March 2009
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From the Desk of Marilyn Atkinson: Becoming Cleopatra for the Crisis: Flexibility Coaching World Conference of Erickson Coaching leaders Transformation of Codependence into Meaningful Freedom by Benjamin Evgeny Shulman Passion Into Profit: Planning for Success by Teresia LaRocque, MCC Wanted! Coachable People who would like to seize an opportunity
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From the Desk of Marilyn Atkinson Becoming Cleopatra for the Crisis: Flexibility CoachingBecoming Cleopatra for the Crisis: Flexibility Coaching Thinking about the current financial ‘crisis’ in the world had me noticing the nature of fear. It is not really relevant whether you feel it or not. What is relevant is whether it stops you from doing what is required. What can allow us to weather the storm, and to learn from it? I remember studying psychology in California in my mid-twenties. It was a financial crisis for me. My training was expensive but important to me, for this purpose I had moved to California with my two children. I had arranged a suitable job as a clinical psychologist but arrived to find the assured job had vanished with administrative changes. I could not afford to live in California. I decided I could make money with a series of evening ‘Cooking Classes’ for grade school kids in West Hollywood homes (it worked), as well as starting organic vegetable gardens,(it was spring). Yet what I earned was just pocket change. Several days of studying ‘suitable’ want ads proved discouraging until I went wild and became flexible. I found an agency that hired models to pose nude for regional art schools. Certainly not my ‘self image’ but still enabling rent payments while I went to school in the evenings. I soon found myself driving daily all over the Los Angeles area to one junior college or another. Picture the scene: It was rather disconcerting to arrive off a complex freeway exit, and run into a college building just to immediately throw off all my clothing and immediately pose “naked as a jaybird” in front of 30 strangers. Yet the job paid well and I often could read an interesting book while reclining like Cleopatra on a sofa as an art class busily sculpted for 3 hours. Crisis resolved. The key was flexibility. How do we find improbable ways to do what we want despite the odds? If you are a corporate coach and your regular corporate clientele say they cannot currently afford the luxury of a coach consider other variations: group coaching, team coaching, retirement coaching, job change coaching or ‘stress management coaching’. Consider incentives and special offers. Emphasize measurement tools so managers can measure the value. Consider calling what you do by a different name. Even silly labels like “Magicians helper to entrepreneurs: You get results or you don’t pay.” Consider going into professional areas where jobs remain stable, such as government, education, hospitals, (medical hospitals and health professionals). Find another strong niche and it may eventually be the one you keep as well as your current area. “Flexibility Coaching” means being playful and give lots of extras. It may mean adding some low cost or free exchanges. You learn to propose services that matter to people. Meantime you are building relevant contacts. It is value not dollars that connects us. Our long term vision brings energy where it counts. We find ourselves learning to relax within different opportunities and markets that we didn’t expect. Enjoy surviving the crisis! Marilyn Atkinson President, Erickson Coaching International Read this and other articles of mine on my blog at LiveJournal.com World Conferenceof Erickson Coaching LeadersHello all present and former participants of The Art and Science of Coaching! Would you be interested in attending a World Conference of Erickson Coaching leaders and participants, all attending a Trainers Training in Transformation in a fabulous resort hotel on the Antalya beaches of Turkey this April and May? We are expecting a large crowd (one hundred Erickson people or more are expected, perhaps as many as 120). Eighty have enrolled at this point from six different language groups. Yippee!!! This means that the Antalya Trainers Training will be a large Erickson conference. We will be in a wonderful setting and some great excursions are being planned to Roman and Greek ruins, as well as river and mountain climbing events. Our hotel is large and offers multiple kinds of services as well as ‘Restaurants’ at no extra price beyond the basic room charge (food and drink inclusive) which is “priced for the financial crisis”, and very reasonable per day. The large numbers mean many wonderful things... good parties, etc. We plan careful organization for real rest and learning at its best. We plan to have some Erickson Forums on different key topics every evening, led by different coach trainers. Please send in your own conference topics if you would like to make a presentation. This will be a large conference and an opportunity for multipletypes of Coaching presentations and demonstrations of different coaching and NLP applications. Our aim is to create real bonds between people of different cultures. Yoga, dance classes or body oriented training will be held in the mornings...possibly other times. Are you a person who might bring a specialization of this type? Our yoga trainer from the 2006 conference was a great early morning addition, with his class and it added to the daily enrichment of all who attended. Are you a person with a specialty in some body movement practice perhaps? Any dance trainers? Voice trainers? Who would like to attend with special agreement? My main question to you all is: What do we want to leave with? What is the opportunity here? The quality of everyone’s experience makes a real difference here. What will be the best result of such a large Erickson gathering and can we plan for long term best results based on this for all involved? How can we make this event into a lifetime Win? Vision it please!! Again, please plan to join us in Antalya this April and May. If you have attended a Trainers training before, remember that we offer a special half price for reviewers as well as new specialty programs before and after the main Trainers training. Bring your best and join the think tank and life development stretch that this opportunity provides us all. Marilyn Atkinson, President, Erickson Coaching International
Transformation of Codependence Into Meaningful Freedomby Benjamin Evgeny ShulmanMarilyn Atkinson in her recent article has clarified the core distinction of consistent coaching approach as is used in Erickson from other forms of assisting human growth and development, belonging to, I would say, to the previous level of the spiral of Human Spirit evolution. She described it as a shift from Paternalism to Eternalism. What she calls Paternalistic (read NLP) approach is characterized in the article as “very pleasantly ‘client focused’, which certainly does not feel like manipulation”. If Paternalistic approach does not feel like manipulation, but to some extent contains elements of it, what would substitute it in Eternalistic approach? I would call it awakening. We can think of the shift from manipulation to awakening as a scale. And we, as human beings, may move ourselves along this scale further and further from manipulation into the area of Awakening, where we become, as Rae Chois nicely put it, “an arrow, moving toward the true awakening”. I experienced this shift strongly while attending the Marilyn’s “Advance of Spirit” training, working with Ramana Macharshi approach and walking along the levels of Human Spirit under the guidance of my spiritual Guides. Eternalistic approach is based on the fundamental idea that human resources are eternal and you only need to awaken them by reconnection to our Deeper Wisdom System. With this ideas cooking in my mind I participated (actually for the second time) in Marilyn’s “Freedom to Love”, delivered in Moscow at the end of October 2008. At the last day, in the process of practicing with the “Cutting Enmeshment” exercise, designed as the tool to build freedom out of codependence, I got an idea. It was about to develop this approach further along the scale toward the Eternal area of awakening. One of the important approaches to awakening is the process of discovering Core Values and building Value Based Self Image. I thought that with the power of the Core Value approach it would be possible to get rid of all kinds of cables, robes and so on without cutting them at all, as in Cutting Enmeshment. Also my experience with Constellation work supported the idea that it will be possible to transform them together with the whole codependent situation into free relationships based on core values. In the course of next months I was elaborating these ideas in coaching sessions, in order to check, if it is working. And it worked beautifully! Now I would like to describe the “Transformation of Codependence” process as the sequence of steps. Even if experienced practitioner could do this process individually, working with qualified coach would add a more depth to it. I am going to describe the steps without specific instructions for the coach with the presupposition that it will be clear enough out of the context. First three preparatory steps of the process are the same as in the “Cutting Enmeshment”. “Transformation of Codependence Into Meaningful Freedom” step by step. 1. Start with choosing relationship situation you are going to work on, as if you are looking at it from the Coach Position and experience it from there, as if it would be the scene in the theater. Mark (better by chairs) places where you see yourself and others. Put your observations on paper as verbal description and as a picture, probably in a way it is done in the Constellation work. 2. Ask yourself, what would be the best outcome you would like to get out of process, what would be its value for you and how it would affect your life. Write it down. 3. Then, if it is appropriate to you, move to the place of your own location in this scene, associate with it and visualize the space around you (with eyes closed ore open) and other people involved in relationships, which are present there at their locations. Sense the space and check if there are some visually seen connections between you and other people, whom you see in this space. Put your observations on paper. 4. Ask yourself, what you receive from this relationship; what is its value for you, feel this value and remember the feeling. Write what appears. 5. Move to the chairs of other people, involved in the scene, and find out the values of this relationship for them, feel these values. Write what appears. 6. Return to your own place and explore results of step 4 further by discovering your Core Value in this relationship. Contemplate and then physically create a model of your Core Value Based Image as if you sculpture it. At this point the process might continue in two ways. 7. The regular way is to move to positions of other participants, to discover their Core Values in this relationship and sculpture their Core Value Based Image. 8. Return to your position and check the quality of the space around you, if there remained some ropes or cables or something else connecting you with other participants. Generally there will be none. If yes, find out the core value behind them and integrate it in your Core Value Based Image. 9. Check the ecology for all the participants and send gratitude to everyone, including you for all these beautiful discoveries and for all the richness of experience, related to these relationships. 10. Return to the Coach position and check what you got from the process. Is it truly ecological for you and others? Will it lead both you and them to a more conscious, more awakened, richer life? Find out how could you incorporate your discoveries into your everyday life and what would be your first steps. What was the value of this process for you? Another scenario may develop, if while exploring Core Value at the 6-th step you would experience the switch to a collective, transpersonal field of consciousness, embracing all participants and accessing their Core Values equally well, as if you are a Core Value Spirit of the whole group. In that case, being in this state, it is possible to sculpture Core Value Based Images of other participants directly out of this transpersonal Spirit. This opportunity is still under investigation, but what is intriguing here is the connection with Transpersonal Coaching approach of John Whitmore, who writes in his “Transpersonal Coaching In Action”: “In recent years people especially in Western culture are waking up to the transpersonal within themselves through the emerging need to find meaning and purpose in all aspects of their lives and to work in the service of something beyond just making a profit .” The above quote goes along with the idea of “shifting gears and moving from structured to global listening,… from focusing only to the client’s specific goal, to their expanding developing larger goals, their eternal goals .” I hope that further development of the presented approach would contribute to this “shift of gears”, from codependence to the past into the freedom to love and to discover who we really are, the Oneness beyond all kind of divisions… Benjamin Evgeny Shulman Professional Coach, Erickson of Russia, Moscow, www.core-success.ru benshulman.55@gmail.com Course AnnouncementsErickson College International is very excited to present 15 days of Advanced Coaching Events on the Southern Riviera Coast of Antalya in Turkey.The main course in the program is Standing In Contribution, Erickson’s world famous Trainers Training in TransformationSPRING - SUMMER 2009 TURKEY |
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