International Teaching Seminars Blog

Having been asked to write a regular column for Resource I found myself thinking about resources generally - and what might be the most important resource of all.

I think our ultimate resource is consciousness. How we use this resource will determine what is possible for us. What we choose to pay attention to focuses out consciousness in one direction rather than another. And, of course, this can help or hinder us depending on what we’re wanting to accomplish and what we focus on.

So much of my adult life has been about learning and developing means that can make this process directing attention easy and effective – for myself and others. This is how I became interested in both NLP and Coaching. During the 1990’s it became obvious to me that if you combined the best of NLP and Coaching you would have a formidable way of supporting people in focusing their attention and achieving change.

The original attraction of NLP for me was that I could be contributing to a field that celebrated, unpacked and then made available what really worked. If, as with NLP, the focus of your attention is excellence and working with a person’s natural way of functioning, you can achieve amazing things.

This is particularly true if the practitioner doesn’t get in the way. So part of my work has involved developing formats and tools that achieve as seamless an interface as possible between a practitioner and somebody who wants to effect change.

Coaching is above all about deciding where you will focus you attention and what you will make happen. As a coach you create an opportunity for people to engage with themselves so they can shape their experience rather than just being at the receiving end of it. In this way coaching fosters a self-reflexive intelligence – that is to say, for a little while your attention is not so focused ‘out there’. Instead you turn the spotlight of your attention back on yourself to clarify and address what is of most importance to you. So coaching is primarily about learning rather than teaching.

For some years I experimented with different ways of intergrating these two extrodinary complementary approaches. Gradually the way of harvesting the best of both became clear. Then it became possible through ITS to start offering a full scale certification programme in NLP Coaching accredited by the International Coaching Federation. This is now in its seventh year and attracts people from all over the world.

Cycles of Attention

What you pay attention to will fundamentally shape your life. Where you put your attention Where you put your attention is a choice – but many people are unaware of how much mileage they could get from refocusing their attention. Our attention naturally oscillates between turning inward inwards and turning outwards. However, people often show a bias over time for one of these. In our culture they often seem to be engaged with the outward stroke more than the inward stroke of attention. Taken to the extreme this can produce some pretty unpleasant – and unintended – consequences. Indeed, at the extreme, I think it is true to say that there is a vicious cycle of attention and a virtuous cycle of attention. Ideally we want a balance. It’s worth considering which describes how to live at the moment. Here’s how they work…

Vicious Cycle of Attention

A vicious cycle means I tend to have my attention externally focused most of the time and that means I do not pay too much attention to internal signals. Because I don’t pay much attention to my internal signals, if I remove external stimuli my life is flat and boring. On the other hand, if I have just the same external stimuli, over time they do not really do it for me. So I have to turn up the voltage. The vicious cycle means you require an ever increasing amount of external stimulation, just to maintain the same level of interest and excitation as previously, and over time that is really hard to sustain. You end up with your head proverbially in the speakers at the concert, because nothing else really gets to you. The more that happens the more deaf you become to the internal signals and to the internal pleasures, because they may be of a more subtle nature. If you are deaf to these, you’re going to be less aware of the messages, the signals from within that let you know when you’re on track or off track and that tell you ‘more of this, less of that.’ Too much of this and you become more out of touch with yourself, you begin to lose some sense of you; where you are going, what really does it for you, what you are about and what can bring you joy. But you are healthy enough to want joy – so you settle for its cousins, pleasure and excitation, because at least these give you some sensation of being alive. To me this is rather like describing the life of an addict. You have to keep upping the dosage but actually you are experimenting diminishing returns. That’s the vicious cycle.

Virtuous Cycle of Attention

In the virtuous cycle, you begin to pay attention to your internal experience and you find that there is rather a lot of it. Some of it you like, and maybe some of it you don’t like. But you don’t run away from yourself: you know that, in truth, it’s not really possible because as the song says ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ So you begin to acknowledge your internal experience and you begin to find that certain thing you do on the outside bring greater joy than others. As you find yourself going more in the direction you also begin to trust your internal signals more, because they keep delivering. And you begin to have more of what you like in life because you are creating it . You trust yourself. Your inner self begins to flourish because it has your attention and respect. So what you are doing is building a relationship with yourself. As this happens you become someone who begins to have more presence because there is more of you to be present. And as you have more presence, so people begin to have a sense of who you are and what you stand for. Then you begin to attract people towards you, which means you don’t need to spend your time frantically running around the world saying, ‘look at me, look at me.’ You may also begin to that a lot of people don’t necessarily engage with you, but then there are other key people who do and you’re engaging with them because they are the right people for you to engage with. In short, you now have attractor properties. In systems terms this is a reinforcing loop: because you know this works you do more of it. And so you keep developing the wisdom you have within.

Practical Hint

You can chose which style you adopt. If you want to get more familiar with the inward stroke of attention all you need to do is begin to pay attention to your own experience. And you can do this in so many way anytime you’re ready – you’ll find lots of practical hints on how to get started in Your Inner Coach. But for now just take something really mundane. For instance, whatever you ate last, did it work for you? Does it feel right now or not? Was it satisfying or not? Notice what experience you’ve created for yourself. Almost anything can be a place to begin this process. All it requires is some cultivation of self-reflexive. Instead of all your attention going outwards, you turn it around and you begin to pay attention to your own experience. In the same way you cultivate the art of asking powerful questions of yourself, you will have a way of engaging with yourself that is truly profound.

The Quest

Here is one of many place where NLP and coaching begin to come together in very obvious ways. One of the absolutely fundermental elements of coaching is asking good questions. Not just any old question, but asking the right question at the right time – and then just shutting up. There is an art to asking a really good question and that art comes from understanding what a question does. As every NLP practitioner knows, whenever you ask someone a question, you send them on an internal search. That is because they cannot even understand the question – let alone answer it – unless they understand what it means. To do this they will necessarily need to access their own experience. However, if you want to understand what is going on when you ask a powerful question, you just have to look at the etymology of the word. If it’s a really good question it has the potential to send a person on just that, a quest.

A quest is an exploration, a journey. It is not just moving from A to B. There is more opening, and more questioning, and more questioning, involved and that’s part of a mindset that characterises any really good NLP practitioner or coach. You are questioning, you are open; you don’t know and you don’t have to know. You are not trying to demonstrate that you have the answers. In this way you also avoid jumping to premature conclusions. You can live with the mystery of life while at the same time having practical tools for moving forward.

In the months ahead I look forward to exploring the mystery and sharing some of the tools with you.