Life Coach Training

Lesson 9

The Gift of Contrast

I have discovered an extraordinarily effective decision-making tool you can use for yourself and your clients. It is fast, easy, and always works if you are honest about your response. You can practice right now, and then pass the technique along:              

      1. Think of a decision you need to make, and boil the decision down to the two most basic alternatives. For example:  Should I buy the Toyota or the Honda?  Do I stay in my job or leave?  Would I be better off confronting my mother about a particular issue, or remain silent for now?

You can use a big-picture question, such as “Should I quit my job and do coaching full time, or coach part-time?” or something minor and right before you, such as “Would I prefer to go for dinner at the Thai restaurant, or Italian?”  To practice, you might want to pick something simple to start, and then work your way up to bigger-picture matters.

      2. Take a coin and assign one alternative to heads, and the other to tails. It doesn’t matter which you assign to which side of the coin.

3. In a moment you will flip the coin. Before you do, imagine that the side that comes up will indicate which path you will absolutely follow through on. If it says, “Toyota,” you will pick up the phone and confirm your Toyota order, and forget about the Honda.  If it says “Leave your job,” you will begin to write your resignation.

      4. Flip the coin and notice which side comes up. Then ― this is the most crucial part ― notice within 3 seconds what reaction you have. You will feel an emotional reaction of either relief or tension; expansion or contraction; joy or depression. You will probably also feel a visceral sensation, most likely in your stomach, solar plexus, or chest. It will be an “ugh” or an “ah.”  Your reaction may be subtle or dramatic. In any event, you must observe your reaction immediately upon seeing which side of the coin came up, and you must be extremely honest about your reaction. If you wait longer than a few seconds, your mind will come in and you will be back to the confusion that clouded your decision in the first place.

This exercise works because there is a part of  you that always knows where your joy lives, and it is seeking to communicate to you.  Call this part divine mind, intuition, gut instinct, inner guidance, higher self, or any other name, it is all the same. You know where your joy path lives. When you are following that path, you feel alive, empowered, creative, and free. When you veer from that path, you feel numb, deadened, disempowered, uncreative, depressed, and stuck. What a gift we have in our inner guidance!

Poet Piet Hines put this process into the form of a simple poem:

                                          Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind

                                          And you're hampered by not having any,

                                          The way to make up your mind

                                          Is simply by spinning a penny

                                          Not so that chance shall decide the affair

                                          While you’re passively standing there moping

                                          But the moment the penny is up in the air

                                          You suddenly know what you’re hoping!

      The coin, of course, is simply a tool to help you tap into your intuition. After practicing with the coin for a while, you can glean the benefit simply by closing your eyes for a moment and trying each alternative on for size. You will notice that simply by thinking about choosing a path, it will yield a gut feeling. As Abraham says, “If thinking about something doesn’t feel good, doing it will probably not feel any better. If thinking about something feels good, doing it will probably feel better.”

While this technique is extremely simple, it gets to the heart of all decision making. After you have practiced it for yourself, you will be able to use it on the spot in coaching situations and give your clients a technique that will accelerate their decision making, growth, and happiness.

Exercise:

Over the next few days, whenever  you have a decision to make, either do the above coin-toss exercise or simply try the alternatives on for size in your mind. When you discern how each alternative feels in your gut, practice heeding the voice closest to joy.