Podcast: Play in new window | Download
If you want to get the most: focus on one thing in a program
In my Friday Podcast with Bonnie this past Friday it became clear that the methodology of using courses, coaching calls, programs is not taught anywhere, so each person feels that they need to make up their own method. Each coach, each participant.
By methodology I mean: how to get the most out of a course, a coaching call, a program.
In this article I’ll teach the most effective way to get the most out of anything. Literally anything you do.
The current state of affairs in this arena: Depending on what you think will have the most value, the most benefit to you, you make up something that will actually more likely to hinder you than not.
Most people don’t have any ‘what’s important‘, ‘what is even more important‘ set. I.e. no priorities, no focus statement. None of that.
How you do anything is how you do everything. So like in a Swedish buffet where the table is packed with all kinds of goodies, in a course, in a coaching call they will try to get everything that is said… and the result is getting next to nothing. The get so little, it is normally less than 1% of what is being taught.
My method is: I listen and hear everything… make sure I am not distracted. But I aim to get one thing from a course, a lecture, a coaching call… one thing.
I don’t know ahead of time what that is… I’ll decide what that one thing was way way way later.
So I allow everything in, undigested.
I don’t filter the incoming avalanche of information. Instead I spend days regurgitating and chewing it… until I choose the one thing that is worth having gotten. By MY criteria.
Often I use the one thing I got on Monday to organize what I got on Thursday as its focus… and often that one thing, if I decide that it is significant, I use it as the focus of everything for a month, maybe even longer.
My current focus is ‘vision’. I distilled it from a long webinar I took on Monday. So now I look for vision in everything, and that is my one thing right now.
I looked and I saw that the 67 steps coaching is most transformative if your one thing is SEEING. Not looking or looking for… The program takes you to places and shows you stuff that you can see.
But you can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink, unless it is thirsty.
So the one thing is seeing. Not thinking. Not remembering. Also not understanding. Not using it. None of that. It is SEEING. Seeing what is shown to you in the program. If you see more, good. But the focus is to SEE.
See with fresh eyes… I can add.
Many of my other programs, the one thing is feeling.
The gap
The way to grow yourself or anything…
Most businesses, most lives would benefit if the owner took on bridging ‘the gap’.
That is what I asked Bonnie, a business owner, to find and address to grow her business where it starts serving her.
I asked Bonnie to take on a daily task: to find gaps in her business and in her life, so she can be coached. So she can see her activity as building a bridge to span between the two shores of a valley or a river.
A gap is a tad more complex than just one thing, and yet every gap is one thing with two sides: how it is now, and how it could be… the vision.
Most people are not intellectually ready for taking on the gap as the one thing… You know if you are…
That assignment: finding gaps and formulating them in a way that coaching can happen, can be a godsend to you if you take the one thing seriously.
Most people, even if they claim that they want to grow, they want more, better, different, won’t do it. Or will find such big gaps that no one can jump from one side to the other.
A gap is relatively small, and requires only a few action items to bridge.
Most people hooked on fables and unreality think they can go from pauper to rich business owner in one step…
Once you identify a bunch of gaps in your life, in your business, in your attitudes, then you may be ready to request coaching.
Most questions I get are ‘inquiring minds want to know’ type… not requests for coaching. Even though the person who asks them, I know them! has a ton of gaps they could start working on to get to where they’d like to be. Free, joyful, respected, fully self-expressed.
If you are paying to be coached and haven’t been formulating requests for coaching… maybe that’s what is missing…
Unless you have done the work, and identified the gap, and formulated a request for coaching, everything the coach will say will be their good idea, their opinion, and you’ll accept or not… Or try it on to please them for three days… But it won’t FEEL like the answer to your prayers.
But maybe you are not ready for coaching… For a request for coaching you need to define the gap, including the vision.
I have taught vision before. Today I know way more than I did then…
If you’d like to listen to what we did in last year’s vision and purpose workshop, you can. It’s just $20.
Vision and purpose recordingsIn the meantime I’ll write a lot more articles on the topic, and will continue the conversation with Bonnie…
PS: The one thing can be an action. It can be a how, a what, or a ‘to what end’ purpose.
The one thing is ultimately an organizing principle. What you organize your activities to be about. So it is not necessarily a doing thing. It is a focus.
Here are two examples of two people who are in the 67 step coaching program.
The purpose of that program is to take you to see what in your current lifestyle you cannot see.
You’d have to read hundreds of books, travel a million miles, dip your toes in too many things to get the same things. But you already have a life that is filled to the brim.
But you can steal an hour or so a day to soak up what someone distilled down in their hundreds of books, their travels of millions of miles, and their experiments.
It is not a learning experience: it is a seeing experience. And allowing… allowing to be taken out of your life, out of your egomind, so you can look and see.
OK, the two people:
- One person is adventurous and is taken where the program takes her. She has had her ups and downs. Like clockwork, she completes about five steps a week. She writes a long report on each and emails it to me. The reports are a good reflection of what they saw. Her focus is on principles. She maps what she sees on her life, and on the life of people she has been able to see. Her current about-me score is 10%.
- The second person: from her report you can hear that she hears about 1% of what the speaker says. The rest of the time she re-interpreted, and 99% of the report is about what she thinks, what she feels about this whole thing. Her current about me score is 91%.
Looking and seeing when doing the 67 steps needs to be outward directed. Seeing with the physical eye.
The higher your about-me score is, the higher you look in your feelings, in the mind, in your interpretations. You effectively don’t look, and don’t see.
You didn’t allow the program to take you to places… So you remained where you have always been. You didn’t get any new views of life… So you can remain untouched, unchanged.
You have a superiority issue…
When you do a program like that, it is clear that that is exactly how you do everything in your life.
Even just one hour a day, focused on a new way of doing things, with your one thing focus, can start transforming your life, transforming the way you do everything.
I said ‘can‘. But only if you do it that way. If your focus is not on you. Only if you can force your self-importance, your self-concern, your superiority to the back-burner. If you don’t: you are wasting your time.
When, during listening or writing your report, you catch the self-stuff get in the foreground, stop the audio, stop the writing, and handle what came up. Stop/change/start! And when done with the distraction, go back to the audio and re-listen the part you lost.
I do exactly that! The art is to know what you are doing. Self-awareness.
If you follow these instructions, you’ll reap great results.
Watch all your numbers rise. But only if you can HONOR your one thing… in the 67 steps’ case: allow the program to take you to look and see.
Someone complained yesterday: It is harder than I thought.
What do you think: it is going to be easy?
PPS: I am reflecting on what is my ‘ultimate’ one thing that I focus on, no matter what I do, no matter where I am.
And that is ‘the question’. Have room for the answers that come, but focus on the question.
