Predictive Method? Stage I: Unblock

People come to me because they’re stuck. They know the consequences of being stuck; they come to me talking about business issues, romantic problems, dietary habits, existential anguish, sleepless nights, and more. They come to me talking about the products of being stuck, all the ways in which their lives are stalling.

What they often don’t tell me is why they’re stuck. They may know that they’re not as productive as they can be, as open-hearted as they could be, as healthy as they ought to be, but they don’t exactly know why. They know the right choices, they can describe them in great detail — but they feel unable to make them.?

The first stage of my Predictive Method, Unblock, is dedicated to addressing this issue. Like a physician performs tests to asses a patient and make a diagnosis, I spend the initial portion of every new relationship determining why my clients are stuck.?

I do this by listening closely to words. Language builds our worlds; the words we use create the worlds we inhabit. Since I can remember, my life has been about harnessing the power of words, digging down to their roots, and understanding what they do. The goal of the Unblock stage is to help my clients to do the same.?

Our Universe of Letters

Our subconscious minds — bless them — are simple. They don’t have the power to distinguish between negatives and positives; if we say we don’t want to think about trains, they will feed us images of trains. If we say we don’t want to feel stressed out, they will seize on the word “stress,” and make stress the wallpaper of our waking hours.?

It’s not just us. Japanese scientist Dr. Masaru Emoto famously detailed the impact of language on nonhuman matter, demonstrating how water molecules changed shape when exposed to different messages. Messages of kindness and gratitude produced symmetrical molecular structures, while messages of criticism and negativity threw the molecules into disarray.?

Whether revealed by the lenses and mirrors of a microscope or felt acutely in the human heart, it’s abundantly clear that words have energy. Words are messengers of meaning, and the meaning we — consciously or not — convey to ourselves determines the quality of our lives.

So, the first step of the Unblock process is asking my clients powerful, open-ended questions and listening to how they answer. I ask them questions like:

• What’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now?
• What is your earliest memory of experiencing success?
• When was the first time you can remember being stuck?

I then listen very carefully to their answers. There are several levels to how a person answers a question. There is the thing they’re trying to say, there are the words they use, and there is the logical framework that undergirds their comments. This last piece is the one I’m most interested in; I call it their success process.

Diagrams of Success

Renowned speaker Simon Sinek attributes the phrase, “How you do one thing is how you do everything,” to Zen Buddhists. Others variously attribute it to business leaders, authors, leadership advisors, and more. While the source is indeterminate, the phrase is omnipresent, and its meaning has everything to do with my Predictive Method’s Unblock stage.

“How you do everything,” in my universe, refers to the success process. We all apply our success processes to challenges of all sizes — how we make our beds, how we do our jobs, how we envision our futures, how we work toward peace of mind.

Success processes come in different shapes. Some people — me, for example — are recursive, and apply mental Venn diagrams to the challenges we face. Others use flow charts, others use the fishbone project management shape, others yet use some elegant combination. I have one client/friend whose success process is a series of objectives arranged in a circle, with flow charts expressed in each objective.?

By listening closely to the words my clients use, I learn how they arrange information. I learn how they sort it into categories, sequence it temporally, prioritize problem areas, and assess it all qualitatively. This matrix of data (“words are data” is a personal mantra) and data-scaffolding constitutes a person’s success process.

Language is how one mind syncs up with another. It’s how we sort our worlds into manageable fragments, and it’s how we assess the danger, delight, and direness of each one. By developing a rich understanding of my clients’ language habits, I gain foundational insights into who they are. I learn what self-talk is ruling their minds. I hear the childhood tapes that play on an endless loop in their brains. I see the limiting beliefs that act as needless obstacles between where they are and where they want to be.?

I illustrate their success processes, and together, we determine the exact point at which they’re stuck.

The Levels of Awareness

Within all of us, there are three levels of awareness: what we know, what we don’t know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. The third level is the one I call our “blind spots” — the areas of our lives that we’ve gotten used to not seeing. Maybe they cause us pain. Maybe they undermine our egos. Maybe they’re just behind us, in awkward places that are hard to crane our necks and see. Whatever the case, my objective in the Unblock stage is to shine a light into these areas and see what unfriendly forces lurk therein.

I’ve listened to tens of thousands of answers to powerful, open-ended questions. I’ve developed a list of 230 emotions that color people’s responses, and 125 limiting beliefs that keep from realizing the heights of their ambitions. I’ve learned to see what my clients have trained themselves not to see, hear the voices they take for granted, and view them as beings whose underlying systems need help.

The Unblock stage is all about discovering your success process and figuring out which of its elements is ailing. Once we do that, we can transition to stage II, Unlock, in which we bring about the fundamental shift.