Lesson 17: The Second
Coaching Question (Phase III)
So far you’ve moved from the Pit, through your Stop and made a Choice to Coach yourself. The Coach has been very kind and acknowledged you as a genius. You’ve accepted that acknowledgement, and asked and answered the powerful question, ‘What do you want?’
Now you know the answer to ‘What do you want?’ it’s time to step back into the Coach position and ask the second Coaching question:
Naturally the inspiring Coach asks this question from the point of view of ‘And you can have anything you wish for – what would you love to have?’ This question should never be asked, ‘And how on Earth are you ever going to get that?’
Once asked, move back into the Present to discover the answer. There are two ways to answer this question:
We covered states, or states of mind, in an earlier chapter (see States) and very often the answer to ‘and how are you going to do that?’ is a state, such as being calm, happy, motivated or confident.
In this type of answer, which is probably the one you’ll use most of the time, it’s all about choosing to feel different instantly and so is probably one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn. But to do this effectively you need to know a bit more about how the brain, and especially emotions and feelings, work.
One of the easiest ways to understand how the brain gets in touch with powerful experiences is by considering the example of two people approaching an interview, as the following story demonstrates.
These two people, let’s call them Gordon and Brad, have both attended many interviews in the past and got a number of those jobs. However, Gordon feels he is very ‘good’ at interviews and Brad loathes and fears them, and considers himself ‘bad’ at interviews.
Now, imagine for a moment that the brain’s memory banks are a little like sets of three-drawer filing cabinets: the top drawer marked ‘good memories’, the middle drawer ‘average memories’ and the bottom drawer ‘bad memories’. It’s easy to predict which memories Gordon or Brad accesses when they think about the forthcoming interview.
Memory recall
Gordon goes straight to the top drawer of good memories and reminds himself of all the times he’s had successful interviews, when he was confident and communicated well with the interviewing panel.
Brad, however, goes straight to the bottom drawer of his memory filing cabinet and reminds himself of all his experiences of dreadful interviews.
What’s interesting is that both Gordon and Brad have a mixture of good and bad interview experiences. Gordon didn’t get every job he went for and Brad was successful in some of his interviews; however, Gordon doesn’t spend any time looking in his bad memory drawer and Brad never looks into his good memory drawer.
Predictions
They also both predict what’s likely to happen in the forthcoming interview. Gordon imagines the whole thing going fantastically well – they like him, ask him the right questions and he performs at his best. Brad, of course, imagines the whole thing going wrong; they don’t like him, they ask tricky questions, he even gets easy questions wrong and makes himself look a fool.
Voice-over
Finally, they both talk to themselves, but the voice-over or soundtrack each one runs is quite different.
Gordon tells himself how great he is at interviews, how much they’re bound to like him and how lucky they are to have him as a candidate. Brad tells himself how terrible he is at interviews, how they’re bound to hate him on sight and how quickly they are going to want to end the interview, knowing he is an appallingly bad candidate for this job.
As a result of these ways of thinking Gordon will clearly be ‘set up’ for success and in a much more interview-ready state than Brad; their posture and appearance will be congruent with this – Gordon walking into the room confidently and Brad shuffling in like a cow to the abattoir.
The interview process will unfold with a relative inevitability: Gordon is very likely to be offered the job, while Brad is not.
This story demonstrates an interesting phenomenon of the mind. In order to make a memory, or any prediction about the future, so emotionally strong that it affects you powerfully, you need to be ‘IN’ the movie of the memory or prediction. By ‘IN’ I mean seeing the events unfold in front of your eyes, as if it were really there.
The other option is to be ‘OUT’ of the movie of the memory or prediction, so any position or perspective other than your point of view. This could be seeing it from above, behind, from the interviewer’s perspective, etc.
The reason the ‘IN’ perspective creates such strong feelings is that’s how we go through the world, by looking out through our eyes. However, we can recall things from a different perspective but, as this won’t produce as much neurological activation, it will have less powerful feelings attached.
You may recall this from the ELF (Excellence of Limited Function) chapter when, in order to feel bad feelings fully, we have to immerse ourselves in the negative memories and reduce the impact of positive memories by stepping out of them.
Imagine being on a rollercoaster (don’t do this exercise if you’re very scared/phobic of rollercoasters).
Run a movie of a rollercoaster and put yourself ‘IN’ the position of being in the seat of a big scary rollercoaster. See the track disappear in front of you to be replaced by the yawning expanse of the open sky as you reach the top of the track.
If you do this from your own eye’s point of view, you’ll feel the powerful feelings of being on a rollercoaster. If you like rollercoasters it will feel exhilarating, if you don’t like them it will be scary.
Now, imagine watching yourself on that rollercoaster – this is the ‘OUT’ perspective. As long as you stay distant from it, your feelings will dissipate and fade. (If you have a strong fear of rollercoasters there is a good chance you’ll try and step back into the rollercoaster movie; if you do that you will continue to feel scared. So make sure you continue to remain watching it rather than being in the movie.).
From this example, you can see that:
Stepping IN to a movie increases it – steps it up.
Being OUT of it decreases it – fades it out.
In much the same way when you recall ‘detailed’ memories or predictions you’ll feel more powerful emotions, while having much vaguer memories or predictions will result in vaguer, less emotional feelings.
So think again about the two interviewees, Gordon and Brad, and consider the following questions and answers:
Q: When Gordon reminds himself of a positive memory of an interview, which makes him feel powerfully confident, is he ‘IN’ that memory or ‘OUT’ of it?
A: He is ‘IN’ it because the emotions are powerful.
Q: Do you think the memory is detailed or vague?
A: It is ‘detailed’ because again the emotions are powerful.
Q: When you think about Brad, reminding himself of a negative memory of an interview – which makes him feel powerfully nervous – do you think he is ‘IN’ that memory or ‘OUT’ of it?
A: He is ‘IN’ it because the emotions of nervousness are powerfully strong. They are not good emotions, but they are powerful. It would be much better for him if he were ‘OUT’ of that memory, as being so deeply ‘IN’ it causes him to shake before interviews.
Q: And is he recalling it in a detailed or vague way?
A: Again you know he has recalled it in a very detailed way because he feels very powerfully strong emotions about it.
You might also recognize that Gordon and Brad do exactly the same with their predictions about the outcome of the interview; they feel strong emotions about it, so they are both IN a very detailed version of the movie. In addition, accompanying both Gordon and Brad’s very different movies and predictions is an authoritative, convincing and strong voice-over.
So when we consider the difference between Gordon and Brad in an interview situation we can see something very intriguing. They both have the ability to recall specific memories from a wide selection of memory options. Both are able to immerse themselves ‘IN’ their memories to make them very emotionally powerful and recall these memories in great detail. They also do that with their predictions about the future too, and run an internal voice-over that is authoritative, convincing and strong. In fact the only difference between Gordon and Brad is which memory they choose to get out of their filing cabinet and what the content of that voice-over is.
In this way, it’s easy to realize that the difference between people who are good at interviews (or speaking in public, going on dates, etc.) and those who are not – or more precisely, those who dû good interviews or dû poor interviews – is minimal. And to change from dûing bad interviews to good interviews is a very simple process of learning how to select better memories and voice-overs.
There is one even more intriguing result of this understanding.
Once we recognize that we’re free to select which memories we use, this changes how we respond to our future – and this applies to every one of our behaviours, every single way of being and every single situation.
This means finally you can be powerful in any situation, independent of your past, of who you thought you were, or of what you were told were your limitations.
The keys to the kingdom are yours!
Using this knowledge you’re now ready to create a brilliant life-changing answer to this question. For example:
Well, if Gordon was able to feel confident about interviews by recalling a time of being confident in interviews and Brad was able to feel deeply nervous by recalling a time of feeling deeply nervous in interviews, if you wish to feel deeply calm and confident, then all you need to do is go back into a memory of a time when you felt exactly that way. Simply take yourself back to a specific time now where you felt deeply calm and confident.
Let’s say, for example, you choose to go back to sitting on the beach that you went to every morning when you were in Mexico in 2001.
To make it really detailed you would remember one particular morning. Let’s imagine it was when you got up early and went down to the beach. Nobody else was there; you remember just sitting with your feet being washed by the beautiful clear blue water of the ocean waves.
This kind of level of detail is exactly what you need to boost the amount of activity in the nerve pathways connected to that moment. You might find some helpful rules in recalling the memory are:
By doing this you re-energize the precise pathways you used to create and store the feelings of that original experience, so re-triggering those pathways brings those feelings right back.
Just like Gordon and Brad, you’ll need to step ‘IN’ to those memories in detail, it won’t work just to recall them in some vague way, like ‘beaches’ or from watching it from some other perspective.
Avoid using phrases such as ‘I am going to imagine that time’, as imagining encourages the idea that you’re making it up or pretending. And the same is true of ‘remembering’ as it makes it too much like a memory rather than something you’re re-experiencing right now. A much better phrase is ‘I am going to take myself back to’. So now each time you use the steps you go from:
This example is about having a ‘deeply calm and confident’ state, but the same structure applies for any ‘state of mind’ or ‘state’ that you want to get into. If you wish to be energized, you would choose to take yourself back to a time when you felt full of energy. If you wish to be focused, you would take yourself back to a time when you felt focused. If you wish to be motivated, you take yourself back to a time when you felt incredibly motivated to do something. The list and therefore the opportunities are endless.
You can step IN to these feelings even more by using a powerful visualization technique. Choose a memory that fits the state that you want to create, reconnect with those powerful feelings, and then enhance them further by adding some sparkle and glow to them.
Ask yourself if those feelings were to have a colour, what colour would it be? Then have these feelings and let that colour just pour through you; and sense it flowing from your head through your body, down your arms and out of your hands, coursing through your spine and down through your legs, and flowing out of your feet.
Feel yourself being immersed in that, as you breathe it in deeply.
Re-score
Once you’ve accessed that great state and poured it into yourself re-score yourself out of 10, where 10 is feeling good and zero is not feeling good. Again you should notice a very significant improvement in your score.
Generally at this point you might expect to feel a score between eight and 10. Any less would indicate you need to go though some of the steps in this chapter again to raise you score, and increase the activation of the parts of the brain that you want on line, fired up and supporting you in your future.
You don’t need to go back to a precisely matching time involving exactly the same situation or context. In other words, you don’t need to recall a time of ‘confidence when public speaking’ in order to get in touch with the ‘confidence’ state you might need for speaking well in public. All you need to do is to go back to a time when you were confident. It really doesn’t matter what the situation occurred in, because confidence is just confidence. There aren’t different types of confidence, one that you use for public speaking and one that you use somewhere else, they are all activations of exactly the same nerve pathways of confidence and so can be used in any situation in which you wish to feel confident.
One of the skills of this process is to be able to think creatively about times when you were in contact with exactly the feelings you wish to recreate. For example, many people say ‘I’ve never been confident,’ but when you ask them if they are confident that they can tie their shoelaces, tell the time, or if they’ve ever lived on Mars, they are supremely confident about these things.
These states of confidence are just as powerful as any others and can be used to generate confidence for any future situation. In fact, the same applies for any ‘state’ that we wish to get into.
Take some time to consider what ‘states’, such as confidence, being energized, focused, motivated and so on, you would love to have more of in your life.
Also consider the catchphrases that take you into the Pit and what the opposite states would be to those versions of the Pit. So if you often dû stress then the opposite state would be calm; if you dû procrastination, the opposite state might be focused, motivated and proactive.
Having recognized the states you would like to have more of, make a list in your notebook of the times when you were in touch with these feelings. You might want to include photos from that time, or from tourist brochures or the website of a particular place. You can be creative in how you develop a deeper familiarity with these important memories.
Don’t necessarily restrict yourself to going back to the same memories each time – so, for example, if one of your memories for calm is ‘that beach in Mexico’ you don’t always have to go back to ‘that beach in Mexico’ to get in touch with calm. Some people find that by going back to the same experience time after time, they become bored with it. While others find it enhances and deepens their experience of it. Be guided by what works best for you.
Many people find that they have spent far too much time focusing on not very useful memories, and far too little time focusing on, or talking about, the really great things in their lives. We can see now that this is a really valuable thing to do for the health of your brain and for getting a life that you love. And now you know this you can take action to change your future by using your past more usefully.
If you recall the story about the black VW Golf from an earlier chapter you’ll remember how things and events in the world can trigger us to run destructive pathways, which make very little real-world logical sense – for example the trigger of ‘seeing people playing golf’ reminding me of ‘my black VW Golf’, which ‘made me’ upset.
There are things in the world that will continue to trigger those old negative pathways, but we can’t remove all these triggers any more than I could forbid the driving of black VW Golfs while I was out in the street.
Luckily, this process is able to take advantage of these triggers in a new way.
Now every time a trigger event occurs that used to help you towards the Pit you will:
Now the old triggered pathway has been rerouted, the trigger directly stimulates a great positive state, and things that used to bother you will now make you feel calm or smile.
And that is magical and life-changing.
There are four simple options for ‘taking yourself back’. The first is as described above: finding an event in the past, which has all the feelings you need right now. However, sometimes people say, ‘I just don’t have a memory of a time when I felt that way,’ which means you may need to spend a little longer thinking creatively about a time when you did have what you need in your memory bank. If, however, you still haven’t located a memory of feeling that way then there are two other great options.
Role model
Choose someone who, for you, is a great role model of the state or quality that you wish to access. It can be:
Imagine walking in their shoes for a day:
Being creative in this way will give you a full sense of what it is like to live in the world with the qualities you admire in them. This works as well as accessing a positive memory because your brain can’t distinguish easily between what really happened and what’s imagination. So, developing this experience allows you to gain first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to have this quality.
Now, imagine pouring those qualities and approach to the world into yourself as you walk through today, operating as they would, thinking as they would, speaking as they would, enjoying the world as they would.
And any time you find yourself drifting from being that way use your Stop and the steps (see Recap) to get yourself back into that state; after all, it’s what you want and you deserve it.
Future me
The other option is to take yourself into the future, when you have already achieved these changes, and feel what it feels like to be you in the future. In exactly the same way as using the ‘role model’ option above, walk in the shoes of your future self; pour those feelings into you, feeling how it feels to take on life in this way.
This simple exercise can help you develop a new sense of your future self.
Imagine you’ve been given a huge amount of money (millions or billions, even) so that you can design somewhere that would naturally bring on these feelings that you wish for.
For example, imagine you wish to feel deeply relaxed, but have no good-quality memories to bring to mind.
With your unlimited budget you design the perfect place, so that when you’re there you would naturally feel beautifully and deeply relaxed. Let’s imagine a tropical island is your relaxation haven.
Have your living quarters be exactly the way you would love them to be, with all the design features you’d like. Money is no object, so it might have French windows with flowing white curtains opening onto a veranda, while an orchestra plays in a turquoise lagoon purely for your pleasure, and the fragrance of the tropical flowers is exactly how you imagined it to be…
Be creative – what would make it the most relaxing place in the world for you?
Make sure you cover the basic points of being in the memory, creating it in great detail and using the present tense; as well as making sure, of course, that your voice and posture are congruent – matching the quality of that state.
Voice speed
Very often people speak too fast when they’re trying to relax, too slowly and down when they’re trying to re-energize themselves, so pace and volume are important.
Choose well
Make sure you choose a good memory, one that is powerful and evocative, and not mixed. For example, a relaxing memory of being snuggled up in bed in the morning won’t be very positive if it’s associated with an ex-partner with whom the relationship ended on bad terms.
Make sure the memory is ‘clean’ and that you’re recalling it in a useful way rather than, for example, recalling a happy memory and then destroying it by remembering it being such a long time since you felt that way.
Both of these are examples of ‘bad editing’, which we’ll be looking at more detail in a later chapter.
For the moment, however, if you find yourself choosing either of these memory types, choose a different memory or recognize that you’re unintentionally sneaking into the Pit, and then use your Stop and the steps (see Recap) to get yourself back on track.
Above all, remember that you are really good at getting into states, it’s a skill of yours – you, just like Gordon and Brad, are great at it. It just so happens you may have been practising getting into bad Pit states. Regardless of what kind of state you’ve been getting into, it reminds you just how good you are at it and so that means you can get into any state you choose.
Remember also, your brain doesn’t really care which pathways you use. It will build itself around the most commonly used pathways, and so with practice these new states will become just as familiar and easy to access as those old negative ones that used to rule your life.
Sometimes when you’ve worked out what you want, the solution to the second Coaching question – ‘and how are you going to do that?’ – is very clear, as in this example:
Coach: ‘What do you want?’
You: ‘To go to the gym.’
Coach: ‘How are you going to do that?’
You: ‘I’m going to put my trainers on right now, and go.’
When you were in the Pit these kinds of choices just seemed unavailable to you, but when you’re free from it, the solution is obvious. However, there are a few points worth covering in making sure your plan actually happens.
Make sure there is a ‘by when’ attached to this plan because saying, ‘I’m going to go to gym’ isn’t enough to ensure it happens. Saying, ‘I’m going to the gym this week’ is better, but still quite vague and may slip your mind. So, the best answer to give is precise and specific. For example, ‘I’m going to be at the gym by 1:20 p.m. today.’
This is much more likely to happen as the agreement you’ve made with yourself is very clear. You can make it certain to occur by putting it in your diary right now. Why not take even better care of yourself from now on and start making appointments with yourself, just as you would do with anybody else that is important?
Just consider whether you have enough time in your schedule to make this action plan happen. If not, then either reschedule the gym trip or one of the other events in your diary to make room for it. Thinking through your action plan now will save you dûing stress about not having fulfilled your commitment, or trying to fit too many things into the same time slot.
Letting other people know that this is what is going to be happening tends to make it more real. Tell someone you know who will help keep you on track and can share in your sense of success when you achieve that.
Once you’ve made your action plan re-score yourself out of 10, where 10 is feeling good and zero is not feeling good. Again you should notice a significant improvement in your score.
Finally, you’ll also find that even if you decide that your answer to this question is going to be a plan, it’s usually incredibly useful to make sure you’re in the right state to make that plan happen.
If you combine these two approaches you will end up going to the gym by putting your trainers on and leaving the house at the right time (the plan), and feeling motivated to do so (the state) by getting fully into that state. This way, suddenly life just starts to work better and you have a formula for success:
A great plan plus great state truly revolutionizes lives.
This, again, is a great place to pause as you’ve now integrated the main elements of the training. Now every time you spot the Pit, you should Stop and Choose to Coach yourself. As the Coach, you acknowledge and ask the two questions, ‘What do you want?’ and ‘How are you going to get that?’
The answer to this second question will take you into a great state and might be combined with an action plan, which will change how you feel. Feeling positive, motivated, relaxed and happy activates the great pathways of your brain and moves you into a life you love, NOW.
When you’re ready continue to the next section, which is all about how to make all this work ‘stick’ neurologically.
