Coaching beyond systems
The launch of a mini-series regarding coaching and consultancy. Discussing what separates my style of coaching from others.
Overcoming creative blocks is maybe one of the greatest challenges a writer will face.
The same goes for musicians, artists, poets, and any other creative individuals.
The consultancy I provide for individuals, often involves me guiding a creative client to breakthrough periods of stagnation and passivity.
Sidenote: I use the term coach and consultant inter-changeable throughout this article. As often my work will often shift from coaching to consultancy, depending on the client. There are glaring similarities and subtle differences. Coaching involves more guidance and direction from me, whereas consultancy is generally me facilitating.
At the very core of every being lies unlimited creative capacities and impulses, waiting to be accessed, awakened, and brought to life, which would transform personal and collective realities’ beyond anything witnessed before.
Every time I encounter a situation where I’m working with a client who is blocked creatively, I go straight for imagination.
If I work with a client who doesn’t think they are creative, I direct them towards imagination, with the strategy of persuading them to see they are creative. That they are at the very core of their being an artist.
I shoot an arrow directly at their imagination on every occasion, no matter what, their imagination is always the target!
Every opportunity that arises for me to coach, will involve me presenting dynamic exercises, techniques, and ways for a client to tap into their own imagination.
I call this a ‘workshop in imagination’, and it’s designed to awaken, stimulate, and intensify a person’s imagination; so, they can bring their imagination to the fore, in their life. And bring it to life for the pursuit of their creative ambitions and endeavours.
In every situation, the imagination work is tailored to the individual’s needs. I don’t present clients with a generic one-size fits-all system.
I always find my clients possess great imaginations, but I find often they have allowed their imaginations to be buried, and disappear into the background of their everyday life. For whatever reasons that may be.
I describe it as though people have allowed their imaginations to wane in intensity and power. Their imagination is there just like the searing Sun in the sky. And similar to the Sun it’s immensely powerful and the source of all life. However, it’s just hiding behind pervasive clouds.
I see my work as way of dispersing those clouds, which block out the rays of imagination.
Unlike most conventional coaches or consultants, I don’t go dissecting and analysing the situation in a client’s life nor their past. There is little reflection or retrospective work carried out.
As I see the past as an event been and gone. The past matters no more, as hard as that may sound, or for some to swallow. The new and the future is where attention should be placed.
My coaching/consultancy style is centred on the creation and invention of the new. Focusing attention on creating new futures and realities overflowing with adventure, excitement, and intensity.
I see paying too much attention on the past, as a lost cause. And when a coach or counsellor strings pieces of a person’s past together to form a distorted image of their client’s reality; which they then present as a fragmented and fabricated image to explain to their client why they are experiencing challenges, and why they are stifled creatively. Then these coaches and counsellors are setting the individual up for failure, by taking them down a psychic cul-de-sac.
Ultimately it’s a lie.
A lie fabricated from over analysis.
It leads to the old adage: ‘analysis leads to paralysis’
True authentic power lies in what one can envision now for the future. When the individual sees the emergence of a wonderfully thrilling future on the horizon, then previous troubles will fade into the background, like parting mists at dawn.
Because energy is now focused and directed on what’s next?
What’s next? Is a question answered in the territory of imagination.
A terrain vastly expansive, and unexplored by many. It’s a space I lead people to charter into.
My consultancy involves guiding individuals to embark on that journey into the unknown.
Involves guiding individuals to realise the true unlimited scope and range of their creative capacities.
I encourage individuals to openly embrace and explore their creative capacities and impulses from a space of imagination.
In many situations coaches are not even aware that expanding creativity via imagination is the key to transforming and enhancing one’s life.
Most coaches simply work with clients from an overly materialistic and rationalistic space.
A space lacking any true spark of creative ambition and desire. Their work often focuses on adaption and refinement.
After which they provide their client with a template or system to adjust and fix their situation. A system to adjust, adapt, and fix their current reality.
The system or programme they reveal, is like a pattern they lay over the client’s life, which they spread over as if it were a grid.
Unfortunately, life wins in the end, and the individual finds the system wears thin, the pattern and the grid disintegrate, and they find themselves in a dead end.
In my early days of coaching, I made the same error with clients.
That was until I began working with the ‘philosophy of imagination’.
Once I discovered Jon Rappoport’s matrix material, and studied his courses back in 2020. I began to work with my imagination on a more deeply personal level. I engaged with my imagination in a radically more dynamic and intense fashion.
Along the way, a perception shattering insight arrived, where I reached the firm conclusion that I must incorporate this ‘philosophy of imagination’ into my practice, if I was to fulfil my potential as a coach.
Suddenly I was going 180 degrees in the opposite direction of mainstream coaching, and its worn-out and tedious systems and models.
The effect was life changing, as I moved into new elevated spheres of personal energy and power.
I realised as a coach, after witnessing a dramatic transformation in my own life; that imagination and creativity when it’s deployed and brought to the fore in one’s life, will engender tremendous transformation.
I became aware I was lifting myself to soaring heights. And expressing my own unique and infinite self with greater emotion, energy, thought, and language. And that life felt electric and alive.
Furthermore, I realised that this transformation, this lift in expansive consciousness didn’t require any reconciliation with my past or analysis of my present. And that the sheer thrill and adventure of creating and imagining was enhancing my personal reality.
This revelation opened my eyes to a new way of coaching. It highlighted immensely that coaching systems don’t work. That systems in any form don’t’ work, they fail in the long run.
Because people are not systems. The true authentic power that lies within everyone is non-systematic.
Moreover, it’s non-material in essence, therefore it can’t be accessed through materialistic or mechanical methods.
And what I’ve experienced and observed over the last few years is that pervasively mechanical existence and materialistic compulsions often cause many of the troubles in one’s life.
Often the origin of most people’s troubles stems from the pressures of fitting into an excessively mechanical and materialistic world. Where individuals are always shrinking down their personal visions and desires to fit in with the consensus reality.
People adopt a reductionist approach to reflect the reduced paradigm they perceive before their eyes. A paradigm and culture which imposes limits upon everything.
People are stuck inside the loop of consensus reality. A consensus which is embedded tightly within a lowest common denominator culture, which merely operates on the level of the bio-survival mechanism.
As a corollary, people then impose limits upon themselves. Limits upon what they can perceive, feel, create, and experience.
Once these limits impose, and pile up on top of the individual; it will eventually generate a diminishment in what energy and consciousness an individual is accessing and expressing.
Resulting in life becoming incredibly confusing, boring, depleted, frustrating, and lacking life.
Therefore, I throw away and discard methods which are centred on fixing things and adjusting individuals to reality. As that’s what’s caused the challenges a person is experiencing in the first place.
The individual doesn’t need reality rearranged or sequenced differently within a system.
What’s missing often is spontaneity. LIVING LIFE IN THE MOMENT. Improvisation, Invention, and Imagination are missing.
And so, when I work with clients, I encourage them to be more spontaneous. I get them to engage with fun and dynamic exercises, designed to lighten them up and make them be and feel more spontaneous.
Life is crying out for spontaneity, screaming out for it. Life can be resuscitated with new and fresh language, thoughts, feelings which arrive from imagining, creating, and living in the moment.
Ultimately the aim is to enable individuals to embark on the journey of creating their own unique reality.
As a person travels along the endlessly unfolding road of creating desires, there will emerge and manifest even greater capacities, energies, and visions.
As one shifts into expanded states of consciousness. Shifts into a space where one finds they have more energy at their disposal. One feels lighter and more joyful. One’s life and future appears as an exciting adventure, as opposed to a never-ending grind.
Boredom, confusion, frustration, fears, and doubts dissolve and evaporate as the emergence of a thrilling and pulsating future becomes a crystal-clear vision in their horizon.
What troubled a person before melts away in the pulsating flows and rivers of creative action.
This is what real transformation represents. Yet it’s something that can’t even be described, and is beyond words.
I’ve seen it many times in sessions, and when a client launches into their creative ambitions, and their creative endeavours are realised; how hidden powers and energies are unleashed; which have a totally uplifting effect upon their psyche’s.
There is total transformation of the Mind, Body, and Spirit.
As their troubles ease and disappear. I see how they stand taller, glow, and radiate with life.
Their electricity sparkles as they exude an aliveness from their being.
When the power of imagination is unleashed it’s a sight to behold.