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July Special Offer: Tell Me What You Want!

CoachAmal July_10 Special Offer!

I was in the process of pulling my next course together and starting to work out what the best format would be for the course and what would suit people the best. And I stopped myself just in time. I realised that I was starting to make assumptions about what format would suit you best and even which courses you would be most interested in.

A while ago, I was coaching a sister, let's call her Karimah, and one of her goals was that she wanted to improve her relationship with her mother. Karimah hadn't been close to her family for ages; they were hardly talking to each other and she spent most of her time alone in her room with her computer. She had even been taking her meals upstairs and eating them alone. Through our fortnightly sessions, Karimah had been working on the relationship and alhamdu lillah, things were definitely improving. Then one day things suddenly seemed to have turned sour. Although Karimah was getting more involved and doing lots of work around the house to help her mum, her mum had started to get snappy and make biting remarks. This upset Karimah so much that she started to back off and stopped helping out, as she felt hurt by her mother's change of mood.

Perceptual Positions

In our next coaching session, we did the Perceptual Positions exercise. This is a very powerful exercise and helped Karimah to develop some new perspectives on why her mother might have been snapping at her and how else she could respond. Very often when we have clashes with people we feel so upset or hurt by it that we get consumed by self-pity or sometimes even self-righteous indignation. The whole situation becomes about "me" and we can't see any further than the end of our noses. And that had happened in this case.

  1. The Perceptual Positions exercise acknowledges the "me" aspect of the situation by allowing the person to fully vent their feelings and understanding of the situation.
  2. It then asks them to look at the same situation through the eyes of the person who has caused them to feel that way. They are encouraged to disassociate from their own feelings and step into the other person's shoes and express as fully as possible how they may have seen the situation and how they may have felt about it.
  3. The third step in the exercise is for them to step into the shoes of a neutral person - in Karimah's case, it was a wise auntie's shoes - and say what they think that the "wise aunty" would advise both them and the other person to do to resolve the situation.

Going through this exercise gave Karimah a much clearer insight into what might have caused her mother to react in the way she had and work out what she could do to resolve the situation. She realised that in her effort to help her mum and get more involved that she was actually intruding into her mother's world and instead of helping was actually infringing her mother's territorial boundaries.

So why have I mentioned this story now? Because it is a classic illustration of someone wanting to do something good for someone, but going ahead and assuming what was needed instead of asking. With her new insight Karimah was able to resolve her situation by sitting down and talking to her mum. Her mum really did appreciate the extra help she was giving her, but she wanted to keep control of certain areas of her responsibilities. And bearing that wise lesson in mind, I would now like to ask you what it is you want from me and how I can benefit you.

I would really appreciate it, if you have a few minutes to spare, if you would tell me what it is that you want from me, not just in relation to the course that I’m currently working on, but also in regard to any future courses and coaching services you would like CoachAmal to provide.

Special Offer for July

As an incentive, I'm offering July's Special Offer alongside this survey; a 15% discount on a CoachAmal coaching plan* as a token of my appreciation for your time and responses. If you'd like to take advantage of this offer, please give me your name and email address at the end of the survey and return it to me before July 31, 2010. If you'd like to give me your thoughts anonymously, you can do that too.

There are only 7 questions, so it won’t take you long. So please Click here to take the "Tell Me What You Want" survey.

Thank you so much for your input; I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Amal

*Conditions apply 

 

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