I was coaching someone the other day and I said something that made him laugh and say
"That's helpful, in a very Robbie way."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it was helpful, but not in the way I wanted it to be."
When I was learning NLP, I'd occasionally drive up to Marin to the office of my NLP teacher to get a one on one session. I'd come with some problem, some issue in my life, some unwanted experience, or thwarted desire, and the hope that he could help me with it.
So we'd do the session, and afterwards I'd consistently have the experience "that was really helpful, but we didn't fix the issue."
And then, a little bit later, if I remembered to check, I'd notice that the issue just wasn't an issue anymore. As in, it was no longer something that was capturing my attention, causing me distress. No longer something that I would pay someone for help with.
So I reflected on this, trying to understand how it worked.
And I realized: in addition to the issue, I was bringing something else as well: An idea about how the issue would be fixed. I didn't notice this at the time, it all felt like part of the package. But I not only had an unwanted experience, or thwarted desire, but also some pretty specific idea of what "fixing the issue" would look and feel like.
And if our idea about how it would be fixed was good, then we would have fixed the issue ourselves! In fact, this happens constantly in your life. There's some desire or some unwanted experience, and you have an idea about how to address it, and then you address it and it works. 99.99% of the time, this is how life works. "I'm cold. I'll put on a sweater," "I'd like some ice cream. I'll eat some ice cream."
But the ones that stick around, the desires that seem perpetually out of reach, the unwanted experiences that haunt us, those are the ones where our ideas about how to fix it are actually impediments.
In my own work as a client, and then as a coach, it's become clear to me that the role of the coach is very often to help the client get *unfixed*; to release the fixed idea of how the issue should be resolved, and become free to see, feel, and think about it fluidly, from many different angles. From there, the collective intelligence of your life can find a new way forward.
Do you have some issue like this, that's stuck around despite your great efforts and intentions? Something that you'd like to get unfixed about? I'm currently offering free coaching sessions, where we can do just that.
I've opened up a few spots for you fine people on the frontier of sustainable and sane algorithmic media use, where I'll waive my fee. This is not a sales conversation, it's 90 minutes of us doing real magic together on an important part of your life.
If that sounds fun, let me know!
I don't think we have DMs here yet, so you can just tell me your interested and a way to contact you here:
https://forms.gle/1bCSAbFKSwKST58v7