Supercoach - Michael Neill [51]
Patient: My wife and I just aren’t getting along, doctor, you know, in bed. Between my work schedule and her dealing with the kids, it just feels as if the magic’s gone.
Therapist: Hmm . . . tell me, do you ever dream?
P: Uh—sure I dream.
T: Tell me your most recent dream.
P: Well, I don’t remember much. I was walking down a city street, and there were lots of tall buildings and cars but no people.
T: Had it been raining?
P: Not sure—I guess it might have been.
T: So there were puddles?
P: I suppose there could have been puddles.
T: And, I’m just guessing here, might there have been fish in those puddles?
P: Wow—I suppose there might have been . . .
T: [triumphant] Aha! Just as I suspected—fish in the dreams!
While most of our own biases aren’t so obvious and don’t seem so silly (at least to us), the point is that if you’re listening for something specific, you’ll tend to find it. Listen for hesitation in the voice of your partner and—boom!—you’ve “caught” your mate lying to you. Listen for warning signs of trouble in your relationship and before you know it, they’ll be everywhere.
The problem doesn’t so much have to do with what you’re listening for, but what you’ll miss by listening for it. Whether it’s the affection in your partner’s voice, the look of love in their eyes, or the sadness in your child’s heart when they’re telling you about what happened at school today, if you’re looking too hard for something else, you’re liable to miss what’s actually there. But as soon as you expand your listening palette, you’ll be able to hear more and more.
That’s not to say you must never listen for anything. One of the filters I’ve found quite useful as a coach is to listen to language literally—that is, to take what others say as a literal representation of what is going on in their minds. For example, I remember a client telling me that he felt as though his debts were pressing in on him, and his finances were so tight that at times he found it difficult to breathe. I asked him to briefly visualize his finances and notice where in his internal world he “saw” them. Sure enough, his pictures were 360-degree wraparound panoramas surrounding him and literally “pressing up against him.”
When I asked him to unwrap the panorama and lay it out on the floor beneath him, he immediately began to breathe more easily. When he shrank it down to the size of one sheet of paper, he seemed like a different person. He became quiet for a few moments and then said, “Oh, is that it? I can handle that.” Like the traveler who discovers in a flash of lightning that the “snake” he’s hiding from is just a piece of coiled-up rope, by changing his pictures he was able to give himself a new and empowered perspective on his problems.
Here are some of the most useful patterns that come up again and again in my work:
• “I just can’t see myself doing that.” Taken literally, that means you can’t make an internal movie or picture of yourself doing whatever is being discussed. Once you can create that internal imagery, you’ll often find it easier to move forward.
• “This is a big problem for me.” If you shrink down your internal representation of the situation, does it still seem so big? If you make it smaller and smaller, does it still seem like a problem?
• “I’m stuck.” How do you know you’re stuck? On what? With what? What do you want to use to unstick yourself? Which parts of your life/work/relationship are flowing? If you increase that flow, would that be enough to unstick you?
• “The future looks bleak.” What happens if you brighten it up? Make your internal images big and bold. Drop in some pictures of things you would love to see happen . . . and see what happens!
• “I’m hanging on by a thread here.” Interwoven steel thread is actually remarkably strong. And if you tie it onto your waist and engage fully with your challenges,