Friday 5 October 2012

Coaching the mind

The point of contact between the coaching exercise and the individual is mind. This is a bit tricky, because "mind" lacks an objective description. The mind is thoroughly subjective and there's no getting past, around or through that. My take on "mind" is that it's the combination of emotion, cognition and volition. Patterns of all these are established consciously, unconsciously, intra-vidiaully (this is my word, nobody else can take it) socially and ecologically.

Coaching your mind is less academic than coaching the mind, and that's the real difference between formal and non-formal education. In formal education your results are the goal; in non-formal edcuation your formation is the purpose.

Most minds don't like to analyze too much, and generally stop before enough exploration gets going. Coaching employs many methods to assist minds to take easy steps to recognize what they're doing, what they have done for a long time, what they do that goes nowhere, and what they could do to enjoy themselves a bit more and add fruitfulness to the world.

I'm not sure about the extent to which people experience themselves as mind. Daily habits create patterns of intellectual focus: we think about our work, and thus we become agents of our work. Our intra-vidual comfort zone is fine until random experience changes that, and that's disturbing and how we deal with it depends on the greater patterns that we've learnt to set up or not set up. If we've coached ourselves adequately from previous experience, we have resilience. Going along with all this is the greater impetus of volition: decisions we have made that set us on a path until we change direction.

Thus, coaching mind is highly specific. The coach has to be with the mind, minds-on, recognising, honouring, challenging, doing whatever is required to make mind move in a desired direction.

That's why, if you don't know what you desire, you're in the very early stages of being a candidate for coaching.

You have to be alive at least unto yourself, if you want to feel desire. It's quite weird how some folk refuse to connect intra-vidually. The railway lines that can go to work, order coffee and buy clothes are all fine, and the ones that ask why expectations are not met and why prejudices are allowed and why ignorance is promoted are seldom connected, so no passengers go to these stations.

The mind is free. Let's take away the usual linguistic signals and make a more pithy statement: freedom is mind, and that's why if it becomes enslaved in any way, you'll feel it.

I think we all do, we just don't go there to any depth, because what do you do with that realization? Reality bites. Hegemony rules. But then again, as St Paul discovered, you can't kick against the goads. And ironically, freedom is a goad. It won't let your mind sleep until you embrace it, and embracing freedom involves becoming free, free in yourself, and as free as you can be in a world that needs your energy to free it up for better things than chain it to a wall of our own making.

Biofocusing involves allowing free focus of and in the mind. When intent, desire, decision and action are one, I'm not sure whether we move towards the object of attention, or whether it moves towards us, but movement there is, and the meeting happens. Separating intra-vidual, individual, social and spiritual mind can't really be done. It's a theoretical exercise. All the time, for all creation, we're in a field of connectedness and whether we call it a field, mind, holism or heaven, we're to go with the freedom it entails. Otherwise we're kicking against the goads. And don't equate freedom with permssiveness, these two aren't the same at all. The demanding aspect of freedom is strict.

Coaching the mind finds easy steps to achieve this simple reminder. It begins with paying attention to what's happening intra-vidually, because all the information at this level is entirely yours and altogether accessible.



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