Coaching Your Inner Genius

• What is Accessing Personal Genius really about?
• What is this thing about “genius” that Neuro-Semantics talks about?
• Is “genius” about higher I.Q. or does it involve something else?
• Can “genius” be coached into existence?
• If it can, how does that work?

In this piece I want to speak to several things in one go. I want to speak about genius, about meta-stating, about coaching, and about the uniqueness of Neuro-Semantics to coaching. To do all of this, I will speak about the art of coaching your inner genius. Why? In part to explain the 3-day training program that is part of the Meta-Coaching Training system that we call Coaching Genius (also known as Accessing Personal Genius).

The Semantics of “Genius”

What does the word genius elicit in your mind? Do you have any semantic reactions to it or does it excite and thrill you as a possibility? We use the term in Neuro-Semantics to speak about highly focused states, states wherein you are fully present, fully engaged. These are the states that we enter into from time to time when we allow ourselves to be completely captivated by something. When that happens, we experience a “flow” state and the world goes away, time goes away, a sense of self goes away, and we are totally present.

Now the amazing thing is that when we are so fully present, not only are we in “flow,” and therefore in a highly pleasant state, but because we are so present, we have all of our best resources available. No wonder we move through otherwise difficult and challenging tasks so easily and gracefully. This is what gives us “a touch of genius.”

Yet how often we discount such. We often consider it a fluke, an accident, that we were lucky, that things just so happened to come together, etc. I think we discount it as we do because it seems like such an altered state to us. Normally we are more self-conscious, time-conscious, distracted, and unfocused. Normally, challenging tasks seem “hard” and “difficult.” Normally, we separate play and work and consider it weird if we have fun working.

Yet there is a structure to the flow states or genius states of focus. John Grinder and Judith DeLozier began identifying that structure in Turtles all the Way Down (1987) based on the “logical levels” formatting of Bateson. Then I streamlined it with meta-states in Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999). Today we have used the meta-states structure to remodel it even further so that we are able to replicate such personal genius states for all kinds of applications.

Born for Genius

Part of the remodeling of the genius states has occurred through revisiting the field of Developmental Psychology. In doing so, we have identified more than two dozen prime states—states that are part of our heritage as human beings, states that we have naturally and experience easily as children.

Take focused engagement for example. Have you ever seen a child, even a little child, become so engaged with something that for that child, in those moments, there is nothing else? The world goes away. The child is in a simple focus state—engaged, happy, having fun, absorbed, thrilled, and in complete sensory awareness with the object of the engagement.

The myth about genius is that it’s the gift of the few, that it’s a function of intelligence, and only of the intelligence that we call “I.Q.” (Intelligent Quotient). Yet all of that is pure myth. As children we all knew and experienced the ability to be fully present as we played and learned. What if that is precisely what made us as children such ferocious learners? What if the incredible learning skills that we demonstrated in our first years (years before we went to school and learned that “learning” is hard, difficult, fraught with judgment and pain), what if that learning was accelerated precisely because of the focus state?

What if genius is equally about E.Q. and even S.Q. as much as I.Q.? What if it’s about being emotional, and emotionally thrilled, and feeling a sense of our own powers and expressiveness (Emotional Intelligence) and finding meaning and significance in what we do that fans our passions (Spiritual Intelligence)? What if it is in growing up and things getting in the way that interfere with our natural intelligence which is the actual problem? What if it are the worries, judgments, rules, commands, prohibitions, etc. that actually interferes with genius?

After all, what stops most of us from stepping into a genius state of focus at any moment? Is it not all of the clutteredness of our mind—our worries, apprehensions, fears, dreads, and conceptual ideas? So what if accessing the genius states is simply a matter of “losing our mind and coming to our senses” (Fritz Perls) in that simple engagement state? What if taking charge of the genius state is a matter of learning to manage our mind at its multiple levels? What if it is using meta-states to set higher frames in our mind that sets the parameters for our genius?

Well, that’s precisely what the introduction training to Meta-States, Accessing Personal Genius, is all about. In that training, we take the dozen prerequisites of genius as primes and meta-state ourselves with them. This is the power of meta-stating. We can now texture any state (such as a engagement state) with the qualities that transform the engagement state into one of pure genius—delight, intentionality, pleasure, power, freedom, self-management, curiosity, wonder, exploration, etc. If the quality of your life is the quality of your states—and the quality of your states is a function of the qualities you bring to your states from a higher level of mind (ah, the Meta-State Secret), then meta-stating is your highway to genius.

Coaching your Inner Genius

If you were born with all of the natural intelligence for genius, and if genius states of focus are part of your heritage as a human being, and you have all the resources to set the frames to make that happen, then all you need is to access and sequence those resources. And that’s where coaching comes in.

In terms of coaching, NLP was way ahead of its time from its origins. Setting forth the premises that people are not broken, don’t need to be fixed, and already have all the resources they need, NLP as a model was ideally suited for coaching. The problem was that there was no field of Coaching when NLP first appeared. So something so happened. The therapists who first took up NLP and ran with it began to change the very nature of the therapy they did.

I certainly did as a psychologist. My practice moved more and more from doing remedial change work to doing generative work. Even with the “sickest” of clients, I was working on getting them to generate the most transformative responses possible for them within the first few sessions. And as I cared less and less about visiting the past, healing old wounds, getting them over hurts, grievances, traumas, and phobias, many of them simply found them more and more irrelevant as they caught a vision for life at its best rather than stopping the hurt.

Why is this? Because of another premise. “People make the best choices available to them in their model of the world.” Give them more choices, more options, and better strategies and they will immediately move toward them. These premises about human beings and how we operate are today the very premises of coaching. Ian McDermott has done an excellent job in his book, The NLP Coach to demonstrate this.

Because the Neuro-Semantics’ use of Meta-States is uniquely suited for coaching Neuro- Semantic goes further to take Coaching to yet another level. There are a number of reasons for this. With the incorporation of the prime states from Developmental Psychology, the Meta- States training coaches people to access and apply these innate states of our natural intelligence.

One of the key things we’ve learned and built in Neuro-Semantics is the absolute importance of applying to self. In this, we use our self-reflexive awareness to first experience the genius state of focus for ourselves. This isn’t something that can be taught, trained, or commanded. It has to be experienced. A person can facilitate it, can ask questions that evoke us to experience it, and that’s the key distinction of a coach. A coach isn’t the one on the court or in the stadium, a coach works from the sidelines. A coach plays a different game from the game that the player, whether an athlete or business person, plays. It’s the game of Coaching for peak performance. The player plays the game of the Peak Performance.

The Key Coaching Question

• Would you like to have your inner genius coached so that you can take your learning, your enjoyment, your achievements, your sense of self, your ability to contribute, and your ability to play and win at the game of life to the next level?
• Do you find that you have too many things on your mind, too many objectives, too many dreams, too many rules, expectations, and hopes?

In Neuro-Semantics we use Meta-States to coach a person’s inner genius. How do we do that? We do it in several ways.

• We use meta-states to set the frames that will enable a person to access that innate genius.
• We use meta-states to texture the engagement states so that they are just right for a creating the qualities that enrich a given experience.
• We use meta-states to eliminate the interferences that can get in the way (i.e., the dragon slaying, dragon taming processes).
• We use meta-states to keep enriching the focus state until the gestalt of “genius” emerges.

Are you ready for coaching? What if you only need to have the interfering meta-states of judgment, non-acceptance, negative emotions, and limiting frames eliminated so that your natural genius states can emerge?

References:

Hall, Michael. (1995/2000). Meta-states: Managing the higher levels of your mind’s reflexivity. Grand Jct., CO: Neuro-Semantic Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Secrets of personal mastery: Advanced techniques for accessing your higher levels of consciousness. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

Hall, L. Michael. (2000). Frame games: Persuasion elegance. Grand Junction, CO: Neuro- Semantic Publications.

McDermott, Ian; Jago, Wendy. (2001). The NLP coach: A comprehensive guide to personal well-being and professional success. London: Platkus, Action Printing.