fear itself. So why dwell on fear? The optimist’s approach would be to look for what works and for what she personally can get out of the situation.
Achieving goals starts with advancing your ideas – in sharing them – first with yourself and then with another person and others. But think big. You may say to yourself, “I want to sell 100 units in 100 days.” Expanding the door to opportunities and create a realm of probabilities that you can achieve. Next, take steps to articulate those goals and to share them.
Why share them? Take a chance to allow others to give you feedback to help you better shape those ideas/dreams/goals, to reinforce that message in your own ear for your brain to continue to develop.
2) Ask yourself, “What does this make possible?”
Weifling states that the optimist’s mindset seeks positive change or outcome of an experience. The key is positive or developmental. One way to develop that winner’s mindset is to seek opportunity in the midst of chaos.
Think of something troubling you right now. Are you trying looking to:
a) win the game?
b) make a positive change?
c) develop a solution to the problem or challenge before you?
d) find yourself out of the position you are in?
e) find that which inspires you?
If you are, ask yourself, “What does my current situation or problem make possible?”
Think about it.
Then say aloud, “What does this make possible?” The key is to allow yourself to be open to what presents itself in solution.
3) Be Aware of the Patterns.
Developing a basis of positive patterns, of ideas, of thoughts and activities and stimuli, we can program our brains to seek other like patterns in the world around us. Actually we can reprogram the brain to see, to perceive.
The brain is a pattern recognition device that tends to see what we like. The brain is capable of recognizing more than 10,000,000 million bits of information per second, though it distills it down to 30 or 40 for us to actually pay attention to.
The trick is to know the goal we seek to achieve and then articulate it. Once conceived, this idea can now take shape in thought and be recognized in the world around us as we continue to shape it on paper as a “thing to do” and in life with others to continue to get feedback on that idea to help define its shape.
4) Take Action
Decide to advance your idea, your thought, your dream or goal.
Form a clear commitment to action. This helps clarify our goals and change our perception of our future realities.
Thus, if we can see it we can achieve it. Though only if we can see it mentally and give it voice, give it permission to exist.
With these actions we create our own realities, and set off the rhythms to tickle the universe to conspire against what we would have otherwise thought to be “our better judgment” in order to bring our imagined goal to life.
5) Write down your Goals.
Put them on paper, your palm, or blog. Rid your mind of the idea before it becomes the mental detritus of your imagination on the road to your dreams. Think of it as a dream deferred in your own mind that will explode into existence on given voice and shared.
This step to creating a pattern of “recognizing one’s own ideas around you” sets off an auto feedback cycle that will resonate in your brain to “visualize like patterns” for the brain to identify.
The goal is for you to recognize these “clues” to follow and to become attracted to them, thus, creating your own reality by continually observing it. Something along the quantum principles of Schrödinger’s cat.
Remember the brain can perceive more than 10,000,000 million bits of info per second? An optimist asks herself “what else am I missing” in order to be more receptive to increasing your probable alternative solutions?
6. Articulate your Goals.
Say it out loud. Say them out loud. Yes, read aloud what you have written, blogged, sketched, coded, photographed or composed. Give it voice so your brain can hear it and then allow it to decide what to do with it.
7. Find a generous listener… … and then some more.
Share your idea to acquire continual feedback and thus, to bring it into existence. Literally giving it shape for you to find patterns of that idea in the world. And then follow those things that resonate with like frequency to attract the desired qualities of your goal an thus create it.
In short, I see coaching as a way to guide someone towards their imagination. Literally getting a person to create a mental image of what needs to be achieved; “the Goal”, their articulated “what if?” or aspiration.
It is also a way to get us to wake up to something that really inspires us; whether its laying dormant somewhere in our psyche or lying there right in front of us. The trick it allowing ourselves to become more aware, articulating a goal or dream once discovered and take steps to move toward its vision.
I see it as quantum mechanics at a personal level. A person’s life path like a moving particle only comes into existence once we observe it and then articulate it in validation of what we have observed.
The state of the art of coaching yourself to new achievements or realities is playing the optimistic observer in your own professional and personal existence, to play “witness” to the improbable distribution of your own idea of your reality and to be open to seek out and to attract the possibilities that present themselves in our life’s activities which can guide us with measurable steps towards our articulated improbable goals.
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