Teaching your wife to drive

Here is an extract from an interview I did with another coach who has been using the cards. One of the things that came up was that he had often said to his wife when she had issues in her business that they ought to do some coaching around it. He summed up her reluctance and the situation  as “a bit like teaching your spouse to drive” which seemed to be most appropriate. However when he got the cards and started using them he decided to introduce them to her and this is what happened…

“Do you want to have a look at this? This is real good fun and its interesting.” So I gave her an explanation of how it worked and I pretty well broke them down into the areas of the mode of transport, where you are and how you can devise a route and so on and obstacles in the way. Knowing that it was best not to intervene at all I just stood back and it was the most amazing thing to watch – the complete absorption in the process. Moving around, mentioned a couple of things. She didn’t really ask questions just made a couple of statements and observations and shared what she was seeing by using the cards. After about twenty minutes or so she became quite tearful in a nice way and she said “I can see where my problem has been,” and it was specifically to do with her business.  She identified the roundabout and felt that she had just been going round and round in circles and not getting anywhere and she needed to take an exit in order to go down another route to get somewhere. Rather than get frustrated and going round and round the roundabout as she has been. It was quite striking to watch how impactful the process was and I really did nothing more than introduce the cards and step back and let her get on and use them.

Coaching Talk and Life really can be a Journey

I have just been listening to and transcribing the Teleseminars, interviews and discussions that I have recorded with coaches that are using the cards. It is great to hear them swap insights and experiences. In August I will be interviewing one coach who bought the cards as part of his journey, and took them with him on his round the world trip. He is very much living the metaphor of a journey through his adventure and his story is great inspiration. Rich recently sent me a testimonial so I’ll post that here.

I met Tim Kenning in March 2006 at a seminar to introduce his coaching cards. I had recently lost my job and I had been inspired to change my career and my life by spending a year travelling the world to find my own unique purpose. I was excited by the cards as I was looking for a way to coach myself as I travelled and I purchased a pack. Then a funny thing seemed to happen. Wherever I sat down to play with the cards and coach myself, people nearby would ask “what are they?” and “can I have a go?” I was living for a while at a retreat centre on a beautiful island off the coast off Thailand. The fact that I had left behind everything I used to hold dear and was taking some time to follow a dream to travel the world seemed to inspire the people I met, and before long I discovered that I was offering life coaching to people from all over the world.

With Tim’s cards I really didn’t have to do much more than to trust in the process, to trust in the cards (they really do have all the questions you need to ask), and to trust in myself to be open to whatever came up for people. The cards are a really wonderful support to a first time coach. I have been using them for over eighteen months and I now have my first paying clients. I have used the cards with people from all over the globe – from Israel to Canada, Sweden to Switzerland to Australia, Britain to America. The metaphor of life as a journey truly does work with people from every country – and the road signs are pretty universal (where a client doesn’t recognise a sign, I simply ask them to create their own meaning). I often use the cards as part of a free trial coaching session I offer to people and they love it.

As I coached myself using the cards, I found that each time I made a little map of my own journey and asked myself Tim’s key question, “if this was happening in real life, what would you do?” I tapped in to my deepest desires and moved away from a world where I had been trapped by my own fears. In the past eighteen months, I have lived in Thailand, India, and the US. I have trained as a yoga teacher in Thailand and as a meditation teacher in the Himalayas and as a relationship coach in San Francisco. I have travelled through Africa on an overland truck and on rickety buses through South East Asia. Oh, and I met a wonderful woman who I got engaged to after just 10 days! (We are about to celebrate our first year together). I am about to create a new life with her in San Francisco, where I will be studying a Masters Degree in Transpersonal Psychology and completing my life coach training.

Can I guarantee that all this will be available to you if you purchase Tim’s cards? Hey, that’s up to you! But if you are looking for an incredible tool that will support you in your coaching, then I’m pretty sure you have found it.

Tim has offered great support and inspiration, too, as I emailed him along my journey.

Rich Litvin (richlitvin@speedymail.org)

I think you’ll agree that Rich and his journey is inspiring. I can’t wait to get him on the phone and interview him about his adventures.

Coaching Session on Video

I asked the guys at http://www.nlpconnections.com/ if anyone could post a video of them using the coaching cards. The video below shows a coach laying out the cards at the start of a coaching session…

I have to say I was surprised just how well the sessions went with the cards, both Louise and Mark had a few ‘wow’ moments when we worked through the process.
Stephen Salmon

Roundabouts?

Here is some recent feedback from a lady who was orginally from the United States. She worked with the cards in a group session and this created a significant shift for her. She left with a very differnt outlook. This is the feedback that she sent a while later -

I was reminded of my early days of driving in this country when we worked with the road signs cards. Dealing with round-abouts was particularly difficult for me since they are not common in the US . I could not believe that the other drivers would yield to me. Hence, I would go round until there were no other cars, and it was safe to exit. Actually playing with the cards, I realized that I have been taking similar actions in my life’s goals. Not that I was waiting for safety to proceed, but that I was waiting for permission to do so. I did not believe that the world would yield to me so that I could go on in the appropriate direction! And once I started making positive moves, not only did the oncoming world yield to me, but also started to seek me out. Thank you for the visual prod. Now my card is: Clearway!

First Feedback

Here is the first piece of feedback about the coaching cards that I recieved…

I had some fun with Tim’s Lifeways cards last weekend. I was at a Beer Festival in Fulham, and decided to lay the cards out and get a feel for them. I’ve been a coach (Corporate & personal) for six years or so, and I like tools that get clients out of their heads (so to speak) and to stop them repeating their stories.

The guy next to me got interested, so I laid out the cards to coach him. Now, this was late afternoon, and I’d been sampling strong ales since 11am. So I was in a somewhat altered state – not normally the way I coach clients.

The interesting thing was, the cards drive the process themselves. The client picks cards that are a metaphor for where they are now, where they want to go, mode of transport etc.
The killer, though, is the NLP/coaching questions on the back of the cards. Where I’d normally use my NLP and coaching skills to ask appropriate questions – there they were. I could coach completely content-free, getting the guy to follow the process built into the cards. So, with minimal processing going on in my brain (just as well seeing how much Ale I’d enjoyed) I was able to deliver a very effective coaching session. The result, after about 20 minutes or so, was the guy next to me had engaged in the process and got sufficient insights into what to do next that he’d filled two A4 sheets.

I’ll be using them again. And I imagine they’d be of even more value to coaches just starting out. Cool. And fun.

Alun Richards – Senior Change Management Consultant
Siemens

I took this to mean that the processes designed into the cards were fairly robust. This could also be an indication of the robustness of Mr Richards.