A bright Friday, a sunny Saturday and a glorious Sunday. Did I
spend them in the open air, gardening or swimming or lazing in the
dappled shade of our grapevine with a book? No, I spent most of
those sun-filled hours in an air-conditioned room, often with the
shades drawn, with a group of six other strangers.
What was I doing? It was a three day personal development
seminar run by Freefall and the
word I would use to sum up this training is cathartic. If
Sally Anderson, the owner and lead facilitator of Freefall, doesn't
have shares in Kleenex she's missing a trick, because over that
long weekend an awful lot of tissues were twisted, shredded and
soaked…
A bit of background
Freefall is positioned as personal development that will enable
you to move past negative thoughts and behaviours to live, and
sustain, an exceptional life with extraordinary relationships. My
objective for being there was to get a better sense of what
Freefall and Sally Anderson offered, and how our organisations
might co-operate. Sally is also an executive and leadership
coach.
It's experiential training, where the value comes from what you
figure out about yourself rather than from absorbing external
knowledge, so I am going to write about it that way - a struggle
for someone as cerebrally-oriented as me!
Freefall is running another 3 day Auckland-based
seminar in early April. Professionelle members are eligible for
a significant discount of $400 off the price of $1595 excl GST.
3 things that worked for me
- Learning from listening to others and watching others being
coached live. It's so easy to see the speck in someone else's eye -
and so hard to see the huge damn beam in your own. But watching
your colleagues grapple with their issues can make the parallels
with your own ones painfully obvious.
Specific example: someone else evaded
responsibility in life by falling back on an "I lack education so
I'm too dumb" routine. Witnessing Sally coaching this person to see
that this was their way of avoiding taking positive action made it
much easier for me to see how I sometimes do the same with my "I'm
not confident enough" number.
- New tools for getting out of stuck/negative patterns and moving
towards the positive. A powerful, if uncomfortable, thought I have
taken away with me is that we always have choice, moment by moment;
we can't change anything at any other time than right now.
That means that the time to not chew my nails is now… now… I'm some
way off having talons but I'm doing pretty well on a habit I've
battled for over 40 years.
- Some great quotations and stories used at appropriate moments.
The one that worked for me, and you may have heard it before, is
about the old Cherokee Indian who tells his grandson that inside
all people there are two wolves, fighting. One is good and one is
bad, and the one who wins is the one you feed. And yes,
I've known for a long time that no-one can make us more miserable
than we can make ourselves, but a fresh insight I got from the
course is this: we feed the things that keep us miserable
(miserable = frustrated, anxious, self-debasing etc) because the
misery that we know so well is a safe place to be. Much
safer, ironically, than fronting up to the responsibility of being
happy.
3 things you should know
- You'll have gathered that the basic premise of Freefall is that
our fears and our negative scripts hold us back from the
extraordinary potential we were born with. Thus the seminar spends
a lot of time addressing the negative, for example, revisiting
"worst memories" and seeking to make participants aware of
unnecessary and unhelpful behaviours that are rooted in the past.
It can get a bit gloomy even though the ultimate goal is very
positive. As you'll see at the end of this piece, I did get to a
hugely useful insight about one of my unhelpful core beliefs, but I
wondered if it had to be reached by so tortuous a route. Note -
other attendees didn't seem to mind.
- Sally's exercises take people to dark places (and she openly
shares her own very, very dark places which you can read
about here), but to the best of my knowledge she is not a
trained psychotherapist.
- Unless you opt for Freefall coaching after the seminar there is
no follow-up. That means you come out of the intense session
inspired, but you're on your own when real life intervenes. I think
there's room for some simple actions to boost the sustainability -
maybe an automated series of reminder emails about exercises and
insights.
Who might benefit?
There's no "one size fits all" with any training. I suggest
Freefall's training might be for you if:
- You read the Freefall seminar
description and it really speaks to you (the language is a bit
woo-woo for me). Sally suggests that most people feel 'called' to
the course, and drawn by their intuition.
- You're looking for new lenses on yourself and you are up for an
experiential, right brain, "being" approach. By contrast you're not
looking for an analytical, from-A-to-B, left brain prescription
that will add things to your to-do list.
- You're deeply dissatisfied with aspects of your life but you
can't find the time to "deal with it all" - this seminar will
definitely carve out that essential time for you. (Of course, so
will other intensive courses!) I do think if you have a burning
platform you will get more from this course, and you'll be faster
to reach the tipping point where you commit to do things more
positively in the future.
- You're prepared to be vulnerable and to respect others in the
same state.
Bottom Line
Did the training deliver for me? Yes.
Though I had no immediately burning platform, I still wanted to
make the most of investing my time. I therefore really committed
myself to participating fully and I set myself the goal of finding
a positive inner voice: a big call, as this is something I have
always lacked.
Freefall delivered for me on this not because of any specific
exercise or framework but because it gave me three days' space to
think about me - and a supportive environment to do it in,
one in which everyone was vulnerable. I know I wasn't alone in
spending hours lying awake at night mulling things over and
over…
Output for Insecure Overachievers
Mid-course, I had a flash of intuition about a core belief that
was truly getting in my way. (Need I say I was at first loathe to
even listen to it?!) Twelve hours after the end of the seminar
though, lying in bed, thinking and thinking once more, I finally
wrestled the insight and its implications into coherent shape. And,
to make sure it stuck, I wrote it up as a little presentation when
I got up later that morning…
Calling all you insecure overachievers in Professionelle-land,
and those of you who suffer from the Imposter Syndrome too… oh, I
know you're there! You might find something useful in where I got
to with my schema (ie my "structured cluster of preconceived
ideas"). It will only take you 20 seconds to read.
Logistics
The seminar is held in a peaceful, secluded,
no-cell-phone-signal valley outside Albany. The food is good and
the animals (donkeys, ducks and a kunekune pig) are all friendly.
It's not a live-in course, but you can book to stay in the Lodge's
accommodation if you want, for an extra charge.
Last thought
We often write book reviews, but this is a training review.
Maybe you have your own training experiences to contribute in an
article for us and all our Professionelle readers?