The goal of coaching,

Belief attachments, part 7
Reza Hossein Borr

Belief attachments will not allow you any major change.
The official coaches must realise the differences between religious beliefs and ordinary beliefs. A person is always entitled to hold and maintain his beliefs. If the person himself concludes that he needs some changes in his belief to improve his life that is something that a professional coach can help him with. For example, I know somebody who believes that having money corrupts people. Obviously this person has a despising belief for money in his mind. It is obvious that this person cannot be rich. He may not even be able to make sufficient money to have a decent living. There is the kind of beliefs that professional coach must help the other side to change.

You do not change yourself when you need it badly if you are too much attached to your beliefs. Beliefs can be held for hundreds of years, generations after generations. Not only we hold beliefs firmly but we transfer them firmly to others. Whatever is the result of our beliefs, we cannot change easily even if when we need it badly to change. These are not only the religious beliefs that are considered sacred, some other people consider ordinary beliefs as part of themselves and they say it is called me. I am all about my beliefs and if I do not hold that belief, I would not be the same. It is me. This is not the case. People can change their beliefs over and over and can be the same person. Beliefs can be changed and must be changed when they are not useful anymore.

Sometimes beliefs become part of our identity. This is a very dangerous situation. The identity of the people must be separated from their beliefs but this is not the case now. We identify people as Moslems, Christians, Jews and others. In fact people can change any other thing so easily but when it comes to changing religion everything becomes very difficult. Those religions which are general do leave room for change. Anyway in coaching we do not deal with religious beliefs. We only deal with ordinary beliefs that can remove some barriers from the away of progress and prosperity of the people. The coaches must realise this very important issue.

Wrong beliefs can be the source of immense problems and poverty. Belief attachments are more difficult than any other thing in life to change and they are source of more behaviours than any other thing. Those who are attached to much to their beliefs can become the product of their beliefs and you can see the embodiment of their beliefs in their lives. If their beliefs and opinions are constructive and productive, they usually have very fulfilling lives. If the beliefs are negative and out of dated opinions, then they make you part an out of dated world. Those people that you see on the streets and looked very odd present their beliefs in their appearances. The appearance of someone can show a lot of his beliefs. Whenever you talk about the negative results of the beliefs, they argue that the beliefs are sacred and nothing must change your beliefs.

Professional coaches usually do not touch religious beliefs are. They usually deal with the beliefs that are originated from political and soc-economic conditions. They know that people are attached to their religions because they were born in the religion. The people love to have their religion appreciated even if sometimes it is the source of discomfort for them and when this is the case, they usually blame themselves for what has got wrong and not their religion. This is the reason that the professional coaches must avoid any religious arguments. Anyway a coach must look for other beliefs and discover how they are the source of different difficulties that the person may suffer from.

It is up to the person to decide what he can do and what he wants to do with his beliefs. If the belief is limiting one he has the choice of changing it. But unless the belief is changed the resulting behaviour from the belief cannot be avoided.

People become attached to the beliefs physically, mentally and emotionally. The coach must act from within the world of the coachee so that his world is reflected and respected.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

The goal of coaching

Emotional attachments, part 6
Reza Hossein Borr

There are different kinds of attachments. Every attachment has a specific time of usefulness. Overstaying attachments can trigger meltdown for both sides. A very good example is the leaves of a tree that are supposed to be detached from it during the winter time. There are two kinds of trees: those that were supposed to abandon their yellow and dried leaves during the winter. If these trees do not abandon the leaves, they will be killed by the leaves. Those trees that are supposed to retain leaves, if they abandon the leaves, will be killed too. There are things to detach and let go and there are things to retain and endear. Detach yourself from what is not needed and the alternative will turn up automatically. The profession of the coach is to facilitate this process.

Emotional attachments

Emotional attachments can keep you in one spot for a long time to come. The emotional attachments are more difficult than others to get rid of. If you are emotionally attached to somebody and his attachment is not generating any useful and positive emotions in you, it is time to give up that attachment. But how can you detach yourself from emotional attachments that involve every sense of your being? The emotional attachments are not only to people but to animals, material things, and whatever you have internalised during many years.

The techniques that the coach must use for emotional detachment are different from the techniques that are used with other kind of attachments. The coach must persuade the client in this case to create new emotional relationships with other people, new people and new subjects that may be somehow similar to the previous experience or completely in contrast to them. If you recommend as a coach meeting people that were in contrast to the previous people, you will open not only different perspective which would be very useful in discovering and developing new alternatives.

It must be realised that to detach yourself emotionally from emotional matters is a challenging task. If you loved somebody some time ago and now that person is the source of hurt and trouble it is difficult to forget the moments that you had lovely memories with her or him.
I had a relative that I had nourished like my own brother as he was a classmate of my brother. As I saw him grow and in fact, I helped him in different ways: financially and emotionally to grow, I developed a lot of attachment to him. During the Iranian revolution when things have become extremely tough for me, he turned against me and he did whatever he could to endanger my life. I was so disappointed and so angry that I became sick but yet I was not able to detach myself emotionally from him. It took me many years to complete the process of detachment from him. I suffered all these years during this time when I was trying to detach myself. At the end I detached myself and felt enormous relief.

Emotional attachments are highly developed in the families especially to the children. The parents live for their children and they do whatever they can to make the lives of their children as much comfortable and successful as they can and when the children want to assert their own independence, it seems that the children are detaching themselves from parents who are totally attached to them. For the children it is a natural experience for the parents to love them, do everything they need, sacrifice their own lives and privileges for the children and at one stage, be prepared to let them go, detaching themeselves completely or partially. The parents who have put their complete whole in the children and in their welfare just cannot believe it that the children can be so much ungrateful. For the children it is not being ungrateful but it is being independent in order to survive independently in the world that needs their independent decisions.

The parents who are completely attached emotionally to the children feel a lot of pain to allow the children to move away fully or partially. Yet there is no any alternative for the children except to have the alternative of moving away. They still can keep the relationships with the parents closely in order to give and receive emotional backup. The children need emotional backup even when they are supposed to be completely independent. It is a two-way street. Sometimes the children begin the process of abandoning and sometimes the parents. Both of them need to learn how to detach themselves emotionally to reduce the level of pain.

Mutual emotional attachments can survive for a long time and can be extremely fruitful and one sided emotional attachment can cause immense pain and panic.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

The goal of coaching,

Detachment from the present states, behaviours, Part 5
Reza Hossein Borr

We do not think of alternatives because we are too attached to what we have, to what we say, to what we do, to what we think about and to what we feel about. That is why we need the help of a coach or a mentor. A great coach must facilitate change from the present attachments to future alternatives.

To begin thinking about discovering new alternatives and striving for having them we have to begin detaching ourselves from different things one by one. What we love obviously we cannot give up. But what is stack to us we can give up and we must give up. Sometimes what is not essentially part of us becomes part of us merely by repetition. While if we accumulate different things we can build on them and get more. Accumulation is not the same thing as attachment. Accumulation is about having more of what you like and keeping more of what you like and enjoying what you have and enjoying applying and using what you have. If you learn the art of accumulation it will stop you from sudden interruptions and even when you make major changes, the major changes would be accumulative and add new values to what you had before.

Give up to find new alternatives whatever that has lost its desired application. If it is something in you which has already expired there is no need for keeping it anymore. This mostly relates to behaviours, possessions, experiences, habits, beliefs, attitude, and established patterns that stop you from going forward and upward. The job of a coach is to facilitate having compelling alternatives that will facilitate detachment from issues which have been deeply internalised.

The other point is we must not be attached to something that is not necessarily useful to us. We have to think what attachment is not anymore useful and replace it with a new alternative. A coach needs to remember that a person gets stack and consequently, the coach has to enable him to move forward. If somebody is supposed to move forward, where he is supposed to move towards? If somebody comes with a problem, he looks for an alternative. The alternative therefore must be so much compelling that makes it easy for him to change. If somebody is attached to behaviour, it is difficult to persuade him to detach himself from the behaviour as it would not trigger thinking creatively in him the generation of a new compelling alternative. It is the attractiveness of the alternative that makes it easy for the person to detach himself from his attachment.

It is important to realise that sometimes people get attached even to pain and sickness. When pain or sickness serves an important purpose, the owner of the pain or sickness likes to retain them. You have seen people who are pessimistic about everything. They have strong attachment to pessimism. If you talk to them you see that pessimism serves them in the way that they want to be served, for example, when a pessimist says that a thing cannot be done, he excuses himself from taking any measure and effort. This person loves to be left alone in his own idle leisure. If somebody convinced him that thing can be done, it means that he must wake up early, leave the comfort of his home and go out in the crowd and do the work in an environment which may be very competitive and stressful.

He even may not have the skills for doing that and therefore, to avoid all these stressful efforts and situations, he just rejects the idea by saying that it could not done. It is also important to remember that when he says it could not be done, he talks of himself and not others. If he generalises the idea and says that it could not be done by anybody, again it does not mean that you and other people cannot do it. When he says that cannot be done, he talks of himself, not you, not me and not the rest.

People attach to something because that thing serves them in one way or another according to their own psychological makeup.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

The goal of coaching, Generating alternatives, 4

Generating alternatives, part 4

Reza Hossein Borr

If I do not do this, what can I do? If I do not like this behaviour, what behaviour I must have? If I do not like my job, what kind of job I would like?

If I do not like my car, what do I like? If I do not like, what do I like? I defined the goal of coaching as triggering thinking creatively to generate alternatives, yes alternatives.

There is an alternative to everything. There are in fact alternatives to all the present states, situations, behaviours, beliefs, thoughts, and possessions. Whatever you have and whatever you do and hope that you have done, there are many alternatives to them. Life becomes very simple if you think of alternatives. Life becomes extremely difficult if you do not think of alternatives and think that you cannot have anything different. Think for ways of alternatives. But don't fix something which is not broken as the Americans used to say. If something is working well just keep it. But always think of alternatives.

Ask yourself what will happen if I have a new alternative to the present state or behaviour or belief? Ask yourself what will happen if I have a new job? What will happen if I have a new home? What will happen if I can move to new city? What will happen if I have new friends? What will happen if I have different ideas? What will happen if I speak differently? What will happen if I think differently? There are always better and more effective alternatives.

When there are better and more effective alternatives why we should not go for them? Always think of alternatives. The people who thought of alternatives have created all those things that we have. The people who have not thought of alternatives have not changed anything. We need to change and therefore, alternatives must be always thought of, discussed and even evaluated and encouraged to happen.

When you coach somebody, you trigger in her a sense of looking for alternatives. People get stack because they do not think of alternatives and think that there is no alternative. People get sick because they think there is no any alternative state. If you want to make permanent changes in somebody, change his attitude from being stack to finding alternatives. Once a person accepted and acknowledged that there are alternatives he can raise the question of what alternative will best suit me in the present situation. Finding alternatives is giving people hope that they can see a better future.

People usually do not think about alternatives unless external or internal forces force them in so doing. They usually accept what comes on their way and move on as if that is the only choice. Nothing is the only choice. Every choice has other choices. Every choice has an alternative. In fact there is no alternative to anything unless you have to ask the question. People usually do not ask questions from themselves. They ask questions from others, and the greatest question that anybody can and must ask himself is: what is the alternative? Alternative to whatever I think, alternatives to whatever I say, alternative to whatever I feel, and alternative to whatever I do and alternative to whatever I have. If you have the courage to ask yourself these questions, initially you will begin a great sense of curiosity which is accompanied by uncertainty and also by turbulence in your life. People love stability and security and asking questions about alternatives tarnishes, reduces or even erodes the level of stability and security they have.

A coach, a mentor and a master must generate a state within a person in which she accepts to be questioned vigorously. He also must willingly accept to answer questions vigorously. A lot of solutions will come out when the questions are asked and when the answers are given. A lot of new inventions come up. A lot of new ideas would be produced. A lot of behaviours will change. A lot of efforts will follow. A lot of energy would be released.

One of the best skills of the coach is to create an environment in which responding becomes easy and systematic. Since answers will reveal a lot of secrets and possibly sad events of the past, a coach and a mentor must have the ability to create a comfortable environment in which recalling of the sad news and sad events of the past will bring in new solutions, not only to the same sad event but how in the future that the person will be equipped with the necessary skills for undesirable events of the future.

We make our future by what we already have and what we have already done and what we can do now. Making a good future will not be possible if the right alternatives are not created now. Find the right alternatives, apply them and when you reached the desired outcomes, think of how you can improve them even further. We must never stop looking for being better, looking better, having more, and the great secret is to start NOW.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

What is the goal of coaching?

Thinking creatively, Part 3
Reza Hossein Borr

I defined the goal of coaching as triggering thinking creatively to generate alternatives. I described triggering and thinking from the point of view of coaching when a life coach or an executive coach intends to help another person.

Since the other people come to you when they cannot find the solutions themselves, it is your responsibility as a coach to trigger in them a process of thinking creatively to find a solution. You are not supposed to provide them with a solution although you may suggest solutions and ways of getting out of block using the examples of other people. Examples of other people are usually called story telling and I have written several articles about how to tell a story effectively to create change. Since the intention is to find solutions, the main source of finding a solution is creativity. Those people, who are more creative and know the art of thinking creatively and have the experience and knowledge of creating new ideas and you solutions, can easily and quickly generate dozens of different ideas and process them to find out which one can be the best solutions and alternatives to the present stumbling block.

Remember that there must be a very specific stumbling block that you have to do generate an alternative that can serve your interests better than the present one. Thinking creatively can be easy for those whose left sphere of brain has been more active and more difficult for those whose right sphere of brain is less active. People are usually classified as having a more proactive left brain or right brain. The people with more active right brain have more capacity for creativity; however, they need the necessary training for learning the art of creating solutions. Organising the work of brain and shaping the ideas that it produces is a major task that has to be mastered by everybody in order to stop the random wanderings of the brain which will not bring any tangible idea or product.

NLP offers the coaches with an amazing strategy for becoming creative. The wandering in the open air and looking up at the right side can bring hundreds of new ideas. You can walk leisurely in a park or anywhere else for the purpose of creating ideas. Here your purpose and outcome must be very clear. You must walk to create new solutions. Before beginning to walk, you set an outcome and guide your brain for producing solutions and ideas. Once the goal is set, walk with your head up, looking towards right side without endangering yourself of falling down. Keep a pen and paper and write different ideas that may come to your mind. The looking up and down will change your state and allow radon ideas to come to your mind. This procedure is for when you have already identified the problem and seek a solution. If there is no the possibility of walking in open air then seat or stand in the comfort of your home or office, looking up and at the right in a very relaxed manner and allowing comfortable sensations to move in your body and allow your brain to generate intended outcomes.

When you are dealing face-to-face with other people, off course, you can not walk in a park but you still have the choice of looking up towards the right side to trigger the action in that part of your brain that generates new ideas. This must be done very delicately without disturbing other people.

When you repeat this technique regularly you will be in a position to produce and generate hundreds of solutions and apply them before the problem happens. My philosophy has been always something like that: find the solutions and apply them before the problem happens and if the problems happen, find solutions not only to resolve the problem now but prevents the future problems from happening.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

What is the goal of coaching?, part 1

Reza Hossein Borr, London,6.10.08

After years of studying almost all books on coaching and writing a book about coaching and giving many lectures and presentations and writing dozens of articles on the subject of coaching I have always thought about finding a definition that can be short and up to the point and at the same time manifests a concise and comprehensive definition. This is my definition:

The goal of coaching is to trigger thinking creatively to generate alternatives. This definition has four key words and I would like to devote a short article on defining each key word which is related to coaching. The definitions may be sometimes general; however, they are inclusive of the meaning of coaching. The first word is trigger. This word has a mechanical meaning and it is a device that is pulled in a gun to release a shot. In coaching, it means to begin an action. The action may be a reaction to another invent or initiating a new action. The coach is the person who prepares the ground to initiate this process.

In this case I intend to use the word, trigger, to initiate the process of thinking, generating thoughts, various thoughts and sometimes contrasting thoughts. In coaching, the coach acts as a leverage that pushes and pulls a mental string that creates purposeful thinking. The coach has to create a culture of thinking in the client. We know, the people mostly react in most cases. Reaction is instinctive and is designed to protect a person and therefore it relates more to survival. Thinking in coaching is intended to create better and more purposeful response to get better results.

People can learn to naturally and unconsciously initiate the process of thinking or they can decide to deliberately wait for a moment, reflect, pull the leverage of a mental activity and target it to a very specific outcome. There are some people who can do all these in matter of seconds unconsciously and naturally and there are those who need another mechanism to initiate the process of thinking through pulling a trigger. Once the trigger is pulled, thinking begins to generate its purpose.

The whole purpose of this article is to create a situation in which the trigger for thinking happens automatically, unconditionally and naturally; specifically when there is no time for thinking. There are urgent situations that need urgent actions. Thinking fast is a skill that can be mastered. This is called trigger forming. This is also a skill that can be learnt initially deliberately with a planned mechanism that will end up in automatisation. The skill of the coach depends on how he can automates the process of thinking purposefully to start from the beginning and finish at the point where an alternative is found for the present state or behaviour.

To trigger thinking instead of reacting instinctively is the way forward for calculated responses and answers. We know this is not an easy task but we also know that this task is within our resources and abilities if you are a coach, working as a life coach, executive coach or a mentor. If you can stop instinctive reaction you have began the greatest reorganisation of your life. If you respond after a short reflection with five senses active in silence, your response will be more promising and your profession as a coach will be more prosperous and at the same time, you will enrich another person with the skills of initiating thinking for intended results.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com

The culture of thinking in coaching, part 2

Reza Hossein Borr

Why a person needs a coach to make him think? The answer is very simple. There is no culture of thinking in most of the people. People do not think; just they act according to their instinctive. The culture of thinking is about learning how to reflect on different issues, evaluate their effectiveness and impacts on our lives on a regular basis. The number of people who have left dairies shows that a small number of people have been involved in making a deliberate attempt to leave behind what has happened in their lives. Taking notes is very important but more important than that is to think and reflect about the most important things that happen every day and think how to find a better way for making them happen the next day and in future in a better way to give more positive results and outcomes. Even those who have left dairies did not go in the process of culture of thinking to evaluate those events and use them as a source of learning for the next time.

Once the culture of thinking becomes a habit in the process of coaching, the culture of the client and coach both begin the initiative of self coaching. Self-coaching begins when somebody begins to develop an attitude for evaluating ones behaviours, beliefs and actions. Coaching in that sense is about self-engineering in its mechanical form. When you need to create a new mechanical product, you have to go through a new process of material finding and engineering those materials in to a new product. When you want to create a mental product, you need to go for the same process of engineering mental ingredients and assemble them purposefully to generate one desired outcome.

As the purpose of the coaching is to empower the client, the process of empowering can only begin with creating a culture of thinking in the client which would turn into a habit that can be repeated automatically again and again and when it is repeated more, it gains more momentum and secures more competence in production of thoughts.

The aim of culture of thinking in coaching is to engineer a situation where a person learns idea creating activity which is possibly the most important habit in life of anybody. The habit of thinking is not heard of. We do not know a habit of called habit of thinking. While people think that they think, the culture of thinking is hardly seen in the lives of ordinary people. Only exceptional people create ideas. These people have already developed a culture of thinking that manifests itself in their thoughtful behaviours and talks. Only great thinkers, artists, and inventors possibly have a culture of thinking. When you get involved in coaching, you need to think hard as the client has some requirements which need solutions. Solutions can come only from creative thinking. The creative thinking has its own mechanism. But it is a skill that could be learnt. People use different ways of thinking. NLP has an effective way of thinking which includes auditory, visual and emotional triggering aspects.

The best way for creating a culture of thinking in coaching and mentoring, or for that matter, in general or another purposes, is a meaningful and proactive silence while five senses become active at the same time. In fact all the senses become sensitive in organising themselves to work together collectively for the configuration of one outcome.

Although everybody returns home every day with a big bag of experiences, hardly anybody opens the bag and looks at events carefully to discover the ingredients of the events and how he could have made it differently to generate more and better chances of joy and happiness. Think and reflect from the top to open your way to the top. Use NLP and life coaching if you do not know how to do it.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com