CorporateCoach eNewsletter

Issue No. 87, 31^st January 2005

Editorial: Letting go of the past
Coaching notes: Beliefs, behaviour and the mind

1. Editorial: Letting go of the past

Richard Winfield - editor and principal consultant In order to learn, you have to be able to unlearn. To be able to move forward, you have to be able to let go of the past. I heard a story many years ago about a grieving ritual, I think in South America. When somebody died, the remaining spouse had to put the body in a sack and carry it around for a week. This was in a hot country and during the week the body would decompose and start to smell. Without any disrespect to the dead person, this exercise greatly accelerated the letting go of the past. By the end of the week, no doubt, it would have been a joy to let go of the loved one, to bury the rotting remains, and to move on into the future. Death, burial and mourning are celebrated in many different ways around the world, but generally there is a ritual to mark the change point and to allow the survivors to move on.

Other rituals celebrate birth, puberty, marriage, etc. Rituals can be valuable in organisations, to mark a change, whether it be promotion of an individual, the beginning or end of a project, or a retirement. Much of my coaching work is with directors who have not yet made the emotional move from manager to director. They need to let go of their previous role, as well as take on a new identity and learn new behaviours.

We have had a couple of cancellations for our free workshop for people wanting to become consultants or coaches, or to improve the business success of an existing practice. If you would like to join us in Birmingham on Wednesday, call Shosh Waldman on 020 8203 7757.

USEFUL LINKS:

SEMINAR DATES: Train to become a successful consultant

Consultant Training Limited; helping successful managers and professionals become successful consultants Are you a successful executive or professional who would like to become a successful consultant?

If so, Consultant Training Limited has an intensive six month programme that will set you up in business and give you the skills in sales, consultancy, coaching and training that will turn you into a successful and rounded consultant. We are also offering foundation workshops on accelerated learning and building a successful consultancy....[MORE]

Seminar programme

FREE SEMINARS:	How to Save 18 Months, Wednesday 2 February, 10.00-4.00 , Birmingham How to Save 18 Months, Wednesday 16 February, 10.00-4.00, London How to Save 18 Months, Thursday 10 March, 10.00-4.00, Birmingham
BUSINESS BUILDING WORKSHOPS:	Business Kick-start (Essential first steps), 4-5 March, Birmingham Winning more consultancy business, 6-8 March, Birmingham

2. Coaching Notes: Beliefs, behaviour and the mind

?Your beliefs are your reality. Beliefs are assumptions about the nature of reality, and because you create what you believe in, you will have many ?proofs? that reality operates this way.?
Sanaya Roman

John Duncan Put simply, if we go into a situation believing that we are going to fail then our behaviour will increase the probability that we will fail, thereby reinforcing our feelings of failure. And so it goes on. The evidence of our actions, and their result, is stored in the records bureau of our sub-conscious – without undergoing any cross-examination. This evidence is from the external world and we then construct it, normally without challenge, into our underlying, deeply held beliefs. These then become our reality. Since philosophically, reality can only ever be internal we can change it by changing our self-beliefs. This will change our feelings and behaviour, leading to a different view of how the rest of the world perceives us. Grasping this concept of the inner-self is fundamental to changing our beliefs. Without such a transformation, changes in our feelings and behaviour will be superficial and short lived. Herman Hesse said

?There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many lead such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the inner world to assert itself.?

One model of the mind used extensively in coaching characterises the sub-conscious mind as a non-judgemental filing cabinet, with the conscious mind acting as a filter, removing those things that are inconsistent with our beliefs. As a ?lapsed? chemical engineer, I attempted representing this as a simple flow diagram to show whether these functions occur in series or in parallel. However, I gave up since it became clear that the reality is far more complex than my engineering approach could capture. Take for example the following two models of the mind from the field of psychoanalysis.

Appignanesi and Zarate, (1979) describe Freud?s two divisions of the mind as the preconscious and unconscious. The first is all the memories and ideas capable of becoming conscious and the latter is made up of desires and impulses. Jung (Hyde and McGuiness (1992)) however describes the psyche as consisting of the unconscious mind which compensates the conscious attitude. He believed that whenever the conscious attitude is too one-sided, its unconscious opposite manifests itself. Although not explicit in these descriptions, the models clearly also reflect an impact on beliefs (attitudes) and subsequent behaviour.

These models are not necessarily inherently inconsistent. The value of any model is its usefulness in a particular application. The ?filing cabinet/filter? model has in my experience a valuable role to play in coaching. It states that our beliefs come from the accumulated memories of the sub-conscious. When they are retrieved from the filing cabinet, the conscious mind responds to a particular situation in line with the pre-programmed belief. But this programming can be reprocessed using the filter of the conscious mind to place only positive memories into the filing cabinet, consequently overwriting those that lead to limiting beliefs. In this way clients can be helped to change their behaviour and habits but only after recognising and then challenging those old limiting beliefs.

John Duncan is Director of Huxley Strategic Choice, and specialises in Transition Management and Executive Coaching. He has thirty years experience in the engineering services sector where he has held board level roles and lived and worked in Europe, the USA and the West Indies. John is currently working with Brefi Group on a project in the steel industry.

USEFUL LINKS:

Introducing Jung, Hyde and McGuiness
Introducing Freud, Appignanesi and Zarate

We aim to make the Brefi Group web site the premier developmental site for teams and individuals in organisations, so do please send us your suggestions and requests for further development. And let us know what you think of this newsletter, and comment on the content.

THIS IS A FREE PUBLICATION! Please SHARE it willingly with a friend or colleague who could benefit from knowing more about corporate coaching.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter: /newsletter.html

To unsubscribe, go to the address above and enter your e-mail address. If you use more than one e-mail address, be sure to enter the same one that you used when you subscribed. If you want to change your e-mail address, then subscribe with the new address and unsubscribe with the old one.

Brefi Group is a change management organisation that provides corporate coaching, consultancy, facilitation and training. Be sure to visit the Brefi Group web site at http://www.brefigroup.co.uk

We hope you enjoyed this issue of CorporateCoach. If you would like to learn more about how we can work together, then please contact me, Richard Winfield:

Telephone: 08450 678 222, or +44 (0) 121 704 2006 (international)
E-mail: editor@brefigroup.co.uk