Life Guru – Life Coaching in Indian Perspective

Life Guru – Life Coaching in Indian Perspective

Think what you thought…

One day I was sitting with my client and in an intuitive response to his problem I said “The Problem is a problem because we think there is a problem and the moment we think there is a solution then there is no problem”. The seed of this simple thought now taken root in his mind and he is no more bogged down with problems but empowered to think of the solutions.

What is a problem? It is nothing but a thought we nurture and it is true to any of the issues we face in any aspect of our life be it professional, personal, or spiritual. Are you happy with what you do? Are you happy with family/partner? Are you happy about your being? And I guess the answers to these for most of us would be in negative and we beautifully rationalize our own unhappiness by nurturing the thoughts pointing towards external events or things. I am not happy because my boss is not supportive, I am not getting the recognition & reward, my partner doesn’t understand me, and he/she always bullies me and many more.

An external event may result in number of thought seeds in our mind; our state will be result of which thought we nurture. Have your boss appreciated for your efforts? What happened then? There are literally thousands of thought seeds it can generated for example “boss is nice”, “I have done good job so should be appreciated”, “why he is so happy it was no big deal”, “he only appreciate when I go extra mile” and even some may pick “the appreciation is not good enough I should be…”, “he is appreciating just for the sake of it”, “I didn’t like the way he say”  any external event generates both positive and negative thought seed and each of these got potential to overwhelm our mind. “Mind” is nothing but the cluster of thoughts and when get overwhelmed by cancerous thought growth it results in extreme emotional states manifested through our behavior.

Positivity or negativity are relative terms and are dependent on final manifestation in emotional states. Even what seems to be negative can result in positive & functional emotional state depending on how we nurture it. The awareness, “self –awareness” is the key here, if we are aware and watchful then no matter what thought it is we can grow it in a way that it will add to our happiness and growth.

Cancerous growth of simple thought “I am not good enough” may result in deep depression and if we become aware then thought growth will result in personal development.  An aware person may say to himself “Ok, I am not good enough” but “how I am not good enough” “how I can add resources” etc….

It is not about fighting with thoughts or positive psychology; it is about simply becoming aware of the thoughts.  Just think what you thought…..

Neuro Linguistic Programming – The Way of life

To understand NLP it is very important to see its origin. Richard Bandler & John Grinder the co-creator of NLP started their journey by observing three of the great therapist of that time Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson. They identified language used by these three great therapists is one of the important key which is unlocking the positive outcomes in their clients.

Bandler & Grinder focused their observation on what is working and what is not, they extensively studied people who have overcome their problems like phobia, fears anxiety etc and how part of that. Also observed successful people and find out what they do what they do well. Based on all these observations they created the model which is universally true and can be applied to anyone. They discovered that by modeling successful behaviors we can also produce the same results, and they put modeling at the core of the all the available NLP tools.

To my mind NLP is something we always do in our day-to-day life. We learn NLP right from our childhood; Don’t we  learn things by modeling the behaviors of our elders/peer group. And we keep on doing this modeling throughout our lives. Don’t we get inspired by different people?  We do copy the behaviors & attitudes of them, and generally label this as learning or conditioning.

NLP is about focusing on the how someone is achieving something and how we can model them to create the similar results in us. It seems very simple yet effective premise and it works in any area of life, relationship, self-development, career, spirituality, money etc.

In NLP modeling is primarily based on three factors, which in fact is prime constituents of NLP and these are:

• Neuro – The nervous system and the neurological responses. Everything we think or experience causes neurological responses, states and chemistry in body
• Linguistic – Language. We describe our world and ourselves to ourselves and others using language and language both describe and create experience and meaning.
• Programming – Our automatic programs, patterns and spontaneous unconscious responses which we learn how to change and install

There are number of ways to define NLP, Bandler defines it as “an attitude and methodology” “which leaves behind a trail of techniques”. Some others define it as “owner’s manual” for your brain and etc. Every single person coming to NLP has its own take on NLP. Having said that everyone realizes the power of NLP in different settings, no matter how they define it what matters is “It works”.

NLP.com defines it as:

“Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a behavioral technology, which simply means that it is a set of guiding principles, attitudes, and techniques about real-life behavior, and not a removed, scientific theorem.

It allows you to change, adopt or eliminate behaviors, as you desire, and gives you the ability to choose your mental, emotional, and physical states of well-being.

With NLP, you learn how to grow from every single life experience, thus increasing your ability to create a better quality of life.

NLP is a very pragmatic technology based on an ability to produce your desired results, thus allowing you to become proficient at creating your future!”

Where it works:

Since last more than 30 years now NLP has grown and evolved many folds, people from different fields studied and contributed to its development. Every individual coming to NLP has given it a new flavor and added new streams to it.

Few of the fields in which NLP is practiced worldwide these days are :

• Behavior change work
• Education
• Training
• Sales
• Leadership
• Marketing
• Therapy
• Relationships
• Coaching
• sports

And there are more fields to be discovered !!!!!

What brings passion and what fuels it?

I am not an expert of psychology or behavioral sciences to give a confirmative answer to this, however would like to talk about my own experiences and hopefully this may lead us to some conclusions.

What I feel is that every one of us has different areas of interest or likings; some may be hereditary in nature, hardbound in our genes and some may be outcome of our environmental & social conditioning. And these interests or likings develop into our passions, largely due to two factors; first due to our social conditioning & second because of our own perceptions, beliefs & values.

Further, my learning suggests that any interest or liking of ours which survive during our tough times potentially turnout to be our “passions”, ultimate motivation of life. Rest of the interest’s just fall off and we remember them as part of our history. We all can recall all such interests from our yesteryear, some of us may have played guitar, painted or sang etc. but we no longer hold these attributes with us anymore. To me these are nothing but the passions which can’t survive in the adverse social or personal conditioning.

Let me share a part of my history, this is about me being “sketcher”. I was never formally trained in the art of sketching till I discovered this latent potential of mine. Those were summer holidays after my first year of graduation. One day I found myself trying to copy some caricature from the local daily, after finishing the drawing I found it to be pretty OK and appreciated myself and started practicing the art by simply coping one or the other caricature on daily basis. One day passing by the market I saw the advertisement board of an art school and very next day I landed up there with all my so-called sketches. After seeing all those, my art coach agreed to guide me. And then began my journey of absolute passion, commitment, sleepless nights & day long hard work. I still recall those days as shining part of my history. Those were the days, when I have got accolades from all quarters and my life was full of happiness, passion and I was excelling in life. And I belief this is what happens when we follow our heart. This state of passion lasted for a year or so and I have created some of the very beautiful sketches during this short span. And then came the period of so-called practicality in life and my dream of becoming an artist was blown away by environmental factors, which includes social & family cues. And over the period of time I lost touch with my “sketcher” self.

Now, when I look back to this piece of my life, I realize that it was not passion but strong interest of mine. Had it been truly nurtured as my passion then I would have been an artist. But this interest of mine couldn’t stand through the adversities, when societal pressure built up then I left it and moved on. And it is not only about the society but also about my own perception about things and self. Had I perceived the environment & myself differently then I could have stood to that pressures and my life could have been very different.

Having said that, I strongly belief that out of the two factors mentioned above, it is the self perceptions, beliefs, values & self-image which fuels & transforms the interests into passions. It was me, who couldn’t stand those social pressures because of my “self limiting beliefs”, otherwise there were no other reasons. So if we really drill down then it is the “self” at the core of this. If our self perceptions, beliefs, values & image are in place then no matter what happens in environment our interest can survive any adversity. The most amazing part is that instead of realizing and correcting our “self”, we tend to leave our potential passions, a chance to make our life happy & meaningful, that’s easer I guess!!!!

Motivation – The Only Key to Success

Hello Friends, this is my maiden effort to put my thoughts in this format. Considering this being the first step towards my long time dream to put my views and opinions on topics of wider public interest, I am really not much bothered about the literary value of this post. So please forgive me if anybody gets the disappointment on this front.

Motivation, I would like to replace it with “Passion”. As I see the world, all of us get the motivation “to do” or “not to do” a particular task or action based on the degree of passion we are having. All of us can go back to our memory lanes and can easily pick up the incidents from our lives, where we have demonstrated this. Someone of us might be passionate about playing cricket or going out for movies at our school days and definitely bunked the classes for the cause which he/she thought is more compelling than studies. From where we have got the courage to do all this, to my mind this is generated by the passion we had for our interests.

No matter how difficult the task is if we are passionate about it then we always create the ways to accomplish our task and universe helps us in this. As Paulo Coelho said in “The alchemist” “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” I have experience this in my life and I am sure every one of us must have also experienced this at some point in their lives.

Whether it is personal or professional arena, “passion” is the key to success. For achieving our personal or professional targets/goals or outcomes, passion towards them is the primary force which gives the momentum to reach our destiny.

I believe that each one us have passion for one or the other thing, some of us are aware and some may not be. We may be passionate about range of things, what I believe is the decisive factor in being successful or not is the way we appreciate our passions and work towards them.

In an organizational setup there are different roles to be accomplished by different persons with different passions. From an organizational perspective if the person doing a specific job is passionate about that, then organizational success is inevitable.

Now the biggest question would be how to get the persons with equal high degree of passion. To my mind one way would be check the level of passion in general at the time of selection, and it is quite possible these days as there are number of tools available. And secondly degree of passion may be increased in the existing employee base by aligning their personal success and satisfaction with the overall organizational success. I know this is easier said than done, however the organizations are knowingly or unknowingly addressing this through constant efforts in learning & developmental or OD interventions.