QUANTUM COACHING I: SPACE-TIME Warps
Practical examples of quantum mechanics theory in systemic coaching

Note that the here-and-now expression is commonly used in numerous psychological, personal development, social, philosophical, and spiritual contexts.  It is served to suggest a host of different values (to drop out of the rat race), attitudes (to become more aware of feelings and emotions), health strategies (to manage stress), behaviors (to react to or enjoy the present), strategies (to deal with environmental complexity), etc. 

  • In quantum-based systemic coaching, the here-and-now expression rests on a theoretical frame of reference or reality paradigm that collapses time and space into one continuous dimension.

According to Quantum theory, time and space are extensions of each other.  Considering this perspective, systemic coaches routinely deploy very precise skills and strategies to stretch and warp the time-space dimension, to the benefit of client outcomes.  These strategies are not to be taken as mere expressions of an intellectual or ideological coaching posture or stance.  They are used to express the quantum-based systemic coaching reality paradigm to allow for very performing measurable results.  Indeed, quantum-based systemic coaches have proven this quantum-based paradigm and corresponding strategies to be much more effective when accompanying clients to quickly and effectively move on with their lives and loves.

To be sure, most coaching approaches routinely use a number of communication techniques to suggest that clients shift perspectives in time and space in order to change find neww options somutions for their issues and projects.  When working with clients however, systemic coaches follow through beyond these known techniques by completely espousing a quantum mechanics, time-space paradigm.  

The object of this article is to offer very practical examples on exactly how quantum-based systemic coaches proceed. Before introducing the quantum time-space perspective, however, consider a first time travel coaching experience:

Future-oriented time travel

Take, for example, a rather common powerful coaching question designed to help a client move more rapidly towards their future success.  Coaches indeed often ask questions that propel clients into their future, sometimes just beyond the expected completion of their project or expected resolution of their issue.

  • Example A: If you where two years from now and your issue/project was totally completed in a way that truly satisfied both you and everyone else concerned, what option did you decide today?

The way this question is asked suggests the client accelerates fast-forward into the future in order to look back at today.  This process is designed for clients to discover a past option, from a different future time vantage point.  The way the above question is formulated, however, may be just marginally powerful

A different alternative is to proceed in the same fashion by using a similar future projection, and also ask the client stay there for awhile, in order to fully inhabit and describe that successful future.

  • Example B: Imagine you are two years from now.  Your project is successfully completed to your total satisfaction as well as to that of everyone else concerned.  It is a total success.  Can you describe the achieved result?

Also notice the change in linguistics.  The way the coach puts the question in the present tense actually invites clients to travel into the future and reside there as if it were in the present.  In this way, clients are invited now to immediately and truly inhabit their projected future and already achieved results. 

It is also useful for the coach to follow up on this future projection or this collapse of the future into the present.  To do so, it is recommended the coach remains in the present tense by asking detail-oriented questions that aim for minute descriptions of the projected results:

  • Where is this taking place?
  • Who are the people concerned?
  • Who are those who have moved on?
  • What are important new partnerships?
  • What are key technical and operational details?
  • What are the financial ratios and benefits?
  • Etc.

In order to support each description and elicit more precisions on client reality, the coach can validate their exploration with positive comments:  “Great! Sounds really good! What else?” In this way, coaches can help clients fully own and inhabit the details of their successful new project’s future existence and results.

  • This strategy aims to pull client future into the present, thereby collapsing the time continuum into a present space.

Only after this future has been truly and fully detailed by the client can the coach ask another, separate past-related question:

  • “Now from this future vantage point, looking back two years into the past, what are the first, easy and obvious actions that you have initiated in order to start achieving these great results?

Note that there are a number of important differences between the first (A) and second (B) examples of future-oriented coaching questions presented above.

  • The linguistics in the first (A) example use conditionals while the second (B) option is much more affirmative.
  • In this second option, the future is presented in the present tense.  It is now.

Judging from client results, experience indicates that the second (B) example is invariably much more powerful.

  • The first (A) example also mixes forward thinking and coming back to the past in one quick round-way trip.  This most probably reveals that the impatient coach wants to rapidly focus clients on immediate action planning. 

In this first case, the coach strategy could seem to be quite 
incremental, mostly focused on how the client can build tomorrow’s 
action plan in order to gradually get moving forward into the future.

  • In the second (B) example, the client is mostly asked to reside in the future, fully detail the results, envision the place in which this future exists, and get motivated by the finalized project.  This is kin to detailed visioning work.

Note that in the second example, the strategy to return to the present in order to center the client on what to do to get there is positioned as a consequence of the detailed vision of the result.  The proposed focus on an immediate action plan is almost an after-thought.  What is most important, and ultimately much more motivating is client clarity of the end result.

These examples illustrate that it is of the utmost importance for coaches to fine-tune their linguistics when they formulate future-oriented and other time and space-related questions and strategies.  Basically, it seems that the main defining factor in how such powerful questions are asked is the coach’s own frame of reference or paradigm of time and space.  Indeed, each coach's linguistics reveals that specific coach's time paradigm.

  • Through any coach comment or question, the coach frame of reference is transferred to a client, and that includes the coach time-space paradigm. 

If coaches believe that actions take time to prepare and then carry out, their clients will work accordingly. When coaches believe that time is an illusion, their clients will also catch on and achieve results in lightning speed.  Formulated through appropriate linguistics, the coach time paradigm can powerfully enable clients to achieve results in a totally different time perspective. 

To illustrate differently, imagine another slant on our future-projection question.  First return to the (B) option offered above, that asks a client to completely inhabit the details of a successful future:

  • Example B: Imagine you are two years from now.  Your project is successfully completed to your total satisfaction as well as to that of everyone else concerned.  It is recognized as a huge success.  Can you describe that result?

In the same way as illustrated above, the coach can elicit client descriptions and details, and validate the client each step of the way.  When this detailed future has been well established and described by the client, the coach can then ask a totally different type of follow-up question:

  • Example C: Great!  I hear this project is now well finished, concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.  Congratulations!  You can now, at long last, start to focus on what you really, really, want to do with your longer-term future.  Can you describe what that next future is all about?

Qith such a questioning strategy, the coach aims to accompany the client in his or her intuitive search to define the farther future, beyond a medium-term project.   This future lies beyond the first successful one that occupies the client's energy.  Notice this question now offers a totally unexpected shift in perspective, in keeping with a totally different coach strategy.   Depending on client answers, the coach can ask a different follow-up question, this time more focused on immediately preparing the client future’s future:

  • “Considering what you really want on the longer term, how can you adapt or adjust your two-year project and action plan so as to start achieving that bigger, more important goal much sooner than 
what you initially had in mind?”

It is often said that coaching strategies rest on the conviction that clients know.  They know their issues better than anyone else.  They know their history.  They know what they want and they know how to get there.  Taking this as a fact, a quantum-based systemic coach considers that clients can define it all now:  they know their future, and they know how to make it happen.  In order to give clients the space to define the details of their futures today, time travel strategies are most useful.  Again, note the differences:

  • A: In our first option above, time travel is superficially used to run back to what needs to be done tomorrow in order to build the future that is perceived as today's general goal, but not as a detailed reality.

The future then stays rather undefined and inaccessible, far away.  As a consequence, the coach strategy will probably be much more incremental or means-oriented, keeping the client in the near present.

  • B: In the second option time travel is used to define a precisely inspiring future that will organize everything the client does. That detailed and motivating future is already completely present in the client’s heart and soul.  It just needs to be owned, now.

This second coach strategy actually allows the client discover the future that already exists in his or her present.  This coach strategy is much more outcome, purpose or results-oriented rather than just goal-oriented.  It rests on the conviction that means always tend to naturally serve client purpose, when clients are allowed to become truly purposeful.

  • C: In the third option, the coach assumes that a given future can be perceived as a stepping-stone or a halfway house that can allow the client to immediately peer beyond into his or her next future, that can be bigger, more important, or just totally different.

In fact, the last two strategies are indeed marginally different from each other. They both rest on the same quantum-based systemic coach frame of reference in which the time-space continuum is totally elastic and can be played in a number of creative linguistic ways.

Mind games

Considering time-space future-projection travel, once systemic coaches accept the frame of reference:

  • That we all intuitively know exactly what to build into our futures,
  • That we can start traveling up and down the road of space-time to perceive and define what-and-where we wish to be, or what futures we already have in us, or again what our futures already hold for us right now.
  • Then we already very naturally know what is most effective for us to do today.

Of course, we can also dearly hold on the idea that this is all just a mind game.  We do not really know what the future will be.  “Que sera, sera” says the song, or whatever will be, will be.  On the other hand, we can also argue that the whole reason to build our vision for the future, to then define our mission, our corresponding goals and action plans is to make that vision become a reality, as effectively and as soon as possible. 

  • In reality, our vision of the future is the one we hold today.  And the vision we now hold of that future can now influence our immediate actions. 

Our present vision of the future will of course rapidly forge the nature and quality of our future and present.  The more we believe in and want our defined future now, the sooner we will make it happen.  In a simple way, setting a future goal defines what you do today in order to begin to achieve it.  A systemic coach frame reference is coherent with this rather common way to organize one’s life, albeit in a slightly more radical way.

  • A quantum-based systemic coach plays with time perspectives to the point of collapsing time. 

In this quantum coaching perspective, the future is not in the future, it is now: there is no such thing as time, except in a totally unified way.

  • For a quantum-based systemic coach, the future exists in the present, as in fact does the past.. 

We can therefore immediately explore our futures by creating them now, in our present. And we need to go into the details of this creation. 

  • Considering we are all participating observers in our universe, each one of us can now either choose to let others define possible futures, or we can each choose to actively create our futures to our liking.

Consequently, systemic coaches routinely accompany clients in time travel to have them very concretely build their futures in the present, and this with detailed precision.  Of course, this strategy rests is just a matter of personal belief.  Our beliefs are our real mind games.  The trouble with our beliefs  however, is that they regularly prove to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

  • We each act in order to prove that what we believe is true, to the point of achieving measurable results that confirm the veracity of our beliefs. 

For example, by never sailing around the globe because we believe that it is flat, we prove that we better not attempt to sail around the globe, because it is flat.  Consequently, all our beliefs are true because we make operational decisions that end up confirming their truth.

Just as quantum theoreticians, systemic coaches believe that time does not exist.  They routinely collapse time to the point of traveling from past to present to future with their clients, in no time. This is done to the point of helping clients achieve totally different futures, now.

To consult another article on how to radically accelerate client time=

Time-space

As mentioned in this text’s introduction, the time dimension is intimately linked to the space dimension in quantum-based systemic coaching. Time does not exist out of space, nor does space exist out of time.  The two are intimately linked as different aspects of the same continuum.

To offer a practical example, many hand-on managers and leaders often refer to their time management issue.  As a consequence, they often toy with the idea of getting time management training and time management coaching.  Of course they usually do not have the time to do so.  Indeed how could anyone work on their time issue if they don't have time?  A quantum based systemic coach could even argue that should they succeed in doing so, they may not solve their time-management issue for the simple reason that they are not looking at it in the appropriate fashion.  Indeed:

  • Managers and leaders who have time-management issues do not know how to delegate.  They micro manage content that should be covered by others.  They are consequently not at their right place, which is a space-management issue!

Quantum-based systemic coaches know that the time-space continuum is at stake here.  When managers do not delegate, they are actually assuming work that should be done on levels immediately below, or farther down the line.  Those leaders are taking on too many details that concern their employees or other managers.  Of course, control issues may also be at stake here: "To make sure it is done right, I must do it myself".

  • It is quite easy to understand that if one is involved in work details of tasks done by five to ten people on other levels, one will not have the time to get involved in one's own time-space level of responsibility. 

There is direct and predictable consequence of over-detailing and controlling responsibilities that belong to other operational levels: Such managers or leaders will not have the time to invest in the more strategic issues that are characteristic of their own superior or more general level of responsibility.

Consequently for a quantum-based systemic coach, time-management issues do not exist as such.  They are immediately perceived as time-space management issues that in fact often need to be considered as delegation issues.   This perspective provides systemic coaches with a predictable career-coaching guideline:

  • Whenever managers are promoted to a superior position, they (finally!) start facing and managing the issues they should have considered on their previous level.

For example in such a time-space perspective, recently promoted marketing managers often start managing their previous area of responsibility:  They focus on the specific product line from which they have been promoted.  Likewise, recently promoted CEOs originating from finance departments often just start having a more strategic financial perspective.  If they originated from the control department when they were financial managers, they probably then developed a more strategic comptroller's perspective.  Consequently when they become CEOs, ex-finance managers rarely consider other departments such as operations, marketing, sales, etc. in a larger perspective than that of a financial expert.

Consequently, considering their past positions, newly promoted leaders may often get into lower-level over-details by privileging knowledge of their previous field of expertise (space).  In doing so, they don't find the time to become strategic, on the level of their promotion, as CEOs.

In order to accompany these new CEOs to have much more time, the best way to coach them as quantum-based systemic coaches is to have them inhabit their new strategic place.  Accompanying them consists in helping them delegate everything that belongs to lower levels, if possible to excellent managers who will also know how to delegate.

It is all happening now: collapsing time

In order to proceed by example, consider the following true case study that illustrates how to almost magically propel a client forward into the future, or how to cut short postponing strategies. 

  • Example: A very successful middle-aged entrepreneur and CEO had been stuck in a motivational quagmire for years.  He proudly recognized and appreciated his successes, having built a well-known research company that had attracted a good number of scientific minds to create a performing very team of brilliant game changers in their field. 

More privately, the CEO also clearly wanted to move to a smaller university town to teach as a professor, spend more time with his family and have a much more qualitative life style.  He knew his company needed him to continue to play a central role, and he knew he wanted out.  He could not decide what to do, and felt he had become the miserable hostage of his own hard-earned success.  The story probably rings a bell for many successful people, coaches and clients.

On his first coaching meeting, the CEO rambled on explaining the double bind out of which he could not break free.  In short: damned if I do and damned if I don’t, and I feel miserable.  After a few minutes, the coach felt he was becoming a hostage to the story.  He asked to interrupt to share a perception, and softly said:

  • (A): “I may be totally wrong, but it seems to me that deep down inside, you have already decided exactly what you want to do.  You are just wondering how to do it, maybe because you are afraid of facing the consequences. 

Such coach direct language startled the CEO, and shut him up for a long puzzling minute.  The CEO then gave a tentative smile.   The coach then went on to say, just as softly:

  • (B).  “If I may, considering you know how to be a very effective CEO when you set your mind and heart to it, you also know how to manage the consequences of your choice, so they can be acceptable, if not downright positive, for all those concerned.”

That comment silenced the CEO for a while longer. 

In effect, the CEO’s issue was solved in a matter of minutes. For the next three sessions spread out over a few months, the rest of the coaching process was purely incremental: it just focused on follow-up actions resulting from an obvious, very clear client decision.   So what happened?

For more than a year, the CEO had been defining himself as stuck in a time-space where his decision had not been made, where he could not choose, and therefore could not manage the consequences.  This iterative story had been repeated often enough to prove true. Indeed the client was proving he was stuck.

A few minutes were enough to help change the client story.  The new story (A) just propelled the CEO in time, beyond the decision that in fact was already made, in order to (B) start managing consequences in a way that could be advantageous for all.  In as much as managing consequences was incremental, the effective CEO just made it happen, very fast.  His life changed within months.

This case study illustrates that being a systemic coach consists in firmly believing that clients are very capable, know all they need to know, have their answers right, are intelligent adults, are motivated, etc.  They have everything they need to progress immediately.  That means they can rapidly time-travel into their future or collapse their future into their present.  Being a quantum systemic coach is based on that fundamental assumption. 

Clients really don’t need more analysis, or more means, or more courage, or more of anything, and especially not more time.  As time does not exist unless one endlessly postpones, clients can have it all now by jumping into the future they already have in their hearts and souls.

For individual, team and organizational clients accompanied by quantum-based systemic coaches, the consequences of this time frame of reference are very important both in terms of means and in terms of results.  On a team or organizational level, they can immediately affect hundreds of lives.

  • First, in terms of means, the coaching processe or relationship can be very short and effective. 

One or two sessions are necessary to help clients radically change their frame of reference. One or two more sessions may be useful to accompany the resulting action plans.  Not much more is really needed.

  • Second, in terms of achieving results, the benefits or gains that can be expected from such a quantum coaching approach are as immediate as the change of perspective is radical. 

If one postpones a decision for years, the benefits or profits are postponed just as much.  When one decides immediately and acts on the decision without delay, the results are also immediate.

There are no prerequisites for action. 

In corporate environments, quantum-based systemic coaches often perceive all analytical prerequisites are mere excuses to postpone decisions and actions.  Remember indeed, that coaches consider their clients are healthy, intelligent, informed, capable, intuitive, motivated, etc.

  • If any important client decision must be made by first gathering as much information as possible, that would be assuming that clients have kept themselves uninformed and/or misinformed.
  • If any client decision to achieve a new goal first requires the acquisition of new means such as more time, more financial investment, more people, etc., that would be assuming this client doesn’t already have all the necessary means.

Both these assumptions disqualify the client by telling the wrong story.

To illustrate further, consider that coaching in general can be either defined as goal-oriented or as achievement-oriented.  Quantum-based systemic coaches prefer the second, by a large margin.

  • A) When asked to visualize a goal, visualizing persons position themselves on the starting line. The goal is perceived at a distance.  The next obvious question is how can one get to the goal?  What are the useful means to achieve the goal?

The first obvious consequence of this frame of reference is that if we had the means, we obviously would already be there.  The consequence is to discuss at length what means will be required, and the difficulty of obtaining those means.  These are generally defined in terms of time and money, if not in terms of blood sweat and tears.  This could illustrate quite a masochistic approach: In order to succeed, one must put in much more effort, or suffer.

  • B) When instead of a goal, clients are asked to visualize achievements or results, they are immediately invited to position themselves on the finish line: the question concerning the result is now; the achievement is acquired, what is it?

This assumes that the means have been there, that reaching the road was quick and easy, that we can now rejoice!  In this frame of reference, active life can be a picnic!      

Remember again, that our reality is the one we choose to create through our own self-confirming beliefs.  If we believe life is difficult, and that to really succeed, one needs many means, we will prove we are right.  If we believe success is a joyful path of learning and achievement, it in fact is.   As both beliefs are self-confirming, both are in fact equally true.  They both help us equally achieve real results, even if those results are totally different from each other.  Most of the time, one of the above belief systems is obviously more fun and much more effective.

The above B option is also an excellent example of systemic coaching work using the quantum time-space continuum.  In effect, this second option illustrates how a quantum-based systemic coach invites a client to immediately move from the starting line, theoretically here and now to the finishing point theoretically there and then.  This move in time actually occurs in time-space, from the starting line to the finish line.

  • Considering time-space is an illusion for quantum-based systemic coaches, the collapse of here and now includes there and then.
To experience fractal skills-oriented self-coaching online:

Time-space travel to client past

To proceed with our exploration of quantum time travel in systemic coaching, consider the following question that could be put to a client while she or he is working on solving a difficult issue within a conflicting relationship.

  • A) Have you ever had a similarly difficult relationship in the past, with a very similar type of person?

When the client acquiesces, which is almost invariably the case, the coach immediately serves another question, introducing the second part of his time-travel strategy:

  • B) Great! So you have experience in this matter! (pause) What have you learned in this past that can really work out well in your present situation? (OR) Thanks to that past, what do you already know you can do today to make sure you achieve a positive outcome for all those concerned?

On a first obvious level, the two subsequent coach questions exemplified above serve to bring the client’s past knowledge and experience into the present situation.  All coach clients indeed have prior experience.  They have all developed skills that can be made accessible in present issues. This strategy reinforces client empowerment by letting them rest on their previously acquired qualities, competencies or know-how.

In linear time, privileged relationships seem to be repetitious in their form.  These relationships unfold with very similar privileged partners.  Consequently, when a client chooses to work on a present difficult issue within a conflicting relationship or situation, the first question exemplified above is almost rhetorical.

  • The systemic coach knows that the client has already been there and done it in the past.
  • The systemic coach also knows the client has already developed a coherent set of skills to attract this type of partner or situation, to interact with or within them, and to explore alternate outcomes.

Quantum Time

Simultaneously, in a completely complementary quantum or fractal perspective or paradigm, the exact same strategy refers to a form of fractal time-space travel.  A client’s capacity to develop difficult relationships with a partner can be perceived as happening now, as having happened in the past, and as also possibly happening in the future. This perspective is out of time or in a collapsed form of time.

  • Consequently, a systemic coach knows that in a quantum frame for reference, there is no more separateness in space than there is in time. Every life situation that may appear to be separate in time is in fact an integral part of one intricate whole. An ongoing conversation

A client who may apparently be dealing with difficult others in apparently different times and spaces is actually having a continuous exploratory internal dialogue.  That client is actually engaged in an internal monologue that is attempting to elaborate a much more satisfying personal reality, in the past, in the present and probably in the future.  This internal process just appears to be spread out in linear time, and just seems to interact with apparently different external partners and situations.

  • Of course, systemic coaches are also aware that this fractal reality includes the quality of the client’s interface with a chosen coach, and the coach’s own inner ongoing dialogue.

Travel in space

Another strategy to allow client work on ongoing relational or situational patterns could be to just change the client context, or client space rather than focusing on time:

  • If this professional relational issue did not take place at work, but unfolded in your private life, with your partner of son (pause) how can you go about solving it in your professional environment? 

Note that the above coach linguistics serve to confuse or superimpose client personal and professional contexts or spaces, assuming that the client does simultaneously have the same fractal relational patterns in these different areas of interest.  Confusing contexts or superimposing apparently different spaces is very powerful in that the coach is suggesting that the client work on both at the same time, as if these were one and the same.   Such strategies focused on the common pattern behind apparently different relationships allow for fractal solutions. One same option for change can be deployed in may different arenas of client reality.

  • In a quantum perspective, there is no separate space.  In fractal reality, space is holographic.  Spatial separation or distinction is an illusion. For a systemic coach, at home and at work, in sports and with friends, in projects and ambitions, with partners and with their coach, the client is perceived is always having an internal dialogue attempting to elaborate a different internal reality.

In these ways, quantum-based systemic coaching rests on a frame of reference where both time and space are perceptual illusions.  In time and in space, there are no different places.  They are all one.  As a matter of fact in space, there isn't even an out there out there.  It is all inside of us.  Although that too is an illusion, as we are all one.  So for a systemic coach, inside and outside, here and there, are merged, just as present, past and future.

  • Through these separate and differentiated illusions, we are all really engaged in a shared, interlaced and unitary or univeral internal dialogue. 

And quantum-based systemic coaching is an excellent way to explore it.

Travel in time, then in space 


Now consider another example of past-and-present travel, first in time and then in space, in order to accompany client exploration of personal patterns and ongoing dialogues.  Imagine the same client above, engaged in a very similar situation, dealing with a similarly negative relationship or facing difficulties in a project.

  • Example: A) Supposing you are back on the first day of this relationship / back at the very beginning of this project.  (pause) You are now defining the partnership/relationship with your partners in order to set solid foundations. (Pause) What do you do completely differently, knowing what you know today?

Notice that the formulation of the question merges the context past and present, mixing the times when the relationship or project was initiated and the knowledge and experience the client has accumulated today.  In effect, the coach is asking the client how she or he can now rewrite or reboot the project or relationship's initial agreements or contract, in order to revisit the initial foundations or alignment between the partners.

  • A very common frame of reference is to consider that once a contract, agreement, project, relationship, etc. has been engaged, it is too late to go back and change anything. 
  • A quantum-based posture stipulates that we are always at the beginning, middle and end of time, and we can always do what is needed.  It is never too late.

It is therefore never too late to go back in time, or to relive the past today, in order to revisit or consolidate foundations, or to completely reconsider an inappropriate engagement.  In this way, imply changing a past event by modifying what needs to be changed today can allow for a completely different future right now.  Not doing so could firmly anchor our possible futures in the mistakes of one of our pasts.

Of course following the client's work to redefine past foundations to revisit the alignment today, the coach needs to bring that past present back to today's present, in order to accompany the client’s design of a different future:

  • Example follow up B): So considering your excellent work, what can you do with your partners today, to effectively change the situation to everyone's satisfaction? 

This follow-up serves to let the client actualize whatever clarity he or she has gained, in order to ensure a different future in the concerned relationship or project.  Obviously, this client work also needs to be well validated by the coach as it is distilled into an action plan. 

After that time travel, the coach could choose to suggest a lateral space travel into one or more other client personal or professional realm of interest.

  • Example follow up C):  Congratulations for your excellent work!  (Pause)  May I suggest a way you can leverage your insights, in order to make it really useful and lasting?  (pause, and wait for client for client approval) If the way you are realigning yourself in this issue was very useful in other professional or personal areas of your life today, where do you perceive you could transpose this new awareness and action plan?


This lateral shift to other spaces in the client's private and work life is totally coherent with a fractal view of client patterns.  Whatever positive strategic progress the client can make in one micro or local situation in her or his life can most probably be transposed or copy-pasted in a good number of other client relationships and projects.  In this way:

  • A useful piece of client work, changing a pattern in one relationship or project, can be leveraged to be generalized in many other personal and professional relationships and projects. 


Clients can develop much higher motivation to modify a given pattern in any specific area of their lives when they perceive that their pattern modification can actually simultaneously help improve a good number of other, apparently different situations, relationships and projects.
  Consequently, quantum-based systemic coaches know that:

  • Our pasts, presents and futures can always collapse into one, whenever we choose to do so. 
  • The ways we grow in any specific relationship, project, situation, environment, etc. can immediately be leveraged into all the other fractal dimensions of our lives.


Stated in this straightforward way, this can sound quite outlandish.  Note, however, that even in mainstream time perception, if anything radically changed in our lives today today, that change would most probably rewrite our history or our past as much as our future.  For example, should a radically authoritarian régime replace a state's historical democracy, one can be sure that all that country’s history books will be rewritten to justify a more restrictive present and future. 

  • Example: A post-Vietnam war journalist once said: “History will prove that Nixon was a great president”.  When this sentence was uttered, the opposite was obviously true, or the sentence would not be justified.  So in effect, the journalist was saying that in a predictable future, historians would rewrite the past in a way that contradicts the very present that justified the comment. 

Likewise, when such a major authoritarian or libertarian change does take place in a given country, one can expect an instant fractal shift in a large number of that state's institutions and sub-systems, such as in agencies, companies, provinces, families, associations, and personal relationships.  Very naturally, the parts of any system almost simultaneously resonate in coherency with the whole.

Concerning Nixon, of course, we have not yet reached that time but who knows?  Official history has already been changed a good number of times to justify radically different presents.

Here and now time-space

Speaking of here-and-now, another coaching space-time strategy and corresponding question is to bring client issues here and now, right in the presence of the coaching setting.  To illustrate, imagine again our same coaching client facing the same situation, dealing with a negative relationship, or a collective project.  The client says he needs to solve the issue and is looking for a strategy.   In this perspective, possible coaching questions are:

  • A) Supposing this person is right here, right at your side, right now.  What is it you want to tell him now?
  • B) If your meeting was to start right now, everyone is right here in the meeting room, what is your opening statement?

In this way, the coach can propel clients into the here and now of their future-and-elsewhere issue.  To put weight into the situation, the coach can intently look to the side, at the other person or at the group, and address them:

  • "Joe here wants to tell you something."  Such a situation becomes very real when the coach makes it so.

Another example of bringing a situation here and now into the coaching room could concern a client who sustains that no decision is really needed before the end of the year.  This client belief can be quite real, and it can also be a postponing strategy. That difference doesn't really matter, as both options overlap.  The coach could again just collapse client space and time:

  • Suppose you are now in meeting room at the office, at the end of the year, (pause) and you are now communicating your decision to your partners. They are all here and attentively listening.  What do you tell them?

In such cases, the client may argue that this is premature, that more analysis is still required.  This would be a confirmation that the time shift has not occurred.   In such cases, the coach can then reformulate with more intention:

  • Yes!  And right now, at the end of the year, you have done all the useful research and analysis, (pause) and we are now in your office, and you are communicating the decision you have studied, matured, and made,  (pause)  So?

If the coach really inhabits the make-believe situation, the client will most likely follow through and formulate the awareness of a decision already at hand.  Of course, once the client has done that, the coach can then say: "It is now great to have all that free time until the end of the year to really validate your decision, (pause) or maybe to communicate it earlier in order to get things moving without much delay.  You have many options."

Conclusions

The space-time collapsing strategies illustrated above can have a number of very useful positive effects to allow clients to continue elaborating their internal dialogues, and succeed better, now. Of course, there are a number of obvious prerequisites.

  • No technique is powerful in itself. A truly professional coach has the skills to make a technique powerful for a given client, at a given time.
  • Such techniques consequently need to become skills that are lived and embodied by a professional coach. A coach that does not time travel as illustrated above, nor believe in space and time superposition or unity cannot possibly convincingly accompany clients in such useful time warps and space travels.
  • Remember there is no out there, out there and that goes for the coach. Whenever a given client brings forth a specific issue to a coach, that piece of work actually or also concerns the coach’s own personal and professional life. Clients offer their coaches issues in order to have them work on themselves.
  • All basic coaching principles and ethics require coaches to respect client pace, rhythm, integrity, identity, knowledge, etc.  These are also to be respected in all forms of time warps and space travels.

Consequently, helping clients achieve their end in much a more space and time-effective fashion does not justify unethical or disrespectful means. 

When such a frame of reference and prerequisites are respected, quantum-based systemic coaching can become extremely effective in accompanying clients at lightning speed, with magical grace.