James Arthur Ray on Coaching and Life Unleashed
My coaching work goes by the name Ultimate Human Performance Coaching. I ran two sessions this morning before we spoke, and every session opens the same way: I ask the person to tell me what they're good at. You'd be surprised how many answer, "I don't know." Then I ask what they love. Same blank. So I give them a better question, one anybody can put to themselves. If money were off the table entirely, what would you do tomorrow? That's a blue-sky experiment, and it matters, because the answer starts pointing toward what a person loves and possibly what they're here to do.
From there I take clients back into their early years. Developmental psychologists say our core values, beliefs, and assumptions lock into place by around age 13, and after that they almost never shift. Sit with that for a second, Erik. It means you and I are moving through our days alongside 30, 40, and 50 year old bodies that are, on the inside, still running on a 13 year old's programming. Dr. Morris Massey did a good deal of research here, and his finding was the same: those values rarely budge unless a person lives through something big enough to shake them. So we revisit the formative environment, the parents, the way we were conditioned, and in doing that we start to see our own psychology clearly. Not only who we are now and where we're headed, which is the point of the program, but also where we're tied down and limited, and how to cut those cords loose.
My latest eBook is called Life Unleashed, and in it I write that we're born into greatness but conditioned into mediocrity. The idea behind that line is simple. Most of us are the leftover product of other people's habitual thinking. Whose thinking? Our parents, grandparents, other relatives, friends, church, social circles, the media, plenty of other sources. We absorb all of it and it hardens into habit while we're still young.
You already know this. Plug into most media for any stretch of time and the message is relentless: the world is falling apart, the economy's a wreck, we're at war. I'm not arguing for living in a fantasy or pretending none of that exists. What I'm pointing at is something else. From the start we've been told far more about what we can't do than about what we're actually capable of. That's how people end up parked in what I'd call the mediocre meadow, living inside fear and doubt and insecurity instead of chasing anything of their own. Getting people out of there, from leashed and limited to unleashed and unlimited, is the whole reason I do this.