Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership

THE LEASH OF FREEDOM AND THE REFLEXIVE DOG

I recently made a new friend, Buddy Lucas. Well, let me restate that. I didn’t make the friend, he was the one who made me his friend. But there was a problem-my new friend is a dog. That isn’t a description of his character, but his species-Buddy is a real dog. I don’t know who actually owns him, Buddy might belong to Cheryl, Carey, Jerome, Kai, or Mable. I don’t know.

Actually, that is probably the wrong frame. Instead of Buddy belonging to anyone, I think perhaps the reality is that he has lots of people who belong to him. I think the truth is that he collects people as his pets-then he blesses them by taking them on walks, teaching them how to get him food, to pet him, snuggle with him, and so on. Buddy’s pretty smart that way-getting people to work for him and to be at his beck and call. Quite a leadership skill, if you ask me. Actually dogs in general seem to know this and use this strategy. They trick people into working for them-buying their favorite treats, taking them on walks, playing with them, and so on. They also encourage the deception that humans have that they have a pet whereas in truth, they are the pets.

Anyway while in South Africa, I took Buddy on some runs in the mornings before our Meta-Coach trainings. He always made me run faster at the beginning of the run than I wanted to as we ran up and down the streets in Pretoria. This is the time of the year when the Jacaranda trees are in full blossom-bright purple and lavender blossoms flowering in a way that completely covers the trees so that they are quite majesty. And in neighborhoods where the tree limbs reach out over the street, they create beautiful purple tunnels that give off a stunning scent. And then a week later, I saw the trees as they began to rain purple.

Once the leash was on Buddy and we enter into the world of purple tunnels, the leash gave Buddy the freedom to run, to explore, to discover his neighborhood, to go so “hello” to other dogs behind fences. It was a leash of freedom. Without the leash, Buddy couldn’t have had that freedom.

Unused to cars, traffic, roads, growling dogs-Buddy would not have survived very long. But with a leash, he was free. The leash provides a control and management of his energies. The leash focuses his energies so that he can run without being run over. The leash provides direction and guidance. The leash is also connection-connection to me as the person offering guidance as we ran to new places.

From Buddy I learned something new about leashes that I didn’t write in Unleashed. While leashes can tie us down and prevent our full potential, and interfere with our unleashing, there’s another kind of leash-the leash of freedom. These are the leashes that enable us to handle the true constraints that are in the world so that we don’t “run off in all directions at once,” but channel and guide our energies in useful ways. Leashes of freedom enable us to hold back the wildness of our energy so that we can channel it and direct it and give it a productive direction.

On the second day that Buddy took me for a run, when we returned to the yard, he did something incredible. I let the leash drop to the ground, so he turned his neck and with his mouth got a hold of the leash and began leading himself around the yard. What a sight that was! He was using his leash to go for a run in the front yard. A reflexive dog! It was as if he knew that the leash was a key to freedom and fun and play and adventure and he wanted more of it!

By the third day, he would be at my door scratching and letting me know that if I wanted to be a good pet, I needed to get up and use the leash to release him from the house and yard. Running with him on the leash was a learning experience for both of us the first couple days; he often wanted room to run after birds or other dogs and so to give him more freedom, I went with his leash oftentimes drug into a sprint to keep up. But then there were times when he counted on me to hold him back just enough so that he could act ferocious but not have to prove it!

As I ran and reflected, I wondered about my own leashes of freedom: What are they? What leashes actually give me new freedoms and unleash new potentials with agreed-upon boundaries. Then I realized that every value sets such a boundary within which I’m free to turn my energies loose and outside of which I feel the constraint of conscience. Then there are the decisions, choices, intentions, and plans which provide me an area and range of movement and activity and beyond which I don’t go because I don’t allow that- it would take me away from my desired outcomes and highest visions.

But then there is the meta-question-the question of reflexivity: Can I take my own leashes of freedom and use them for my own self-guidance, self-direction, and self-management. Do I have permission within myself to do that? Will I grant myself that permission? Will I allow my highest values and best vision of my potentials operate as a leash of freedom for pursuing the grandest and most noble meaning? Then I realized, that’s what coaching and especially self-coaching is all about.

So meta high-five Buddy for the lessons in freedom, reflexivity, and the unleashing of more potentials!

Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org

THE ART OF LIVING IN LANGUAGE

We live in language. As a species of life we have no full fledge instincts, but only “instinctoids” (Abraham Maslow). Our instinct is to learn and create mental models in our heads (“maps” Alfred Korzybski) is what makes us “a semantic class of life.” Not knowing what anything “is,” or means, or what leads to what (causation), we have to learn. We have to discover. We have to formulate, conclude, and construct a model of reality.

We have to create meaning and we do so at multiple levels.

So we live in language as a chief inner context in our minds which then governs what we see, what we perceive, what we feel, what we expect, etc. With the words that we accept, absorb, and invent we live inside them so that they govern what we are prepared to see. If we say that something is “terrible,” horrible,” “awful” so it becomes to us.

“Criticism is horrible; I hate it. I’m just not able to handle it when people don’t like me. I always fall apart.”

How’s that for a toxic thought? A toxic instruction? A pathology-creating hypnotic induction? And that’s just one of many, many, many that we all face everyday of our lives. Want more? Here’s a sick list of thoughts full of semantic toxicity:

“Over the hill.” “I’m having a senior moment.” “I think I’m cursed when it comes to money; nothing ever goes right for me.” “It’s his fault, if he had not made me feel insignificant and worthless, I wouldn’t have given up so easily.” “I’m alcoholic.” “Change is hard and painful.”

By language we create our categories of reality and by an unthinking acceptance and use of words, we experience and feel things that undermine our effectiveness and leash our potentials. I often tell the story of Wendell Johnson (People in Quandries, 1946) and his chapter, “The Indians Have No Word for it” (Chapter 17). As a speech pathologist and stutterer himself, Dr. Johnson studied two Native American Indian cultures (Bannock and Shoshone Indians) and could not find anyone who stuttered. And it so happened that their languages had no word for “stuttering.” That idea, that category, that experience is not punctuated by their language, so the experience of “stuttering” didn’t exist for them. At first they didn’t understand what he was referring to. To even communicate what he was referring to, his associate, John Snidecor, had to demonstrate stuttering.

So when a child spoke in a non-fluent way, no one noticed. It didn’t exist.

“Speech defects were simply not recognized. The Indian children were not criticized or evaluated on the basis of their speech, no comments were made about it, no issue was made of it. In their semantic environments there appeared to be no speech anxieties or tensions for the Indian children to interiorize, to adopt as their own. This, together with the absence of a word for stuttering in the Indians’ language, constitutes the only basis on which I can at this time suggest an explanation for the fact there were no stutterers among these Indians.”

Later when Johnson found children from those groups who had been adopted by white families he found those who did stutter. In the new English language, the category of stuttering did exist and so those kids raised in that culture learned to punctuate it as something that as reality and then learned to fear it as something dreadful. They then began to live in the language of stuttering.

For better and worse, we all live in a world of language. When we say a word, we call a world into being. It’s a creator power. Genesis describes the beginning occurring when God spoke the world into being, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” yet we also share in that same creative power. As we use language, so we create our reality and then operate within it semantically. In our languaging, our meanings are created.

Without language, we would live life moment-by-moment without any awareness of ourselves or life itself. We would lack “… narrative, evaluation, comparison, and contemplation. We would not know who we are, where we are going, or whether or not we have gotten there-the very issues…” that make life human and meaningful for us (Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, Robert Lukens, Language, Structure, and Change, 1990).

“Without language, there is only ‘now’-life unfolding moment by moment without self-consciousness or meaning. With the advent of language, an observing ‘self’ is created and experience is evaluated. Those evaluations continuously and recursively modify what is being experienced, leading to the self-referential quagmire that generates business for psychotherapists.”

So given that we live in language to this extent, then what is the art of living in language? How can we live with language and in language so that it supports us and enhances our life?

Obviously the art begins with awareness of language. First we need to become mindful of our words and mindful of what we are doing with our words.

What are you doing with your words? And, what are your words doing for you?
This is the neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic facet of language. Language does things to us! Language gets into our eyes so that we see the world in terms of our words and concepts. Language induces us into states. Language gets encoded in our body, in muscle memory. Now you know why Meta-Coaches and Neuro-Semanticists are always asking,

“Do you hear what you’re saying?”

“As you hear yourself say that and use those words, what are you aware of?”

“Hearing yourself say that, how will you start to clean up your language and frame things in ways that support you?”

Once you recognize that you live your life in language and always will, the next step is to quality control your language so that you can choose life-enhancing and empowering ways to speak and encode things.

“What cognitive distortions have you found in your language today?”

“How empowering is that term, concept, understanding, or belief?

“How is your language?”

“What are some of your best formulas that unleash your potentials?”

There’s more- and that’s the subject of the next Meta Reflection.

Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org

META-COACHING™: COACHING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”
-Thoreau

A Meta-Coach™ will first and foremost be able to recognize, detect, and effectively address the processes, structures, mind-sets, frames, beliefs, etc. of the expert or person learning to become a master in a given area whether business, leadership, management, creativity, relationships, persuasion, etc. He or she will address the things that get in the way of that excellence (i.e., lack of clarity, indecision, excuses, etc.). This means the ability to take a Meta position to the mental-emotional matrices of a person’s experience.

After recognition of the structure of experience and being able to model and profile the experience, the Meta-Coach™ needs to be able to see the neuro-semantic system of mind-body-emotion within relationships, contexts, etc. as a system. This means systemic thinking about the human mind-body system within yet higher systems (business, culture, family, government, politics, economics, etc.) and within which yet lower systems are embedded (thinking, valuing, believing, feeling, remembering, imagining, etc.).

For this reason we have developed the Matrix model based upon the neuro-linguistics of human communication and functioning (NLP) that describes how to run our own brain and manage our own states and the Meta-States model of Neuro-Semantics that describes the levels of min-body-emotion as a systemic process. The idea of framing from Bateson came into NLP in terms of a few basic frames: the ecology frame, relevancy frame, outcome frame, meaning (re-framing), etc. With Neuro-Semantics we developed this much further and created Frame Games as a model of the embedded nature of frames within frames. This has led to being able to work with mastering fear, becoming fit and slim, modeling the frames of business experts, wealth building, prolific writing and researching and other creative arts, relationships, persuasion, and much more.

What is META- COACHING™?

Meta-Coaching™ is a powerful coaching methodology that transcends traditional Performance Coaching, taking Coach and client to higher levels – to Developmental and Transformational Coaching. That is why we call it ‘meta’ meaning a higher level. At these levels profound change occurs naturally and easily. The result is success and transformation.

Meta-Coach™ Training is an accelerated coach training system that supports participants to move through learning modules, culminating in Master Coach Status. It is taught in an environment that gives participants every opportunity to excel – as Executive, Personal (Life), Organisational and Self Coaches.

This comprehensive program differentiates itself from other coaching education by integrating three key areas of a successful coaching career:

• Your Self
• Your Coaching Skills
• Your Coaching Business

Meta-Coach™ training draws on the Cognitive Sciences of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantics (NS) and integrates them into cutting-edge coaching psychology. The training programs are rigorous and qualifications internationally recognised.

Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org