How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 324

4. It’s Devious. Talking directly to your unconscious mind is a waste of
time because it’s unconscious. It’s much cleverer than your conscious
mind and it has lots of stuff on its plate. At this very moment it’s beating
your heart, moderating your blood pressure, contracting muscles,
digesting your food and blinking your eyes.
Have you ever read a self-development book that gave you lots of great
advice on improving yourself? You read it all and thought, this is so
blindingly obvious, I can do this? Then nothing happened, no long-term
behaviors changed, you didn’t stop procrastinating, you didn’t get fit,
you didn’t lose weight and you didn’t leave your dead end job?
What do you think happened there? You knew what you needed to do,
but you didn’t do it.
Well the fact is, you knew what to do at an intellectual and conscious
level, but behaviors come from the unconscious level. Whilst you were
reading that book your unconscious was probably thinking “Yeh
whatever, you do what you want, but don’t count on me going to the
gym because I’m off out for a few beers”
When somebody is laughing, their unconscious mind is a lot more
accessible and messages can slip in unnoticed. That’s why when people
tell me they miss the message because they were laughing too much, I
often think, “Well you may think you missed the message, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean you did”
To recapitulate one and another :
Humor can work miracles during a session.
It is very useful to lighten things up,
It helps the coachee to take their situation and them selves less
seriously,
It’s a great way to help people see things from a different angle.

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