The genius six part thinking process that will unlock your best ideas.

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Michael R Dale, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

The genius six part thinking process that will sharpen your edge.

Part One: Free Exploration.

As its name suggests, the point of this part is for you to allow yourself to freely explore the topic you have chosen to bring to the session. I will begin the session by asking you “What do you want to think about and what are your thoughts?” and this is an invitation for you to start from where you are now in your thinking on that topic and go from there, exploring the territory, laying it out for yourself, seeing everything that is connected into that topic. This thinking may go in unexpected directions and to unexpected places. I will be giving you generative attention, and if your thinking comes to a resting place, or pause, you might even feel like you are at the end of it, I will prompt you to allow yourself to go further if you need to with the question: “what more do you think, or feel, or want to say?” I may ask you this question once, twice or several times during the session. You determine when part one is over. When you are quite sure there is nothing more we will move to the next Part of the process.

Part Two: Further Session Goal.

Having had Part One there may be nothing more that you want to achieve from the session, as you will have already achieved a lot. You may have seen for yourself what has been limiting your thinking, you may have identified and clarified your goals and objectives, arrived at a deeper understanding, liberated your thinking in new directions. However, sometimes, from all that wonderful work you have done in Part One you may also have identified “the heart of the matter”, the direction you now specifically want to go in as a result of the clarity Part One has enabled you to achieve. So, in response to the Part Two question: “what more do you want to achieve in this session?” you can, if you want to formulate a specific goal. I will assist you, if you need it, to get this goal to be clear and succinct by asking you to put the goal into fewer words if at first it is not succinct. We will then move to Part Three.

Part Three: Finding and Removing the Untrue Limiting Assumption.

In part three I will ask you this question: “what are you assuming that is stopping you from……?” and I will insert your goal words at the end of that sentence. There are a number of different types of goals you might have, and they can have an impact on how I ask the question, and the direction this part three takes but I will not go into that detail here. We can always take time to clarify questions you might have about your goal and what kind of goal it is and what impact it has on the direction of the session when we get to that point. I will keep asking you “what else are you assuming?” and “what else?” until you say that you have uncovered all the assumptions that sit in your thinking that are in the way of achieving your goal.

A word or two on assumptions: there are many assumptions that we make on a daily basis. For example, what did you assume when you woke up this morning?

Amongst other assumptions we make on a daily basis many of us are fortunate enough to begin with the assumption that our legs will hold us up when we swing them out of bed and stand up on them, we assume that the route we took to work yesterday will get us there again today in much the same time, etc etc. It is useful and necessary to make assumptions, they are part of our survival mechanism and they mean that we do not daily need to re-invent the wheel, thank goodness! Many of the assumptions we make we are not even consciously aware of making. They are useful short cuts. However, there are some assumptions that we are making, consciously or otherwise, that are untrue and limiting. They have become part of our world-view, about ourselves and about the way the world works, as a result of events and experiences that we have encountered over the course of our lives. At the time that we first made them they may have been useful, certainly in terms of helping us to survive the situation at the time, but we might come to see, in uncovering them and looking at them in the light of day that now they are limiting us, and preventing us from being able to achieve what is important to us in our lives.

This, then, is the point of Part Three. As we go through part three you might encounter true or possibly true assumptions that are part of your thinking in relation to your goal. We will work through these until you get to the assumption that you can see for yourself is untrue. This untrue limiting assumption, we believe, will be what is stopping you from moving forward with your goal. Having seen its untruth I will then give you an opportunity to create a new, more liberating, alternative assumption. When you have chosen, in your own words, what is true and more liberating for you to assume we will move to Part Four.

Part Four: The Incisive Question.

In this part I will ask you what we call the Incisive Question, which is formulated from your words. It will sound like this: “If you knew [and here I will insert the liberating alternative you have just created for yourself], how would you [and here I will insert your goal]? e.g. If you knew that no matter how he reacts it will be worth it to you to have shared your feelings, how would you have the conversation you want to have with Joe? We call it an incisive question because it cuts out the limiting assumption and replaces it with your true and liberating alternative and links it to your goal, thus enabling you to think into new territory, new ideas, new realizations and insights and actions, that have before now not been available to you because your thinking has been being limited by the unexamined untrue limiting assumption. I will ask you this question as many times as you would like me to and as many times as it continues to liberate new thinking for you.

Part Five: Recording.

I will then give you an opportunity to record your Incisive Question and any other thoughts, ideas, to-do lists you might want to capture. If you want to write things down before this point as you are thinking you are welcome to do so, but if you have not recorded anything before this stage, this is when you will have some time to do so. It is important that you write down your Incisive Question because you will find that it continues to ignite new thinking for you when you refer back to it after the session. It is also sometimes very interesting to look back on Incisive Questions and see the distance you have travelled since you were first asked it. As a Thinking Environment Coach I do not do any note taking as it would interfere with my ability to offer you the generative attention that is the most valuable thing any coach can offer you whilst you are thinking.

Part Six: Appreciation.

I will always end our session with a sincere, specific and succinct appreciation of a quality that I admire and respect in you. As you will discover Appreciation is one of our ten components and we are excited about the amount of recent research that is showing the practical and measurable impact that the presence of Appreciation is being shown to have on people’s health and well being and on their ability to keep thinking well for themselves in their work and lives.

There are two places in the Thinking Environment Coaching Approach where you, the client, can ask for my input if you feel it would be of benefit to you and would help you to continue to think well for yourself. When you move from Part One to Part Two, your further session goal could be a request for my feedback. If you do ask for my input at this point, I will ask you to put your request in the form of a question, and then I will answer that question from any information or experience I have that I think will help you to continue to think well for yourself. Having given you my input I will then ask you what you think, and what more you would now want to achieve from the session. Alternatively, you could ask for this input at the end of your session after you have already found and recorded your own Incisive Question. I will use the same guidelines at this point. As a Thinking Environment coach I am happy to provide input as and when you ask for it, but I see the point of the session as primarily being an opportunity for you to have your own time to think and to discover your way forward.

Contact me now to arrange your free consultation.

Michael Dale
Skype: md-ignite
email:
thinkmichaeldale@gmail.com
contact@enterignite.com
web:
www.mrmichaeldale.com
www.enterignite.com

The genius six part thinking process that will sharpen your edge.
© Michael Dale 2013. All rights reserved.

Incisive Question, Thinking Environment, The 10 Components Of A Thinking Environment © Time To Think 2013