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,

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

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

Give meaning to your conversation

Reza Hossein Borr

I have a friend who speaks 10 languages but yet he doesn't know how to speak. You may know many languages. You may know many words. You may know many jargons. But if you do not know how speak you cannot give meaning to your conversation. People get affected by what you say. Speaking is very expensive. When you speak people evaluate you and give you a price. This is how they decide about your worth. What your worth is in the eyes of the people is the price they give you when you speak. What you have, you have for yourself. The worth that the other people give you is more than any of other property.

Your worth is decided by what you say and how you say it. Even if you have billions of dollars, your worth is not more than what you are priced after a conversation. This is how you are known to people and how they make you known to people they know. Your worth will be more valuable if you do what you say. What you say has a price, what you do confirm the impression you have given in the conversation. The worth of speaking well is the worth of job or respect you receive.

I have seen a lot of people who don't seem impressive before they speak. Once they speak you can evaluate their impressiveness. Once I saw of a handsome tall gentleman. His presence created a lot of respect in me. As soon as he began speaking he reduced his respect in me. I saw another small fellow who was poorly dressed. The way he was dressed made me disregard him. Once he began to speak, he corrected me and changed the view of all the audience about himself.

What I saw in these people was the scale and level of meaning that they gave to their speaking. They created new ideas that appealed to the audience. The way they said the message was appealing to many and more important than all, they refused to talk when there was no anymore a meaningful message. It is not very important to talk for one hour and say nothing but talk for two minutes and give a lot of meaningful ideas. The impression is not only created by the meaningfulness of the message but by the state which it is carried out. Billions of people speak every single day but there are only a few great speakers. Great speakers know how to use the tone of voice and body language and emotions to transfer not only meaning but also emotions to other people. It is emotions that you create in other people that create your impression on them. A conversation is about exchange of emotions. If the emotions you exchange with others generate fine and meaningful emotions, you will create the kind of strength in others that may change a lot of hearts and minds.

There is no any point in saying anything which does not have a meaningful purpose. With each conversation you can create a state which will last long after you go. You will be cherished by what you said. Your image is built with your sayings. What people think of you is what you have told them. If you do not like what people tell about you change what you tell people about people. What you say about people is what they say about you. If you don't like what people say about you change what you say about people. Say about people what they like and they will say about you what you like.

Keep silent when you do not have a meaningful thing to say. Your silence does not expose your ignorance. Keep quiet when you do not have a nice thing to say about others

Only the great speakers know when to be quite. They know the value of speaking; they also know the worth of silence. Sometimes their silence gives more meaning than when they speak.

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