Using Solution Focused-Vedic Coaching

A paradox is something (a statement, a situation) that appears to be self-contradictory or absurd, yet is actually valid or true. The Gestalt understanding of change was developed by Arnold Beisser, who defined the process this way: The Gestalt practitioner “believes change does not take place by ‘trying,’ coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpretation, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when the [client] abandons, at least for the moment, what he would like to become and attempts to be what he is.” That is, authentic change begins with full acceptance of and investment in one’s current state of being rather than the dogged, cognitive pursuit of a desired future state.

NLP/AI oriented Traditional coaching is transitional and future focussed and individual oriented. The feeling is client has all the power and capablity to progress in life by optimising his resources.

A transcendental Vipashi coach lives moment to moment without attachment of wanting to be more. As he gives attention to the present he lives in a sense of wonderment of love, compassion and inner knowing.

His total presence here and now with no inner conflict by leading a life of total surrender of what it is helps him dance to the moment.

As Thomas Leonard has emphasised 'being over responding to the present'. In Gestalt language the focus is on " Here and Now" and not on what ought to be or what could be.

A coach does not fake anything or bothered about personal branding of being a guru.

A coach subsumes himself to the need of client in a no ego state. He is your Sarathi or Sakha as in Mahabharat Krishna took a lesser stance by treating Arjun as the supreme commander a coach seats in a lower ego state.

The stance is I am not a guru, the guru is within the client.

It is a wife or mother’s stance of totally surrendering to husband or son/daugther for their welfare. And working ceaselessly for the family.

When coaches surrenders to present with self-acceptance and love he lives in a world of total awareness of here and now. He is neither futuristic nor past focused, he is in a neutral state of non-attached dancing to the moment being Lord Shiva.

In the state of awareness and stillness of being nobody, he is able to notice every subtle move of the environment.

Embrace What You Have: How did I discover my acres of Diamond

Modern day life is demanding. The more we want, the more

In 2016, fresh from another dissappoint and premature resignation in an assignment in Meghalaya, my life was in dire straits. Especially surviving the burden of dissappointing my children again. Whaen I was alone at home through out the day, shame and guilt is the two strong negative powers that was engulfing me.

In the month of Feb, I decided to focus just on counting number 1000-1, which was kind of a practice I had developed during my struggling days after graduation and had helped me immensely.

After some times I started counting my breathing. All of a sudden, I felt I became a better person and felt more grounded. I started writing articles and started posting in Linkedin. My writing consumed my time. Then I started practicing Hatha Yoga and went for a Vipasana camp.

I have been a fortunate person to have got the right mentors at right time. Who provided me the right guidance. Secondly my self directed approach to life long learning helped me greatly achieve early success in career.

Maxwell Maltz and Napoleon Hill's writing was the source that fueled my ambition. As a matter of fact

Coaching is playing a bigger game in low cost way..

????????Getting extra-ordinary results by being the best where ever you are with what you have

????????Effortless effort through non-doing, on-action by not fighting the flow of the river

????????Funnelling resources, knowledge and network towards a singular purpose

????????Discovering hidden assets by asking right questions i.e. can dos.

????????Finding the baby step towards your impossible dream

????????Embodying the inner knowing i.e. skills and habits that produce desired result.

The learning begins with you, exploring your own blind spots, unconscious habits and inherited belief systems that are not serving the path you are creating for the future. You will discover limiting attitudes, perspectives, assumptions and beliefs similar to what likely showed up when you were building your Life Map and Business Map.?This course will expand and deepen your understanding and provide a framework for perceiving and transforming limitations that your clients experience in their lives.

Deepen skills to listen for meaning; noticing judgment and transforming it to unleash your natural curiosity; ask unconditional questions that activate innate creativity; uncover and surrender limiting beliefs.

A centered coach speaks less and listens more. They can “dance in the moment” effortlessly, going wherever the client needs to go, no matter how unexpected. They are not attached to outcome, but are focused on results. A centered coach can shift into new directions, but remains grounded in structure and the foundations of coaching. Such a coach has no need to impress or appear powerful. They don’t work at being powerful, yet they are. Centered coaches do not push their own agenda, yet they do not collude with their clients either. They know when to push, to confront, and have the courage to do so. They also know the power of yielding.

Using Solution Focused Coaching in Assisting Your Client to Move Themselves Out of a Story

?It’s?your ability to assimilate, learn and digest large chunks of information quickly?that could?make or break your business.

How to do things in least amount of effort

A Case against Harvard

Ever wondered how Baba Ramdev could build such a huge business empire. And how businessman turned yogi like Sadguru has such command over language and audience. Baba Ramdev is a multi billionaire business man today and more no of CEOs flock to Sadguru’s annual conclave than any conclave by top B-schools.

Neither of them went to Harvard or did a Dale Carnegie Public speaking course. Nevertheless these are the people who are invited to top universities as well as business forums to understand their success secrets.

If you ask Ramdev for advise, he will simply tell you to practice Kapalvati, a simple yogic practice. And Sadguru has his Samhavi Mudra.

Maharshi held sway over thousands during his life time with his Transcendental meditation practices and by far the biggest influencers amongst the yogis. Deepak Chopra, Sri Sri Ravisankar and Beetles of the Rock and Roll fame are his disciples.

What are these practices that has created a phenomenon such as Hippie movement being popularised by Beetles songs.

If you are a non-believer of yogic mantras, ask Oprah or Tom Cruise. They are the die hard practitioners of TM.

Apple founder Steve Jobs a yogic practitioner, attributed his success to yogi practices. Amongst the current leaders Indian Prime Minister is a yogic practitioner. Both Jobs and Modi spend a more than a year in Himalyas in their teens.

A simple exercise for you

Where ever you are just close your eyes. Focus on your breathing. I am not asking to recite any mantra. Just start counting your breathing till thousand. Magic will start happening. Do it for 21 days. And Share your experience with your family

What we think we create, what we feel we attract and what we imagine we become- Gautam Buddha

Imagine you are in a new world of abundance ruled by love and compassion and you have not to struggle for any necessity or compete for any job. You are abundantly happy as you have everything what you want. Your daily involvement with the work gives you happiness as in this world work is your passion and not a compulsion. You are full of gratitude for being god’s creation and being part of this thriving world.

Learn to become still and take attention away from what you don’t want and place your attention to what you wish to experience. You have the extraordinary ability to accomplish everything you choose and you want.

Now open your eyes look for your best talent, what can bring the best in you today. How do you express love to your dear and near ones? Flirt with your life by being little coquettish. Little over do the positives. Act as if you are having a great time. Say good bye to misery and enjoy being who are.

Your acres of diamond are within you and you can attract the wealthy life you deserve.

You need not go to Himalayas to be a yogi. Being a yogi is accepting the present, expressing gratitude for what you have and living with love and compassion. You can become that by being at home and even at while being at work place.

Take a Leap of Faith and Surpass your Dreams through Coaching

Life is not about reaching your goals alone. Chandragupt had Chanakya/Modi has Shah. Results are harder to achieve, and the process is prolonged, when you are working on your goals by yourself

If you look at models of learning... with new skills, a book has a retention rate and a success rate of about 7%. Tapes have a success rate of about 20%. Seminars about 25%. There is one mode or method of learning that has almost 100% certainty, and that's the equivalent of a mentorship or an apprenticeship where you're put through the paces... you're given an assignment. " they check your results out, they adjust your method, correct it, enhance it and advance it- Marketing Guru Jay Abraha

Can we create a new and more hopeful future by sitting down together and talking about what we truly care about - our worries, our hopes, what brings us joy..really listening with our hearts and our minds to others whose viewpoint is different from our own? This is precisely what Margaret Wheatley proposes in her book,- Turning to One Another

According to research by Centre for Creative Leadership, there is 10 percent development through training/reading books, further 20 percent development occurs when you participate in a peer group forum and another 70 percent development occurs when the executive is assigned a work based stretch project.

Coaching provides customised solutions to leadership development. Coaching today is considered to provide 100 percent ROI for growing leadership in the organisation and slowly replacing generalised training. A coach helps leaders grow an individual development plan through 70-20-10 path. The coach becomes a learning partner of leader and helps the client in a non-guru fashion.

The no-guru fashion is a total surrender to the client's need and withholding the teaching or directive mode of providing solutions and adopting a non-directive attentive mode by being totally present to the client's need and help him find his own solutions. Being non-directive or non judgemental means letting go your desire to share your thoughts and subsuming your need to be somebody to the client's agenda. Coaching presence is being invisible and being gently irreverent.

Coach helps the client to make his problems, challenges, and opportunities to become more manageable with constraints by?letting him make the best out of what he has.

?Coaching is not a helping profession. It is an assisting profession.

Coaching is a creating a self directed learning approach for a client and a super cool way of being successful by having a Helicopter view.

A coach helps the client by noticing what he is not noticing and help him in changing the viewing, changing the doing and amplifying existing resources:

1. Remove Blocks i.e. mental models, self created limitations and assumptions that deters him from achieving potential.

2. Strengthen?what he has i.e. Being the best where ever he is with what he has by designing controllable?baby steps

3.Attracting more of what he wants by following a path of least resistance.

4. Sharpen the Saw i.e. Design his own path of learning by utilising low cost existing resources such as Visualisation, Affirmations and Meditation

A coach dances to clent's agenda by asking empowering questions to evoke kind to find creative solutions. Coach treats the client as the master of his own self development process. In a way it is a non-dualist way( taught by Ramana Maharshi) of non-judgemental listening to the client's story in total silence to observe and becoming a co-partner to the client's solution.

“Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.”??~Ramana Maharshi.

A?coach helps client develop Self Awareness i.e.“Identifies for the client his/her underlying concerns, typical and fixed ways of perceiving himself/herself and the world, differences between the facts and the interpretation, disparities between thoughts, feelings and actions.”

As a International Coach Federation certified professional coach and a trainer, I had to face several difficulties before becoming a certified coach. The real problem was:

SADLY, 90 PERCENT OF COACH CERTIFICATION IS BASED ON LIFE COACHING AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE NEED OF BUSINESS LEADERSHIP AND 2-4 DAY TRAINING ON ASSESSMENT AND IDP SOLUTIONS OFFERED BY MNC CONSULTING COMPANIES/ CONSULTING BIG NAMES?DO NOT REPRESENT REAL NEED OF EASTERN WORLD.?

And most?life coaching programs provide exposure to transitional approach to coaching rather than a transformational approach of coaching the whole person. Furthermore when coaches come from diverse business/technical background,?lack of behavioral science and theory exposure stands in the way of development as a coach.

I am currently designing a 125 hour Coach Certificate Program to develop coaches for organisations.It will be a one stop solution for?ICF Accreditation Pathway to Cutting Edge Leadership Coaching: Coaching Executives, Business Leaders, and Emerging Leaders.

The program is a deep dive into strength based behavioural science concepts and theories and?offers a unique approach to coaching your clients.??And Strength based solution focused coaching approach emphasises on focusing client's strength.

"By dwelling on the causes of problems we often perpetuate and exaggerate them. Over-engaging in self-reflection and focusing on problems actually makes us feel worse. By looking for solutions we immediately shift the emphasis from the past to the future. From why to how to. Sometimes, the how to question can be answered by noticing what’s already working and doing more of that

A tremendous ‘knowing’?comes effortlessly into the mind when it falls into Silence, …?When we allow this knowing into our minds, our very lives become as clear and startling as this knowing.”?~ Robert Rabbin

“Devote yourself here and now to the search for the Truth that is ever within you.”?~ Ramana Maharshi

“Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.”??~Ramana Maharshi.

"What you resist persists" or "what you give energy to is what you manifest"- Viktor Frank

What is enquiry?

There is the enquiry advocated by Sri Ramana Maharishi.?

No matter what arises, ask who is aware of that and remain as that which is aware.

There is the enquiry of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.?

See how you function, watch the motives and results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself, by inadvertence.

We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

Byron?Katie? . The 4 questions and turn around. Is it true??

Can you absolutely know that it's true? (Yes or no.)

How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought??

Who would you be without the thought?

Somatic Enquiry. Noticing the sensations and the automatic responses to the sensations and how that all functions.

By dwelling on the causes of problems we often perpetuate and exaggerate them. Over-engaging in self-reflection and focusing on problems actually makes us feel worse. By looking for solutions we immediately shift the emphasis from the past to the future. From why to how to. Sometimes, the how to question can be answered by noticing what’s already working and doing more of that-Solution Focused Coaching

Sometimes our clients get caught up in a story they are telling themselves, either about themselves, others, or their situation.?They may say something like, “I need a big win. Things just aren’t going my way.”

A coach can challenge the seeming truth of the story by asking a question such as,?“What do you feel is going your way and what do you feel isn’t?”?This could begin to move the client forward out of their story and uncover awareness about themselves and their interpretation of events. And it can free the client from the global absolutism of that interpretation.

Let’s face it. We human beings have a tendency to often exaggerate events to make us look better than others, or even to make us feel worse (i.e. guilty, not good enough…..)

It’s really challenging to change what you’re not aware of!

Once we have awareness about a behavior or way of thinking, we can start to consider different ways to think and act instead.?As coaches, one important way that we add value to our clients is by assisting them to gain awareness quicker, in order to make different choices around how to respond.

The ICF Core Competency of “Creating Awareness” gives us clues on how to coach

The Creating Awareness core competency has a sub-point (c) that provides a lot of clues as to what we coaches can do to help our client move out of the loop or story they may be in.

Sub-point c says [the coach]?“Identifies for the client his/her underlying concerns, typical and fixed ways of perceiving himself/herself and the world, differences between the facts and the interpretation, disparities between thoughts, feelings and actions.”

An Example

Maybe your client says something that seems to conflict with something else they say: In a coaching session,?with Madhab, he says” I am a spiritual person, I believe in spirituality and I love music’ and then he proceeds “ I do not like people with ego who attach success with money, that is why I run away from this place. I wanted to ask, you what should I do where should I go”? He further says “ I do not feel like eating, I feel sick and just sleep for hours. When I find time, I read Bhagwat Geeta”.

As a coach we must not be attached to client’s emotion and fall into the trap of his invitation to suggest and give expert opinion on where should he go. The man seems to be caught various contradicting viewpoints. As a coach immediately we should be caught on being judgemental towards this person, who seems to be running away and scarred of life by being caught on a story while preaching the virtues of Bhagwat Geeta.

As coaches, we are unattached or uninvolved in their situation, so we have the ability to???observe our client’s behavior, and emotions. We can even take a ‘birds-eye view’ and see the ‘whole’ picture as presented so far by the client, and make observations back to our client or ask them questions.

There are two key factors involved in solution-focused work 1) changing the viewing – that is, helping the coachee to see the situation anew, and 2) changing the doing – that is, helping the coachee to develop new behaviours. Changing the viewing is about acknowledging the progress made so far; identifying exceptions to the problem; detailing the preferred outcome; amplifying existing resources; and building coachee self-efficacy.

Changing the doing is about recognizing possibilities by turning presenting problems into springboards for solution construction; asking ‘how’ questions instead of ‘why’ questions; generating coachee-centred multiple options; using small specific achievable action steps; and finding ways to leverage systems to facilitate individual change.

This is a non-exhaustive list of solution-focused tools and techniques to help change the viewing and the doing:

?????????A refusal to purchase the problem.

?????????Compliments.

?????????Exceptions to the problem.

?????????Do less of what doesn’t work.

?????????Scaling.

?????????Small steps.

?????????Highlighting resources.

?????????Possibility language-– ‘If things were going a bit better, what would be different?’

?????????Reframing that highlights exceptions. Coachee: ‘I really loath my work. ’Coach: ‘It sounds very unpleasant tell me, which parts of your job are less unpleasant for you?’

?????????Keep looking for nuggets every day. Nuggests are those moments when things are doing really well.

To bring awareness to his ‘underlying concerns’

?????????Mohan, what is your concern here?

?????????It seems something else is bothering you more?

To bring awareness to his ‘typical or fixed ways of perceiving himself and the world’

?????????What is the meaning of being spiritual to you?

?????????Do you mean, having money is not being spiritual?

To bring awareness to ‘the differences between the facts and the interpretation’

?????????Mohan, what are the facts here?

?????????Is there any particular person here whose behaviour bothers you?

?????????Is there anything you are running away from?

?????????What is the story you are making about the people here?

?????????What is the story that you’re caught up in right now?

?????????What are the evidence you have about people of this area being egoistic?

To bring awareness to ‘disparities between thoughts, feelings and actions’

Of course, there are many, many more questions and observations you could ask besides the examples given.

Something to Reflect On

Consider the following.?What is the story you may be living in, about yourself, your coaching, or your clients? What might you use your coach for to help you gain awareness, and uncover your ‘story?’

Issac Assimov

“Life is what happens whilst we are busy making other plans.”- John Lennon

Coaching is Exploring the distinction between teaching and inviting to what you have always known, but was hidden by the way the mind and nervous system function?

Being THAT in which "here" and all of manifestation appears, including the sense of "I" and everyone.

Most of us have a conditioned habit of focusing our attention, in a way that produces a sense of me and another, subject / object.

The use of language turns living processes into nouns and then we look out and see a thing and it seems like we get the info of what we are looking at from outside.

If you would like to try an experiment, relax your eyes and imagine they are holes and that light of everything is effortlessly pouring in

Notice that what is seen is an experience to you and that all experience appears in awareness. Now notice that the info is coming from inside. Enjoy!

Coach as a minimalist

A coach if attaches his value to the accoutrement such as toys, dress, watches, his mind starts wondering for more. Living in the philosophy of less is more allows him to take the path of least resistance.?

A transcendental coach lives moment to moment without attachment of wanting to be more. As he gives attention to the present he lives in a sense of wonderment of love, compassion and inner knowing.

His total presence here and now with no inner conflict by leading a life of total surrender of what it is helps him dance to the moment.

As Thomas Leonard has emphasised 'being over responding to the present'.

A coach does not fake anything or bothered about personal branding of being a guru.

A coach subsumes himself to the need of client in a no ego state. He is your Sarathi or Sakha as in Mahabharat Krishna took a lesser stance by treating Arjun as the supreme commander a coach seats in a lower ego state.

The stance is I am not a guru, the guru is within the client.

It is a wife or mother’s stance of totally surrendering to husband or son/daugther for their welfare. And working ceaselessly for the family.

When coaches surrenders to present with self-acceptance and love he lives in a world of total awareness of here and now. He is neither futuristic nor past focused, he is in a neutral state of non-attached dancing to the moment being Lord Shiva.

In the state of awareness and stillness of being nobody, he is able to notice every subtle move of the environment.

Process Coaching

Coaching is not just about goals and action steps. It’s about the person’s own experiencing of their life as it intersects with this world.?There is continually a lot to integrate. There is also so much growth that is possible. The authors of Co-Active Coaching (2012) explain that?“Process coaching focuses on the internal experience, on what is happening in the moment. The goal of process coaching is to enhance the ability of clients to be aware of the moment and to name it… Sometimes the most important change happens at the internal level and may even be necessary before external change can take place.”

These authors also urge us to?look at feelings as information rather than symptoms. Our inescapable humanness demands that we accept the fact that we are emotional beings. Recent research confirms that our decision-making processes draw upon feelings 60% of the time rather than logic.?Part of the coaching journey is to assist our clients in sorting out their feelings so they can make the best decisions possible.?That may mean acknowledging the validity and importance of certain feelings like?when a client decides to live according to their values of closeness with their family and turns down the job offer that would keep them on the road most of the month.