When Positivity Isn’t Positive
By Michael Kline

Mindset is crucial to success and happiness. It’s no wonder so many coaches, trainers and helping professionals rush to help clients find a positive mindset. Certainly, there is a time and place for finding the hidden gift in negative events, for finding the silver lining or even gratitude for events that initially feel painful. I totally get it and I have over-used positivity training myself. It is helpful to remember that emotions are our natural feedback system. Avoiding negative emotions is like ignoring the check-engine light in your car. Missing negative emotions allows them to fester, grow and show up in seemingly unrelated ways making our lives more difficult.

According to Vipassana Meditation training, 2500 years ago, the Buddha taught that if we resist negative feelings, they expand. If we pursue the positive sensations, they dissipate. The desire to control our emotions gets us exactly the opposite of what we want. Carl Jung taught that what we resist not only persists but expands. Dr Deb Sandella, founder of the RIM Institute, teaches that emotions flow through the body like water flowing through a river. Our resistance to negative feelings is like throwing a boulder into the river – building a dam that blocks our natural emotional flow.

So, it is critical that we allow the negative feelings to be fully felt, give us the necessary feedback, express what needs to be expressed, and only then, we can simply allow them to dissipate organically and naturally. What won’t work with negative feelings, is what I call the three W’s that people tend to prefer – White-Washing, Walking Away or Wishing.

1. Let’s start with White-Washing. This could also be called “looking on the bright side”.  Do any of these phrases sound familiar? They don’t deserve you anyway! You’ll land on your feet.  I’m sorry he/she/they dumped you, I’m sorry about your diagnosis – you must stay positive! I’m sorry for your loss – they’re in a better place now. I’m so sorry you lost your job, that must feel awful. Maybe this is a chance to look at your passions and find something you like better! You get the idea – think of any bad news you’ve ever experienced, and the corresponding cliché’s you heard from friends and family. It’s all well-intended, but usually not helpful from a coach or therapist. Indeed, there may be a silver lining, and there may eventually be gratitude, but only after the pain has had a chance to be felt, experienced, and processed. Our job is to provide the space and safety for the feelings, the expression and natural dissipation.
2. Next, let’s look at Walking Away – moving away from what is painful is perfectly natural, and it is natural for us to want to help our clients move toward the positive. Remember, what we resist not only persists, but expands. Waking away, also called “leading the horse to happiness”, is having a happy destination for our client – and asking leading questions that will help them discover the path to happiness. This seems better than telling them how to feel, because it creates the illusion that the client is in charge of their experience and self-healing. How do we know that our questions aren’t just manipulating them toward the destination we assumed was desired? Is it possible, we are helping their resistance? Are we accidentally helping them hold on to even more long-term pain?
3. Finally, we know that Wishing them Away won’t dissolve negative emotions. Yet, if we attempt positivity tools prematurely, that’s all we’re really doing - wishing and hoping. Affirmations, visualizations, spending time with positive people, avoiding the news, mirror exercises, gratitude work, etc. are all excellent ideas. Done prematurely, these are ineffective on larger emotional issues and rarely touch on root causes. Remember the analogy of building a dam in the river of emotions? If the dam is blocking flow, all this other work is like trying to send the negative emotions back up stream. Let’s remove the dam and allow the negative emotions to flow, and the positive emotions will flow and expand on their own. So, when you hear or speak expressions like “trusting the Universe, giving it up to your higher power, everything happens for a reason, somethings are just fate, etc.” check to make sure you aren’t helping your client wish away the negative feelings that just want to flow downstream.

When we help our clients move too quickly toward positivity it’s like putting a fresh coat of paint over old rusty metal or rotten wood. It feels so much better at the end of their session but miserable by the weekend. We need to make it safe and easy to invite the client into what we’ve previously thought of as the scary, shadowy underworld of negative feelings. As those feelings dissolve, the client doesn’t have to carry them around forever. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under water or trying to run a marathon with weighted shoulder pads. All that suffering is optional.
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Mindfulness training, or a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat will help you start to experience more of this for yourself. RIM training provides the experience as well as the skills to work this way with clients. If this appeals to you, learn more about RIM at www.intus.life/rim or how to learn the skills yourself at www.intus.life/learn-rim. Also, you can join our free live Zoom webinar and experience RIM for yourself. I generally do them a couple times per week. If the dates don’t align, sign up anyway and we will invite you to a future event. Sign up here.

Coaching the Subconscious
By Michael J. Kline – Master Certified RIM Practitioner & Trainer
 
Coaching the subconscious is not complicated as it may sound. Since 95% of our brain activity lives beneath the surface of awareness, it would make sense to go right to the source of all blocks, pain, and suffering.
 
Whether we are talking about coaching or therapy, the model has always been helping people shift their perspective, reframe a situation, shine a new light, and ask the right questions. All this activity is working with conscious awareness. We tend to work in the so-called thinking brain, while emotions live elsewhere in the subconscious mind and body. Therefore, we cannot think our way out of blocks. fear, anxiety, trauma, and so on.
 
The neuroscience is here. We now know that decisions and behavior are directed by a lifetime of past experiences and live beneath the surface of conscious awareness, out of reach of the 5% of the brain where we have easy access. We can ask all the perfect and powerful questions and let the client talk about an issue endlessly and help give rise to see things differently which is certainly helpful, but it doesn’t resolve the issue at a visceral level, or even tell us whether or not we’re working on the most important issue/s.
 
For example, you have a client who tells you they can’t seem to follow through on business projects that would certainly propel their sales effort. The question is, what’s really and truly blocking them? Most likely the client has exhausted all the thinking, analyzing, and strategizing and still can’t find a solution. That’s why they seek your help.
 
What if the answer lies in the client’s past and is stuck in their subconscious? What if their father, family, friends, or teachers told them repeatedly that they will never become anything, never succeed, and a host of other negative possibilities? The client may even be aware of some of these experiences repeating silently in their head. Even if the client tries to convince themselves and says, “I’ll show them all.” Regardless, the mind is a funny thing. The client may also think, “what if they’re right, I’m such a loser, I’ll never make it on my own.”
 
I worked with a client who thought this was his story, only to find out that beneath the surface, was a resistance to out-shining Dad. This client had just broken the threshold in his career to make more money than his father ever did, and while doing work his father didn’t understand or respect. That was a subconscious block that had never been revealed. No matter how much we explored, we may have never gotten to the real sabotaging issue.  By following what showed up in the client’s body-sensing and dipping beneath the surface, it revealed itself and was completely resolved in a single session. This method or tool I’m referring to is called RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory).
 
The possibilities are endless, and could take a lifetime of talking about it, to find the root issue, let alone heal it. We need to create a safe space where the client can sense what’s beneath the surface – in RIM we call it the dip/see/do method – we dip beneath the surface to see what’s there, then we can act and do something to resolve it. This is not hypnosis or guided imagery, because it only works when it’s generated by the client’s own imagination that spontaneously comes forth while sensing their experiences in their body, not the limited thinking brain. RIM always trusts the subconscious for the real answers.
 
RIM is the best combination of skills I’ve found, that allows all this to happen. RIM does have some skills in common with Interactive Guided Imagery, and Somatic work, along with numerous unique skills discovered by Dr Deborah Sandella.
 
Dr Deb (as we call her) has a Doctorate in Human Communication and a Masters in Psychiatric Nursing. During the first 25 years of her career, she worked in a myriad of mental health settings from intensive services to private practice, and in two innovative cutting-edge inpatient community-based programs. As an award-winning therapist, University Professor, and a Best-selling author, she’s the whole package.  Dr. Deb initially synthesized aspects of Interactive Guided Imagery, Somatic techniques, and other skills she found effective. RIM has evolved “through” her rather than “from” her as she humbly describes, it has developed a life of its own as a revolutionary whole-brain way of naturally processing stuck emotions.  And neuroscience now confirms what she’s been teaching for decades.
 
I think the real genius of her discovery, is the use of imagination to connect the thinking brain with the body. We can use the body as a portal to that which is hidden (not in conscious awareness), then allow imagination to make it tangible for the thinking brain to work with it. The result is nothing less than miraculous. By coaching directly where the issues live, my clients report that they don’t just feel better, or have new insights – they feel completely different and fully empowered to move their life forward.

Three big Money Blocks for Coaches
By Michael Kline

From a recent client: “After our call, I brought in more enrollments than my entire month! It was playful and fun!”

This is the text I received the day after a session with Don (not his real name). Don is very accomplished at enrolling prospects in a two-month coaching program requiring a $5,000 investment. Whether we are brand new to enrolling clients or hate anything that resembles the idea of “selling”, or if we are an old pro, everyone bumps into blocks from time to time. Sometimes it’s about your offer, sometimes it’s your marketplace, skills, prices, etc. Often, it’s mindset, and sometimes it’s a hidden subconscious belief or energy that gets in the way.

After spending a few minutes sharing the pressure of the recent dry month, I had Don close his eyes and find the feeling of that pressure in his body – it was in his chest – as he allowed spontaneous imagination to give it form, color, size, texture and more, I had him imagine being inside the form. As we went deeper and deeper beneath the surface, using the body as the portal to what was hidden beneath conscious awareness, he eventually was surprised to find himself in a memory of being 7 years old in the apartment where he grew up.

Imagining being his young self again, he had a dialogue with his mother that didn’t (or couldn’t) happen when he was only seven. Finding his feelings in his young body and giving them voice released old beliefs about playfulness, safety, masculinity, fun, expressiveness, and creativity. Fully sensing his mother hearing him and receiving all he shared with her, Mom spoke back (in his imagination) and shared everything he never knew to be true in his early childhood. Anchoring his mother’s words and his new feelings in his young body, we then created a long series of new emotional experiences (emotional memories) of his “new” past. The new emotional memories anchored a felt sense of permission to be himself, to play, express, create, take risks, have fun, and not take on Mom’s concerns and worries. Feeling much freer and lighter at the end of the session, Don when on to start his day. His text tells you how it went.

Another client, a coach in her fifties, was certain her money blocks were related to her alcoholic parents. She had done a lot of work with her al-anon group, therapist, and her coach to understand her long-held beliefs. When a client has already done a lot of work with an issue from a conscious intellectual perspective, it may be time to work directly with what is not in conscious awareness. I had her close her eyes and settle into her body and she followed her old belief back to the same age she always goes to – her 9-year-old self. Only this time something felt different – as we continued to body-sense and safely explore beneath the surface, she found herself on the playground. The girl she thought was her friend was bullying her and none of the girls would play with her. After giving voice through a lengthy dialogue with her friend, her friend shared that she was jealous of her, that everyone liked her better. She then created a new memory as she imagined playing with her friend and all the other girls joined in. Mind you, all of this came about organically – if we tried to suggest new images, as could happen with guided imagery, it would not be as powerful as when it comes from the client’s own spontaneous imagination – it just “shows up”. Anchoring this new emotional memory in her body as a felt experience convinces her nervous system that it’s as real and effective as any factual memory.  

Here’s the thing – If you have an unconscious belief that other girls don’t want to play with you at all, it’s no wonder you freeze when asking them to pay you thousands of  dollars to play with you now. The trouble is, if the client doesn’t know what the root issue is, we could spend the rest of our career guessing at what might help.

Working on what we and/or the client “knows” is the issue keeps us blind to what is not available to the thinking brain. And yet, working with the intellectual models still produces great results. I’ve discovered that having clients feel better about their work, just isn’t good enough anymore. I’m looking for massive change, as quickly and efficiently as possible. When we can look beneath the surface, the work almost does itself. We and our clients become far more effective with much less effort.
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So, my top three answers to the big money blocks with my coach clients? Your Father, your mother, and your friends from the third grade. Of course, it’s only true when it is. It must come up organically by following the client’s journey. That said, these common themes are often the deepest source of feeling good enough, having permission to be ourselves, and to ask for what we want. This is where we learn (or not) to set boundaries, and to know at a visceral level, not just while reading affirmations, but to really feel that we are in fact, deserving, worthy, and enough.

Michael Kline is a Master Certified RIM Facilitator and the Senior Trainer at The RIM Institute. He can be reached via mike@intus.life and more information is available at www.intus.life