This was held at the American Chamber of Commerce at Shaw Centre on 12 Apr 2012. The topic was “How to move yourself and your clients from stuck to action!” by Christopher McAuliffe. It was a rather interesting session, as it was a lot quieter than usual. Perhaps it was due to the noticeable absence of some of the more well-known “hecklers”, but it was remarkable anyway.

Christopher reminded me that I ought to have a new relationship with problems, my coachees’ and my own. We all tend to “get a piece of the action” and get ourselves involved in dealing with and focusing on the problems instead of taking the proverbial “coach position” and being a mirror to our clients. While we are all humans and we inevitably bring our own issues to the coaching sessions no matter how hard we try not to, we are privileged to have the skills necessary to “expand our boxes” continuously even as we help our clients expand theirs.

An interesting point was on “hanging on” to our clients, recognizing that they could very well be in a phase of “destruction”, and be taking their frustrations out on us as a result. We need to be strong and be there for them through these phases, to have the joy of seeing stronger and more positive-focused clients emerging from the rubble. There is also a parallel in “pruning” BNI Chapters for future and better growth. I thought that the flip side was also true, that expanding boxes implies absorbing new knowledge, data, skills, competencies, qualities and so on in order to better experience and navigate each phase life as it comes. That does not mean that ALL of the existing paradigms need to be destroyed. Paradigms which prove to be true are BUILT UPON with new data, information and insights. An example is that Newtonian mechanics could not explain some of the observable phenomena in the universe, such as the anomalous orbit of the planet Mercury. Einstein solved this with the General Theory of Relativity by demonstrating that gravity distorts space and time, and particularly so when small bodies are in close orbit around large bodies, as is the case with Mercury. Einstein’s theory in no way disproved Newtonian mechanics, the rules of which remain till this day. Rather, Einstein’s theory EXPANDED on Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics, in effect, is a subset of the Einsteinian theory. You can read more about this, courtesy of Creation Ministries International, here. Conclusion? We help our clients to grow. We’d better grow, too!

Overall, it was a great session, and the view from AmCham was nice!