Contact / Email
Joshua Myrvaagnes

917.648.3993 * Yonkers, NY
Sign up for Inspiring Newsletter:

 
 
 
  
 
Business/Marketing Coaching
 for Holistic Healers, Green Businesses, Community Builders, and Artists

It’s Not Touchy-Feely:
How Inspiring Un-Coaching Gets Results 

    Is the marketing thing eating your vision?
    Do you sense you're not using your full potential in the business side of your dream?
    I did.
    I wanted to be the kind of coach I’d have wanted to have, so I don't give advice.  I un-coach.  
    Based on the work of Patricia and Kurt Wright, authors of Breaking the Rules: Removing the Obstacles to Effortless High Performance, Inspiring Un-Coaching is an intuition-based method of aiding people in accessing their full creative genius to attain their concrete goals.  This allows my clients to find their own strategy for their marketing (or otherwise gaining the means to achieve their goals)--while building energy instead of depleting it.  Typically, in the business world, a consultant will “come in” to a workplace and perform an analysis, then give that analysis to the management who will then tell the workers how to implement it.  Any interpersonal problems this top-down approach generates will be dealt with by firing the appropriate persons.  The results may be solid but short-lived, since they are not deeply rooted in the particular myriad variables that is a real-life business situation.  The same dynamic holds true with sole proprietors in microcosm--since the way one treats oneself can either be "top-down" (ruled by the left brain) or integrated.  
    Unlike other consultants--and most people in their everyday behavior--the “Un-Coach” instead draws on the inherent genius of each person, grounded in the deepest respect for that genius in everyone.  It takes more personal engagement, but the payoff is well worth it.
    Now, the word "intuition" may sound nebulous, and fads bearing this label it have tended to attract advocates who seemed be to asking us to lower our standards, or to believe in vague promises without hard evidence.  But cognitive neuroscience and business have both confirmed that the intuition has measurable value, and articulate proponents are starting to emerge.  The fact is, you can’t think analytically without your intuition--and you can’t use your intuition without proper use of your “analytical brain” either.
    Cognitive neuroscience is now revealing concretely the process of having an intuition.  A recent article in the New Yorker (The Eureka Hunt, Johan Lehrer, The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, pp. 40-45) describes an explosion of activity in the "anterior superior temporal gyrus" (ibid.) a few seconds before the insight arrives—a few seconds before the subject knows that she/he was about to have an insight.  
"Again, we’re not asking ‘What’s right?’ questions in order to  care-take your feelings or pretend you're marketing better than you are.  It’s not about being nice, it’s about what works."

    But the question is, How do you access the intuition?  If it comes eight seconds before you even know it’s coming, it seems it’s something over which you have no conscious control.  Scientists have assumed intuition comes only when you’re not trying to get it: “I think we’ll soon get to the point where we can do more than tell people to take lots of showers [to distract themselves from left-brain thinking],” says Jung-Beerman.
    Well, it turns out there are people in another field who have already figured this out.  Business consultants Patricia and Kurt Wright, mentioned above, have for decades used intuition-accessing tools that have helped businesses save millions--up to 45 million dollars in one case.  They do it by asking questions.
    How do the Wrights access the right brain’s intelligence through asking questions?  They continuously refocus the client on questions that are specifically, deliberately designed to stump the analytical brain.  That’s right, they are impossible to answer with the analytical brain—and that leaves you no choice but to “let” your intuitive brain do the answering.  This also gives you something to do that you can control—using your analytical brain differently—rather than just sitting around hoping that intuition might strike.
    So there is a skill and a science to this intuition work.  One kind of questions, the kind most people usually ask in daily life, will never access the right brain.  That kind is the “What’s wrong?” question.  The other kind, “What’s right?” questions, forces the analytical brain to cede the floor and allows the less assertive but monumentally faster intuitive brain to get engaged.   “What’s-right?” questions can’t be answered with logic alone, they require the emotional input that defines the quality of “rightness” (you can’t define “right” without the ingredient of “makes people happy”).  Now “What’s-wrong?” questions can’t be answered by the left brain alone either--yet we can fool ourselves, and frequently have throughout Western history. 
    Here’s a concrete proof of the results of this approach.  A glass factory generally operated at 70% efficiency, breaking 30% of the glass it manufactured.  %85 was considered the maximum physically possible, since you had to feed some broken glass into the plant.  
     As a result of using this approach, they went to 80%--which was considered “Nirvana,” yielding $1,000,000 a month in profits.  And then on up to 90%.  They started having to buy broken glass from outside the plant.  
    And the Wrights did not create a report and tell the workers how to change things in order to achieve this result.  Instead, by asking questions, they inspired the management and the workers themselves to do this, and what’s more to resolve the long-standing conflict between the union and management.  And they did all this while having a blast.
   Again, we’re not asking “What’s right?” questions in order to  care-take your feelings or pretend you're marketing better than you are.  It’s not about being nice, it’s about what works.
    Genius is something that needs to be handled delicately.  It doesn’t need to be “helped.”  When I was a high school student, and later an English major at Harvard, I would work every night for an hour the week it was due, yet the night before I would still “need to” stay up till 2 am to finish it.  The closer I got to the deadline, the more flaws appeared in the thing I was working on, and finally it always seemed I needed to redo the entire thesis. I wanted someone else to look at the thing with me, but I also knew I didn’t want anyone trying to “fix” me.  Today I have the tools I was looking for then, and I can use the same brain that so ingeniously dragged me into a quagmire to propel me to new insights.  With these tools I can provide the kind of help that would have worked for someone as independent-minded as my inner intuitive brain--or yours.
   Sessions are 1 1/2 to 2 hours long, since it takes an hour of answering properly framed intuition-engaging questions to build adequate emotional energy to go on to the next step--building a vision of where to go next--and the temptation to skip to this step must be resisted for a full hour.  The rate for one session is $200. For people unfamiliar with my work, I offer an initial trial session without charge, and then ask for payment for that before booking a second session.


   
For rates, for more information, or just to get to know me a bit better, please email me at @uncoaching@inspiringwebcopy.com. Thank you.
 

 
 
 
My vision at this time is to co-create texts with other inspired people, texts that articulate what’s uniquely valuable about their products; that I help them write their ideal vision as well as what is good in what they’re presently offering; and that I support them in further unlocking their creativity through other means.  I help people to get what they need to carry out their life purposes, “to have fun, serve the world unselfishly and make a profit” (Victor Baranco).