On the second day of the FAB4 conference, I did a 15 minute warmup session to get people started for the day. One of my own favourite state management activities is the COACH state which I learned on an NLP training run by Robert Dilts. Here’s an audio version. It’s a great way of getting into a good state (or actually set of states) for learning or coaching or teaching or whatever it is that you want to focus on during the day. And as with any state management tool, we can anchor it so that we can access it more easily in the future when it would be useful to have it. The COACH state chains together the four states of
Centered
Open
Aware
Connected
Holding (the previous four states by anchoring them)
Usually I use this activity with myself or others in a sitting position. Recently, however I saw a great TED video by Amy Cuddy in which she talks about her research with “power postures”. For example, sprinters when they finish a race will often hold their arms up high in a natural expression of confidence and strength after they cross the finish line. Her research suggests that taking this pose deliberately can induce these feelings of confidence and strength and she encourages people to do it before interviews or other stressful encounters. These power postures are not for the benefit of others to see, but for the benefit of ourselves.
Her idea that our posture affects the way that we feel is one that NLP has preached for years in the form of the presupposition: Mind and Body are one system. It really is common sense, but finally the consensus of science is coming to terms with the notion that we actually have bodies and what we do with those bodies will affect how well we can think and feel. The whole field of embodied cognition takes account of this by suggesting that we think the way that we think because we have the bodies that we have. Makes sense to me.
Anyway, in this warm-up session, I decided to incorporate some body postures into the COACH state in order to make it a more effective warm-up. Just to make it that little bit more interesting, I also wrapped the whole thing up in a story about a bear that I wrote a few years back.
The video is a little shaky because one of the student volunteers wasn’t quite sure how to work it, but I think the idea will still come across. Enjoy!