In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with coach Guide Furlani about solution-focused coaching and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) as tools for healing trauma.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are going to discuss solution-focused coaching and neuro-linguistic programming, NLP for short.
Barbara La Pointe: To dig deep into this topic, we have brought on an invaluable expert, Guide Furlani, to help us better understand. Guide began his coaching career in Los Angeles in 2008, and joined the prestigious Erickson International in 2009. Prior to coaching, he achieved success as a professional photographer and business owner in Northern Italy, moving next into professional acting.
Barbara La Pointe: Drawing from his acting and voiceover experience, he leaves his clients and audience with indelible images of the learning and thinking frameworks. Along with solution-focused methods, he trained in ontological psychology and family dynamics at the Pescara Center of Phenomenological Psychology. His primary drivers being truth, clarity, freedom, and courage.
Barbara La Pointe: But more recently, he’s embodying authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency. So without further ado, welcome Guide.
Guide Furlani: Thank you. Wow. I’m surprised. I didn’t know you grabbed my bio from somewhere there in the cloud. And I was actually realizing, oh, before we began, the five minutes we had beforehand just to say, “Hey, hi, hi,” I repeated a lot of things that were already down there.
Guide Furlani: Love it.
Barbara La Pointe: You’re on the hot seat...
Guide Furlani: Now. It’s an honor.
Guide Furlani: I love to be on the hot seat. As you understand, having a background, more than a background, having a love and life passion for acting and voiceover and anything that is performing, I love the hot seat. When I can be in the hot seat is when I actually produce in the moment, whatever comes out. So that said, feel free to manage me when I go into a rampage of something, and call me back as I am a kind of an in-time thinker, and I tap into my state to produce what I do. Feel free to call me back anytime, guys.
Barbara La Pointe: Beautiful. Well, I have a whole list of questions here, and I admit that I want to ask you if you know what NLP can help me change my life in 10 minutes, and many other questions. But before we begin, I’m just really curious, if we were to go forward a couple of years or maybe reverse engineer this question and come back to this podcast, what would we have talked about, the three of us, that would make this transformational or powerful for our audience at The Broken Families podcast?
Guide Furlani: Wow. Barbara, that is a keeper of a question. How did you produce such a question? Wow, I love it. I have an afterthought, a pre-thought, actually pre. That’s the right desinence. The pre-thought is, the questions they say are the answers, and it’s absolutely true.
Guide Furlani: If you are able to put out a specific, precise one question, there is no way that the beyond conscious won’t buy it and begin to work on it. And in that moment, without having a pre, again desinence, preconceived idea, we create the solution. We create greatness. Every time that happens, we are tapping into our beyond conscious.
Guide Furlani: We leave the conscious level of thoughts and preconceived idea precooked, and we go into, oh my God, expansion and the world of possibility, as Deepak Chopra called that the field of all possibilities. So as I tap into that, it is an incredible challenging question. To help me, would you mind to repeat it once again?
Guide Furlani: Because I opened up to the theory of powerful questions. I like to now serve the question as a servant. Can you repeat it, please?
Barbara La Pointe: Well, I mean, I’d love to imagine that the three of us met for cappuccino or a glass of wine in a couple of years and you just looked at me and maybe Andrew and I, and you said, “You know, that podcast changed everything for Lucy, who was watching, or for John, who was watching.
Barbara La Pointe: They got some powerful insights,” or something shifted in our audience. And I was just wondering, if we could reverse engineer it, what might those powerful shifts be?
Guide Furlani: Your question is so powerful that I have all my hair raised on my arm. I have what English like to call... Because I am not English, so when I am Italian, try to learn American accent, and now living in Canada, so wow, right?
Guide Furlani: And I didn’t speak your language until 15 years ago, so I don’t really speak English. But if you believe I speak English, good for you. So...
Barbara La Pointe: We buy it.
Guide Furlani: English is called them goosebumps I would say, Lucy, know that it’s not your stuff. Lucy, know that whatever you are remediable in absolutely manageable way, it’s possible to take care of it.
Guide Furlani: Lucy, know that it’s not you. It wasn’t you from the very beginning. It’s never been you. And it’s all borrowed stuff. And the deepest insight I would love everybody to have, talking about trauma, early family history, which is my specialty, early family history issues. Trauma related to your family, which brings up feeling of revenge, feeling of getting straight with that, feeling of, “
Guide Furlani: I will succeed and will show you all how does it work.”
Guide Furlani: Right? All the funny stuff that we have, that we go like, “You piece of whatever”? That either is your father or your mother or your uncle or the person that did you that. That happened because in that moment we must take responsibility. And that’s the hardest part. We must realize that in some moments we didn’t react as we wanted.
Guide Furlani: There was not the preparation for it. We didn’t know it was coming. The point is, trauma takes place when we do not react.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, we were talking a little bit about this. What does that mean? Do we have to process trauma? Tell me more about that.
Guide Furlani: When this begins, when this happens, we are not knowing that is happening.
Guide Furlani: We are not knowing that our father, our mother will do that. A priest, a nun, a professor will scream us in that way to us. Our grandmother, because we broke the little Swarovski crystal train that cost $2,000, and we didn’t know because we are so small. But grandma that loves us so much, lose it. She loses it for five minutes.
Guide Furlani: It’s enough. It takes 10 seconds to get a trauma slammed in, and we will never know it. We can’t remember that it was about a Swarovski train, and it’s all about cognitive dissonance because we believe that that person loves us, and they often do. But when the thing happen, we are not prepared for it.
Guide Furlani: Nobody told us, “Hey, Johnny, or Guide, or Guido, or Lucy, be ready. Grandma is going to lose it.” There is nobody there. So that unpreparedness is absolutely human. The difference is that some of us are able to react in the moment. Some send grandma to where she belongs, even if they are very small. They have a reaction.
Guide Furlani: Even if it’s a scream, even if it’s fear, even if it’s anger. You know those kids that go like, “How do you dare?” Whatever is a reaction is... Remember that in the martial arts where I come from, there is a powerful act that is not an act. It’s called the kiai. We do the kiai every time we execute something that has a special spiritual meaning.
Guide Furlani: The kiai is a over-human scream. I’m not gonna do that now, but basically it sound like, “Kiai.” It can have, again, your hair going goosebumps. And that scream is a fundamental act of life. When people are overwhelmed, they get angry and they scream. They are saving themselves. Don’t think that everything you do is bad and negative.
Guide Furlani: Everything we do unconsciously is having a reason. So one is trauma taking place. Very often, according to neuroscientists that have studied this lately because PTSD has become such a big issue, it is when the traumatic event happens, and we call that traumatic event that, okay? Excuse me, let me stay in frame.
Guide Furlani: That happened. The difference between I or you or them reacting in the moment, being able to do something, help others, help yourself, say something, do something, think something, react, make a sound, is the difference between taking the trauma in that then begins to haunt you or be trauma-free. In a way, this explains the reason why the bomb explodes, typical example of PTSD.
Guide Furlani: The bomb exploded in Beirut. Our veterans came back home. 20 soldiers were there. Two got PTSD, 18 didn’t. How it comes? Well, they begin researching that, and they discovered that the ability of do something, say something, react, react, react, don’t let that in, makes the difference between who gets PTSD and who go like, “Okay, it’s fine.
Guide Furlani: Get up, guys. Let’s get there.” It’s big stuff. It’s very simple in a way, but...
Barbara La Pointe: But sometimes you get stuck in that flight, fight, flight or freeze. I’m a freezer, so I freeze. And so you’re kind of referencing a freeze reaction to trauma. Can NLP help release a traumatic memory, for example?
Guide Furlani: Absolutely. I say it with not a shred of doubt because our brain is beautiful. Our brain is beautiful and is not, because when NLP is used by the bad guys... Can I call bad guys and good guys?
Barbara La Pointe: Sure.
Guide Furlani: When NLP is used by the bad guys, which I usually identify as the big mass communicator, they can use NLP to induce a state of belief, selling a narrative, or making people fearful, or many other negative things that people don’t need, we don’t need.
Guide Furlani: So the reason why I began studying NLP is because, sorry, I deem myself a good guy. I come from much sorrow in my life and a dysfunctional family. And that’s why I call my coaching early family history because I had to deal with a lot, lot of early family history. And when we are using NLP, our brain has a function that need to be understood really well.
Guide Furlani: Our brain does not know the difference between reality and fake. Our brain is beautiful if you use it for the good reason. It’s terrible if you use it to manipulate people. And there’s always NLP, I warn people, NLP can be used to heal you or can be used to enslave you. And when I say that, I am sure that I have a host of NLP practitioner and master and hypnotherapist out there that goes like, “How do you dare to say that?
Guide Furlani: How do you dare? NLP is only good.” No, it’s not. And I am ready to substantiate what I say. You know what is good? Is good who does it. There is only one thing that matters in life, is this. Let me change plane of perspective.
Guide Furlani: Our heart. There is only one thing that makes a difference, is in the morning when I wake up, will I help heal, help human thrive, be good, having a life, or I will serve the diminishing of life, the enslaving of the mind? Will I serve the negative side of the force? If there is one movie that we want to watch, it’s Star Wars.
Guide Furlani: There is the dark side of the force, and there is the white side of the force, and the difference in being a human is which side do you serve today? I serve this, the white side. So NLP is absolutely able. Why? Simple. Because the human brain does not know the difference between reality, perception of reality, intermediate stage, and imagination.
Guide Furlani: There are three stages. Reality, perception of reality, and rarely, blender, a blender. Rarely we speak about this perception of reality, but it’s an intermediate state, end stage, and then imagination. NLP leverages the power of imagination in a way that is not perceived as imagination to go and heal the perception, the reality.
Guide Furlani: Excuse me, the reality. So that didn’t happen. Is that a problem? No. With NLP, we can work on this to rebuild that. And if you want an example, there is a beautiful story from one of my three spiritual mentors. I have my own Mount Olympus, the famous Greek mountain in Greece where they said there they had the gods.
Guide Furlani: Well, they probably had the gods up there. For real.
Guide Furlani: So but I’ve been to Greece only on cruise and I never went to see Mount Olympus, so I cannot speak about it, but I can tell you about my world. Milton Erickson is one of my three spiritual mentors, the other one being Carl Gustav Jung and Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido. So these three peoples are my spirit guides.
Guide Furlani: They don’t even probably know I am existing, but often when I need assistance, I ask them. Milton have a beautiful story, and for any of you that love to be laughing and crying at the same time reading a book, read My Voice Will Go With You. Milton was a guy that was on the good side, on the white side of the force.
Guide Furlani: Milton was a guy with amazing family and human principles, and he did hypnotherapy and therapy in a way that no one else ever did it before. He’s the grandfather of NLP, neurolinguistic programming. And there is this beautiful story that is called The February Man, where this lady had a big issue because her paternal figure was completely missing.
Guide Furlani: I’m not gonna go into the details of that story, but there was no paternal figure. What that was gifting her with, gifting, those are the gifts that come from our families, was a total insecurity, instability, and block of confidence in anything, ongoing anxiety. Milton did a beautiful thing. He did some therapy, hypnotherapy sessions, and he began session after session to rebuild a figure that never existed, that they decided to call the February Man.
Guide Furlani: And in her imagination, this man was coming back and taking care of all those little things that were missing in here, in the reality.
Guide Furlani: Guess what? Six months after, the February Man took care of everything. She was the most confident, beautiful woman ready to take over the world, and the paternal figure was taken care of.
Guide Furlani: I tell you, when I read My Voice Will Go With You, I didn’t read it in your language. Sorry, guys. I read it in my Italiano, and in Italian the title sound is La Mia Voce Ti Accompagnerà. I was 18. It was a book given by my very first mentor, Professor Francesco Benzo, and I was reading this book. I was crying because the humanity of this man was overwhelming me.
Guide Furlani: I was laughing at the same time because he was the most humorous, funny man in the world, together with the most clever hypnotherapist. So to me was like, “God, I’m sorry you died.” He died one year before I met my mentor. He died in 1980. I met my martial art master and mentor for 15 years in 1981.
Guide Furlani: So when I read the book in 1983, it was too late to go, like, I do a trip to Phoenix and I meet this man. Too late. So that’s my only regret, that I never met in person Milton Erickson. He was incredible. He had an absolute compassion for our human condition. He understood all this stuff in and out, and there is a man in this moment that has the same compassion for our human condition on Earth.
Guide Furlani: And I want to mention it because I believe that we need to be honest, is he had an incredible journey, and he began as an absolute corporate guy trying to achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. And today he’s turning into a level of spirituality and truth that is touching me, is our beloved Tony Robbins.
Guide Furlani: Anthony Robbins.
Guide Furlani: I’ve never taken a course from him, but I watched him operating many time. And when I see him doing his interventions, I go like, “Oh man, oh man, you really learn that school.” If in this moment I had to pick someone that is continuing the Milton tradition in that creative, beautiful, humorous, funny way.
Guide Furlani: Fun is important to distract, okay? It’s actually a technique. I would say, Tony, you’re doing fantastic.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s very relevant example because everyone probably knows Tony Robbins.
Guide Furlani: I don’t have any doubt. And the journey he has done is incredible. Sorry, I interrupted you.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, Tony talks about neuro-linguistic programming. Can words really make a difference in our reality, our perception or in our creating our imagined world? Words, neuro-linguistic programming, like that.
Guide Furlani: Yes, they can. The power of words is incredible. But there is a fundamental passage that the practitioner, call it whatever you want, but anyone that work with the mind or the brain of humans is a practitioner. The practitioner need to understand a fundamental tenet which I call a mindset.
Guide Furlani: When I mentor coaches, I am an ICF mentor at the PCC level to get accredited at the PCC level. There are three levels in coaching, ACC, PCC, MCC. It depends on the hours and also depends on how much you show up for someone. I always say, guys, we have titles here on our head. The taller the head, the more important you are.
Guide Furlani: In the ending is how good you are, how center into your heart are. Intelligence is beautiful if it’s used for the good of life with a big L and humanity. So yes, NLP... Can you pose me again your question in a second? The same question you asked me, can you repeat it?
Barbara La Pointe: Sure. I was asking about the power of words or languaging with respect to NLP.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you. Can it make a difference in our life? Is it important? Is it relevant?
Guide Furlani: It is fundamental to get the right word at the right time. And because I went down this Milton Erickson Avenue right now, I will actually read you a piece that I discovered in one of his books of hypnotherapy many years ago.
Guide Furlani: That piece touched me so much again. I didn’t read it when I was 18. Back then, I didn’t even know that one day I would have become a Milton Erickson professional, an Ericksonian trained solution-focused, and now organic coach. Organic, I will tell you more about that if we have time.
Guide Furlani: And so back then I was blissfully oblivious that that would have become my life. So that was just a synchronistic, synchronous encounter. I will read you a quote from Milton that is going to give you exactly his worldview on how to operate with human. Before going there, because I need to find that file and read from there.
Guide Furlani: And I love to do because if there is one thing I believe is very important, is always give back. Not only give back to people that need you now, I deem fundamental to give back to my mentors and mention my mentor and appreciate them, like almost in a Oriental Easterner way and say, “Sensei, thank you.”
Guide Furlani: So my way of saying thank you is to name the name of my mentors and say, those three mens have formed me, and I will do it later on in another moment. But in this moment, staying connected to this question, the mindset that practitioner we all need to understand is that words are meaningless. And you go like, “Wait a moment.
Guide Furlani: If words are the power by which we can change a person, how can they be meaningless?” Because when we listen to a story, when we listen to anything people say, we sometimes buy in the words, and we forget that behind that word, that sentence, that period. A period in grammar is a set of sentences that create a complete thought.
Guide Furlani: Words make sentences, sentences make periods. We need to have an understanding of grammar to operate with humans. So sorry. Some go like, “Ah, I hated grammar at school.” We need to. We need to understand linguistic. Linguistic is fundamental, but words are meaningless. I have an entire quote about that, and if you want, I can send it to you, and you can post it underneath.
Guide Furlani: I don’t want to read it now. It would take us out of our frame. But you can post it under, in the blog, the two quote about truth and a quote about whatever we want.
Guide Furlani: Because they are meaningless. Why they are meaningless? Because they are a container. I say glass or cup. Is this really cup?
Guide Furlani: No. It’s way more. But it’s getting complicated when we talk about objects. It’s easy to objects actually, because in objects we say, well, I need to say cup for simplicity, for time convenience. It would be very long to say, “Hey, I am grabbing a container with a handle. It’s brown color, made of a strong material, but fragile at the same time, which can contains liquid without poisoning me.”
Guide Furlani: It’s a cup. So keep it simple, sweetie. Kiss. But then what the problem is getting there, I am philosophizing about, and that this is what I call the philosophy of coaching. I hope I am able to get this thought across. The meaning is never about you, the listener. The meaning is about you, Barbara, is about you, Andrew, is about him, is about her.
Guide Furlani: And so the most important question we need to ask ourselves as coaches, as practitioners is what do you mean when you say cup? What do you mean when you say love?
Guide Furlani: What do you mean when you say grief? What do you mean when you say loss? And we don’t dive into the negative solution focus coaches, but in organic coaching I have a different take.
Guide Furlani: Because organic is all. I don’t only take the good part of you. I take the good and the bad. I say an organic coach or leader keep both the baby and the bath water. It’s fundamental. We need to become able to have the compassion and the ability to listen without diving into the negative, but we need to be able to keep both the baby and the bath water.
Guide Furlani: And so the meaning is fundamental. When I understand not what people say, but when I understand the meaning of what people say, I can operate with NLP like a surgeon. I can then be certain that I am not addressing the words. I use words to operate.
Guide Furlani: To coach. But I use words in the original meaning that they were created for, and that meaning can only be given and said and stated by the person, that individual. The individual is a beautiful word. Individuated, that individual. There is an entire story. There is an entire mindset of meanings that if I miss those meanings, any NLP intervention, any coaching intervention is meaningless.
Andrew Folkler: It makes a lot of sense.
Andrew Folkler: And just to make sure I got the right framework that you were presenting, that the words themselves individually don’t hold meaning because it’s just sounds that we’ve collectively agreed on. And because language itself, and I don’t know if this is just English or Latin-based languages, but because language itself is comparative, my words portray my perspective, but it doesn’t quite translate into what maybe someone else’s perspective and feeling and experiences.
Andrew Folkler: And therefore, in order to best use these words, we have to see beyond what somebody else is saying and see and look deeper into those experiences and those thoughts and feelings that they might be having. Am I on the right track?
Guide Furlani: Absolutely. Oh my God, you are fully on track. In our world of business, university learning, college, high school, whatever, they told us, so to say it in other words, have you ever heard anybody telling back to you, “So you just did it.
Guide Furlani: You used your words in this moment,” and this is a very effective. You, Andrew, you just did it. It’s a very effective way to stay with me in a non-coaching frame, in a non-practitioner frame, in a conversational frame is fantastic. You just did it. Everybody can go back and listen what Andrew said, “To say it in my words,” or you, I don’t remember, I think you said something, “To say in other words, let me be sure I understand you.”
Guide Furlani: You used your frame of words. In coaching, we never do that. Well, we do that as less as possible because I have heard great coaches do much of that and they don’t know they do. Because the problem in people is not what you know that you do, the problem is not knowing what you don’t know that you do.
Guide Furlani: That is huge. I have seen practitioner destroying completely a successful session done until minute 20 because in minute 25 they say something that completely crashes what they have built upon. But they don’t know they don’t know. Sad. It’s like, “No, no no, no. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Stop speaking.
Guide Furlani: Silence. Silence is gold.”
Guide Furlani: In Italian we say silence is made of gold and word is made of silver. So words are fairly good, but silence is way more important. So we would love to not to use our meanings as practitioner. We must understand their, his, her meaning.
Barbara La Pointe: May I have your permission...
Guide Furlani: And then we use words.
Guide Furlani: So how do we handle life in general, trauma or not? We need to come to term with paradoxes. There are people that hate paradoxes. But as soon as I impacted the Eastern culture, the Japanese culture in my case, the Chinese as well, and the Indian, and all the other culture in beautiful Asia. As soon as I impacted that, I realized, oh, look at those Tibetan.
Guide Furlani: Now look at them, those great master, Rinpoche, all this name that they use, and I am not even able to just mean master. Look at that. In order to have the adept, the student reaching enlightenment, which means in Italian presa di coscienza, taking consciousness. Consciousness is the most precious good in the universe because it’s everywhere.
Guide Furlani: So abundant and so rare to access. It’s a paradox. It’s everywhere, and yet people lack of it. It’s a paradox. So I was looking at these great Tibetan masters through the... Thank you to my first great mentor, Francesco, Professor Francesco Benzo, and I realized that they were accessing consciousness through mastering paradoxes.
Guide Furlani: And in the Tibetan tradition, it’s actually having a name, Koan Han. K-O-A-N. Koan Han or Koan. Pronounce it... You know, English does funny stuff. They try to Anglicize name that originally has another sound, right? That’s so funny. But that’s something we do in every language. We try to make it palatable to our own language, and it’s a catastrophe.
Guide Furlani: It’s a catastrophe. I would say don’t do that today, but that is the tradition we have in every language. Every language does it. There is no one language better than another, okay? It’s not just as you said, Andrew. It’s not just about English. Every language is a map. It’s not a territory.
Guide Furlani: There is no language in the world that can explain and express fully and completely the territory. We use a map. It’s called a language. Life, with a big L, the life of that person, that individual, him or her, is the territory. Are you able to grasp that life? Nobody says the meaning. So when someone in the 1950 in Palo Alto in California, I get excited, that was a genius, and reproduced what Korzybski said.
Guide Furlani: He’s actually a Russian guy. These Russians are amazing thinkers, okay? Oh my God, I love the Russian school of philosophy and researchers. They are way more open-ended than we are in the West. Korzybski said, “Map is not the territory.” And everybody went like, “
Guide Furlani: Duh.” I love it.
Guide Furlani: What is it? It’s very simple.
Guide Furlani: Map is any language. Territory is life with a big L. Human life, okay? And I cannot speak about alien life. I don’t know how they look like. When we will see them, we will know it. So far I am dealing only with human life. Then I will have a problem in the next few years when we get disclosed and we say, “Oh, we are not alone.”
Guide Furlani: In Italian we do this gesture like, come on. Okay, go ahead.
Barbara La Pointe: So we’ve talked about NLP as a powerful tool, but believe it or not, sometimes people still don’t really understand what solution-focused coaching is. And obviously you’re an amazing solution-focused coach.
Barbara La Pointe: So is that a modality that could help someone watching today?
Guide Furlani: Say a little bit more. I want to be certain I understand your question fully and completely.
Barbara La Pointe: What is solution-focused coaching for someone watching? Because we know as coaches that the bar is set pretty low for coaches. But a coach with Erickson, a true coaching experience is very special and very transformational.
Barbara La Pointe: But what is coaching? I thought you might speak to that for someone watching that thinks, “Oh, like anyone can be a coach. A coach is someone that goes through it with you. A coach is a friend. A coach is a family member. A coach is a sports person.” There’s a lot of confusion about solution-focused coaching.
Barbara La Pointe: What is it?
Guide Furlani: Wow. Wonderful question. Solution focus coaching is a methodology where we focus on the wanted. So any time that there is a law in the universe is an unspoken law that today Esther Hicks and the law of attraction guys made a little more available to the human consciousness, the collective conscious.
Guide Furlani: Which is for anything that you don’t want, there is something that you want. Let me put it here. Today I’m noticing that in the screen I am putting everything that is negative on this side, and everything that is light and white side of the force and good on this side. So let me redo it. So and for anything you don’t want, there is something that you direly want.
Guide Furlani: For anything that you want, there is something you don’t want. So it’s a law of contrast. Where is coming from? From the Dao. I’m not kidding. Again, these Easterner guys, right? Come on. Chinese. We’re back there. Come on, Andrew. Come on.
Andrew Folkler: Come on. I can definitely relate to that. I mean, so personal example actually.
Andrew Folkler: When I moved to Singapore when I was about 13 years old, I didn’t warm up well to it. I didn’t wanna be there, and I wanted to go back to the United States. And for the five years that I was there, for most of that time that’s all I wanted. I just wanted to go back. I mean, I had friends and everything.
Andrew Folkler: I enjoyed it, but it was like, “All right, well, I wanna go back home.” And it wasn’t until I was getting myself set up for an engineering scholarship and I had my entire life planned out in this country in Singapore when I finally let go and said, “You know what? I’m probably not gonna be going back.” And months later, I’m back in the United States.
Andrew Folkler: And it’s funny how that works.
Guide Furlani: I love what you said. It’s sometime it is what is the deepest desire? So when you don’t want something bad, this is the not wanted. Okay? Naturally, either you want it or not, and that was the foundation of the book The Secret. I’m not a big Secret touter. I’m not going like, “Oh, you must read The Secret.”
Guide Furlani: No, it was a very commercial book. There is much finer complexity to the law of attraction, much finer. But fundamentally, we are very powerful. We are broadcaster, each one of us, each human. We, all of us, broadcast our own internal chip. I hate to say this word now because it’s becoming very much artificial intelligence, AI, and I honestly, personally don’t want to have anything to do with artificial intelligence because I think that we humans are beyond gifted with intelligence.
Guide Furlani: I don’t need a machine to make me more intelligent. No, thank you. No, thank you. So that said, so my stance is clear just for the truth seeking, truth seek, excuse me. Anytime I don’t want something, I begin to broadcast naturally, instinctually, I want instead that. So the instead is a fundamental approach of solution focused coaching.
Guide Furlani: A good practitioner is able to work both ways, from the wanted to the not wanted when the not wanted is too much ingrained. When the not wanted is too ingrained, that’s where we get into trauma.
Guide Furlani: But so what is this trauma thing? But because trauma... Well, guys, the thing is trauma is way more diffused and present that we could ever imagine. Fundamentally, there is no human without trauma. The level is the difference between how much open this trauma is and can be swept away with, or how much closed, dark, kept in the basement of the house.
Guide Furlani: Look where I’m going. Down there where you say, “No, no, there is none.” Eh, wait. Really? Look at that. Change the perspective. Oops. It’s there. My third mentor, Bernard Hiller, which is a wonderful acting coach, said, “Your past life is always there.” And it’s not positive what I’m saying, but it’s true. I’ve seen many and one people of great success, great fortune, amazing achievement, and even very awakened.
Guide Furlani: Not woke. No, thank you. Awakened, okay? Meaning enlightened and present to their mission. They talk about their purpose, their mission, their vision for life. Visionary. And I see that they have this thing down there frozen. Bernard Hiller told me one day, “Whatever you don’t work with, whatever you don’t solve, it goes in a freezer.
Guide Furlani: It get frozen, and it stays frozen for many years until there is a condition in the atmosphere that allows it to thaw and reopen.” And those are what I call the time bombs. I’ve seen people having time bombs going off and you think, “Oh my God, that person shouldn’t say that. She should have solved that kind of stuff.”
Guide Furlani: She doesn’t. How is that possible? Very simple. Because the father, mother, uncle, priest, teacher, professor, grandma, a great-great-great uncle, I don’t know who, didn’t get solved, and so it thaws. And that day that Bernard told me that, I went like, “Oh, wow, makes sense.” It’s just frozen. Given the right condition, you meet the person, there is a similarity.
Guide Furlani: They say something that that person said, reaction. And you go like, “What? Why that reaction?” So it’s incredible how we operate, and in the meantime it’s absolutely simple. Barbara, I am hoping I am answering your question, but solution focus is a strong attention to what is wanted, supporting the person to then begin speaking and acting toward the not wanted yet.
Guide Furlani: That’s why I am becoming an organic coach, and I am actually crafting this thing and talking about mindset more important than technique because we need to have mindsets fundamentally to use this fully, more than how to do it. Everybody can do a how to do it. But when we have the mindset, we understand what are the laws behind it.
Guide Furlani: The fundamental mindset is that... I don’t want to explain the mindset, this deep philosophy of coaching. I will tell you a metaphor for it. Remember that flowers grows into manure, and remember that diamonds are dirt and hidden in the ground and when you find them, they are not looking like diamond at all.
Guide Furlani: They are a piece of stone that only a keen eye, the diamond finder can tell, “Ooh, that’s a diamond.”
Guide Furlani: So good is always hidden in this. That’s why I’m talking about organic, and that’s why I’m saying that an organic coach keep both the baby and the bath water. Because nature is not just, “Oh, yeah, I have a vision and I want that and I will become so and so.”
Guide Furlani: Dude or gal, what about this? It’s there. So organically, with compassion like Milton did, like Tony does, we need to have the courage to work with this too. And that’s the difference today. I don’t know if you know it, but I parted way with Erickson. I am not anymore part of the Erickson family.
Guide Furlani: And like Carl Gustav Jung parted ways with Freud because Carl said, “Hey, my master, my mentor, I think that there is more.” And that the more becomes non-negotiable. And when things become non-negotiable, you can only follow this. This will always lead you, as Carl Gustav Jung said, lead you through anything.
Guide Furlani: It’s very recent, very fresh. Nobody knows about it. Very recent. But now I am free to create organic solution focused coaching. Myself, me, myself and I.
Barbara La Pointe: So let me invite you to speak about your passion then, which is organic coaching. What’s gonna happen with this newfound freedom when you followed your heart?
Guide Furlani: Well, like everything in the moment it happens. When it happens, you need to stick to your guns, because the path is not delineated yet. I am a clairsentient. I’m not a clairaudient or a clairvoyant. Voyant means sight, audient means listening, and sentient means feeling. I am a clairsentient.
Guide Furlani: I feel things and then they take the form of words. This is pure NLP. I am basically breaking myself down into the pieces that we do work with clients. We need to get to the foundational blocks of the meanings. That’s one of my ways. And being a gut-oriented, my choices come from gut. There is a moment when the higher self cannot, don’t want anymore doing something.
Guide Furlani: Now, the funny thing is because the inner self is down here, let’s imagine... Give me a moment. We were using this image when we spoke for five minutes at the very beginning of the conversation, right? I said, you mentioned that beautiful dream of yours, Andrew, about the ocean. First it was a storm and then it become calm.
Guide Furlani: It became calm. Regardless if it’s stormy or regardless if it’s calm, calm is better, more beautiful, the ocean is the perfect representation of the conscious mind, I put it here, the surface. That virtual millimeter line that you see when you float about with your head, right? And you just float comfortably in the warm water.
Guide Furlani: Doesn’t matter. There are no sharks, just a beautiful ocean. Okay? Sometime... I have fear of sharks. I am a shark addict. I am one of those, like, ugh, what? When it’s deeper than some, I go like, “Okay, yes. Okay, back on the boat.” I’m one of them. Truly, I don’t know what happened to me with sharks, but probably something not fun.
Guide Furlani: Not nice. I will have my coach work on it. He can fix it. So see, we are all in the same boat, guys. There are no people that don’t have a trauma, a phobia. There is... That’s no human. If you are perfect, well then you are Spock. Well, no, Spock, what is called from Star Trek. Great, great acting. I like that character.
Guide Furlani: Spock, right? Your what is Vulcanian. The surface of the ocean is the conscious mind, and then there is all the rest. Meters and meters or feet and feet or feet of depth that you cannot see through because the virtual light of the sun impedes you. You only see the surface. That’s a conscious mind. All the rest is beyond conscious.
Guide Furlani: I don’t dare to call it subconscious like Freud did, because sub means less than, and that big quantity of water underneath knows everything about your past, everything about your present, everything about your future, is omniscient, like God, is very spiritual. Our beyond conscious is our spirituality.
Guide Furlani: There is all the information we need. We just need to be able to tap into it. When we do that, when we support this moment, we do organic work. And we dare to look at what is great and what is not, and we dare to just not being having a naive perception and just wanting to badly, madly, badly and madly go for the solution.
Guide Furlani: Okay, so what you want. Yes, we will get there. We will get there all the time. Almost all the time. And if the client doesn’t want to go there, it’s fine. Wayne Dyer, a beautiful American speaker and psychologist and author, I love him. He’s one of other my mentors. He said, “Infinite patience will produce immediate results.”
Guide Furlani: So infinite patience is fundamental because the Eastern guy say the master appears when the student is ready. I want to paraphrase that. I want to say the solution appears when the client is ready. I will never force you into a yoga position with your leg up just because that’s what everybody does. If you’re not able to go into the yoga position, that’s completely fine.
Guide Furlani: Maybe one day you will go it. And I learned this from the philosophy of aikido. You know why I chose to become an aikido practitioner? Because there was no competition. There was no first, second, and third. Morihei Ueshiba discovered the foundation of life. We don’t have competition in aikido.
Guide Furlani: It’s one of the most successful martial arts in the world. Very spiritual, self-defense. And we hit each other. We hit each other. We do martial arts, but there is no competition. So who said that human need to be competitive? Who said that we need to have a first, a second, and a third? Who said that everybody need to do this in order to be a successful person?
Guide Furlani: It’s a flawed truth, meaning it’s a lie. We are supposed to individuate our life. Not your life, not her life, not his life, not their life, my life. In organic coaching, what is the definition of success? Lead your life the way you want. Not the way your mom wanted, not the way your father wanted.
Guide Furlani: In organic coaching, success is not how much money you have. Success is are you leading and having the life you want.
Andrew Folkler: I had two things I wanted to throw in there real quick. I mean, one, The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba is such a fantastic book, and one of the more revolutionary works that I’ve read.
Andrew Folkler: And so just wanted to throw that out, one, for the audience especially, because it’s just pages of aphorisms that you can take a moment, read them, sit back, meditate on it, think on it and really reflect on how you can incorporate it into your life. Some of them are more profound, some of them are very direct.
Andrew Folkler: It just depends on which one you read. But the question I wanted to pose to you after that though was, so there’s all these parents and all these people going through either these bad divorces or estrangement from their children, and they have all this trauma. They’re all so caught in the moment that they think to themselves they don’t have time to be spiritual.
Andrew Folkler: They don’t have time to do the inner work. They tell themselves that it’s not their fault, it’s somebody else’s fault. Somebody else has to do the work. And even in some cases, some people will say, I don’t know, the depression or the anxiety has become part of their identity. I guess where I’m going with this and what question I wanted to ask was, how does a person know that they are ready for these transformations?
Andrew Folkler: How do they know that they are ready to work through that trauma?
Guide Furlani: I love it. Thank you. Oh my God. Because the point in life is always knowing exactly am I ready for it? And personally, I’m gonna be very vulnerable, huh, I had a feeling of inadequacy until a day a very special acting coach told me, “Your biggest monster is inadequacy.”
Guide Furlani: And I was like, “Ugh, what?” You know, when you have the special effect in movies that you see the background going like, ah, and you go, what? Which is the camera runs against you, but in the meantime they move you away from the background. It’s a beautiful technique, very simple to achieve.
Guide Furlani: And that usually create a sense of huh, right? That’s what I felt on that chair in front of 30 other people. We were studying deep acting. It was incredible. Incredible. Incredible. I have so much to say about acting and how acting can be therapeutic in many ways, but now it won’t be the talk of this time.
Guide Furlani: How do we know we are ready? Having had inadequacy for 45 years of my life, so I solved the inadequacy piece 10 years ago. I am 56. You go like, “What?” Usually a third of people goes like, “Okay, it’s time I get a family.” I did that. I am divorced. At 28, 29, I went like, “Okay, I need to,” you know, yuppies kind of, “I need to make it happen.
Guide Furlani: I need a family. I need to...” I bought a house. Successful. I made successful business. I was a photographer. Yeah, I was nailing it. Three years after my wedding when my marriage went, okay? Big time. And then I ask a very dangerous question to myself. I ask, “Who am I?”
Guide Furlani: Terrible question, because you might find out who you are. Whenever you ask a question, your beyond conscious will always do like the lamp, the Aladdin lamp. Your beyond conscious, if you really ask a question and you are really meaning it, and you by mistake ask, “So, God, who am I? When you do that, it’s gonna happen.
Guide Furlani: Be ready. Brace yourself because my truth came in rocking in through breaking everything down. That’s the power of the Inse. We call it Inse, inner self in English. The self, the big S. It’s amazing power, but it doesn’t do anything until you summon it. We need to summon our gods. That’s the most important act one human can do.
Guide Furlani: When you have lost everything and you are down to the ground, that’s the time to summon it. It doesn’t matter if you summon it with a mantra. Om. It doesn’t matter if you summon it with a prayer. Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli, sia santificato il tuo nome, venga il tuo regno. It doesn’t matter if you say it in English and Italian.
Guide Furlani: Holy father who art in heaven. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you ask a powerful question. There are multiple endless ways to God, and God is always within. It is there from the surface of the ocean to the bottom where there is the sand. It is very deep. That’s your God. That’s your spirituality.
Guide Furlani: It is inside there. You need to summon it. And do you know how I summoned it? I asked... I was a photographer, successful. 14 years of photography. The... Can I say it? Sorry, I’m full of shit. When I say like that, people goes like, “Oh, you’re full of shit.” And I say, “Yes, you’re right. I have an ego,” and I love it.
Guide Furlani: Love your ego. It’s good. It’s part of the bathwater. It’s not true. They tell you, “Oh, it’s my ego talking.” It’s okay because you are both. You are the baby, beautiful baby. Beautiful baby. I remember that TV show Jane the Virgin, where the lady speak with a Ukrainian accent. Beautiful baby, beautiful sister.
Guide Furlani: Okay. Beautiful baby in the bathwater. You’re both. Sorry. We need to accept the paradox. It’s acceptance. That’s beautiful. That’s being human. So I summoned by asking God, “Who am I?” My life was going to pieces. What I believed to have a family is gone. Three years, was gone. Was sad? Of course I was sad. I was did I cry? Of course I cried. I cried my eyes out. I lost 150 friends in one day because I sent a famous martial art master to off. Not my first mentor, not Professor Bensu. That is a man of freedom, a man of truth. I said already in the name of two of my mentors, I need just to mention one, the second one.
Guide Furlani: Another big one, another incredible professor. I will say it. I will name it. I must. I sent another Japanese mukalukalaka wakamazu master of a part of a sect. I said, “Yeah, sure. Goodbye.” I lost 150 friends in one day. Was I alone? Of course I was, but I made a mistake. I asked, “Who the hell am I? Who am I? Am I a photographer?”
Guide Furlani: Am I a son? I’m not an husband anymore. Who am I? Well, the truth came rumbling in few months after. I became an actor. I began study acting. I got in television incredibly soon. I went into psychotherapy. I met my therapist, my second mentor, Professor Rocco Persico, a man of freedom, a man of incredible sight.
Guide Furlani: He is my second mentor. I went into therapy myself, and the answer is still unfolding today. I am anything I could ever imagine to be. I wasn’t speaking your language back then. I was speaking only Italian. Today I speak English. I teach in this stuff. I coach people. No ideas. I became an actor. I had some success.
Guide Furlani: I love it. I am having success in other things. I’m becoming a farmer now, along with coaching. I am having three and a quarter acres. Who are you? Who are you? Ask it and the truth will come hurdling in. And be ready, brace yourself, because sometime it comes in unexpected ways. It’s beautiful. But we need to develop something.
Guide Furlani: We need to develop courage. Then we need to have the integrity to follow the call, the integrity to say, “Your will be done.”
Andrew Folkler: Especially after you ask that question and that realization that starts coming in. People will either say to themselves, that they’re scared of what they might see or they don’t know what to do, or is this the real me? All this doubt that creeps in. So I think you’re right that there’s a lot of courage that needs to follow through.
Andrew Folkler: When you kept saying, “Who am I?” You know, the thing that kept coming to my mind was Jean Valjean, Les Miserables. It’s who am I? It’s that realization that I at least... That the answer is beyond words, like you said. It’s beyond explanation, and it is a journey into the deep.
Guide Furlani: It is a journey into the deep, and I want to warn everybody that is having a faint heart. Courage is something we develop. I was not courageous. I was actually very scared of conflict. I always wanted to avoid conflict. I hated the first, the second, the third. I hated competition. That’s why I began aikido, because I could become someone without having to succeed.
Guide Furlani: I hated to succeed. And this guy like, wow. Well, that’s what you feel when you are inadequate. It’s a silent snake, inadequacy, that have you asking all the time, “Am I good enough?” And the answer is no. Meanwhile, the answer is, yes, you are good enough. You are you. You have a unique freaking gift that only you can find out what it is.
Guide Furlani: You are perfect. As Wayne Dyer said again, I like to quote him as much as I can because he’s... That man was like, thank you, God, for sending someone like him down back again. He used to say, “Repeat this quote to yourself every morning, every time. Write it.” He said, “I did it.” He did what he said to others to do.
Guide Furlani: I did it, of course. I was reading his book, The Power of Intention. Beautiful book. Okay, Italian we do... Ah. Beautiful. Muah. Ah. Buono. Pomodoro. Tomato soup, sauce. It’s like, that quote is like tomato sauce for spaghetti. Okay?
Guide Furlani: The quote says, “You are whole and complete as you were created.” I repeat it. You are whole and complete as you were created. Now, say it in first person. I did. I learned it from his book, and then what made the difference for me, I didn’t just read the book, The Power of Intention, I did every freaking thing he said.
Guide Furlani: I was reading it, I was going out doing it. Either speak, meditate, breathe, jump up and down, didn’t matter. He said, “Say to yourself, ‘I am whole and complete as I was created.’” And then he was continuing, “How does it sound? Say it again.” And I said it again, “I am whole and complete as I was created.” And then he said, “Write it in considerable places.
Guide Furlani: Write it on the wall of your office. Put it as a little paper in your wallet. Write it in the flap of your car.” You know where you have what you call in English, the flapping, the visor that protect you from the sun beaming you, right? There is a pocket there always or a mirror.
Guide Furlani: He said, “Put it there, and once a day, flip it down as you drive the car and read it.” I am whole and complete as I was created. You don’t have an idea of how much that sentence led me out of darkness. We are whole and complete and powerful beyond measure, despite they are trying to make us believe that we are not and there is something in the air that’s gonna kill us.
Guide Furlani: Someone said in medicine... Excuse me, let me say it positive. It’s all about the terroir. It’s all about the land. It’s not about what comes in the land. It’s not about the fact that there is a germ. It is how well your system is able to harness it. It is the same thing that happen in trauma.
Guide Furlani: It is not about that trauma. That trauma happens, you know why? Because it’s life. Trauma happens. It is about the terroir. The French say it beautifully. It’s about the territory. It’s about the terrain. Let me say it even better. It’s about the terrain. Is the terrain accepting that trauma passively, that event passively, or is the terrain able to react?
Guide Furlani: Same thing happens in thinking, happens in psychology, happens in psychiatry, happens in medicine, happens in coaching, happens in NLP. That happen. How we react make all the difference. It’s responsibility. And I can tell you a story, very vulnerable, that I never said to the public before to exemplify that I’m not better than others.
Guide Furlani: I’m doing this job because I am worse than others. It took me 45 years to understand that I was feeling inadequate. It took me 40 years to deal with a traumatic event in my life, and if you are okay, I’m gonna tell you now. It is about my dysfunctional family. Nothing porn, nothing terrible. It can be said.
Guide Furlani: Do we do it?
Barbara La Pointe: Please. Sure.
Barbara La Pointe: Tell us...
Guide Furlani: The first time I said it, I was in front of an acting class, and it’s always a little bit emotional, but I will curb the emotion because that is, I believe, 80% solved.
Guide Furlani: My father and my mother, my mother passed away in 2005 by cancer. I know why. My father did not. Still alive, he’s an artist. Instead of being my father, he wanted to be my friend. Big mistake. It doesn’t work. We need fathers that are fathers, mothers that are mothers, and friends that are friends. Life is simple.
Guide Furlani: We humans, it’s made it complicated, but life is simple. We need a male figure, is the compass. And we need the female figure, is the love and the compassion. We need both, and then we mediate the paradox and we create our own life.
Guide Furlani: So obviously some of this quality of a father were missing, and I was missing it, and I was 15. So already well ahead, right? You go like, “Hey, have your adolescence. Hey.
Guide Furlani: Hey, John, come to play with us outside.
Guide Furlani: Hey, John, let’s go to the discotheque.” And you’re like, “No, no, no, I can’t.” Why? I got to work. I’m serious.
Guide Furlani: No, I don’t have time for that. Why? It’s the right time. Well, let me tell you the story. They were beginning by a long time having all this big discussion, screaming, “No physical violence. No physical violence, only mental violence, psychological violence.” And they were not in agreement on many things in life.
Guide Furlani: And then being the older in my family, three of us. I’m the first male. There is a female in between, Maria, and then there is Ricardo, the youngest. Il Grande. Il Grande, meaning the big one, me. Il Piccolo, the little one. And La Mediana, Maria among us is the one that took the biggest hit psychologically. What happened is that because I was the Grande, the big one, they decided to make me part of their freaking secrets.
Guide Furlani: That wasn’t nice. So they began to use me, as the French says, as a trait d’union. The trait d’union is the linchpin, the little pin where the teeter-totter pivot. So I got to learn about the unpleasantry, non niceties among themselves from one side and from the other. And one day my father and I have built up this new studio at the fourth or fifth floor without elevator.
Guide Furlani: Heavy. Don’t get a studio at the fifth floor without elevator. Look for an elevator. And that morning he’s very sad, and he tell me in his somber voice, “Guido, I need to tell you something.” I said, “Okay, Dad, show me.” “Well, come with me.” And we go up our studio, and we go in the studio, and he goes into the dark room.
Guide Furlani: We were photographers, so he had a dark room where to develop pictures. And he look up, and in the ceiling we had a crisscross systems of binaries and tracks to move photography stuff. And he points with a finger and says, in his somber voice, he says, “Look.” He says, “I wanted to be done with that tonight, last night.
Guide Furlani: Your mom sent me out of the bed and sent me away and I came here and I wanted to be done. And I raise my head and I see a noose, a hook, an electrical cable hooked to the irons in there with the noose.”
Guide Furlani: In that moment, my life changed. It wasn’t a big traumatic thing, but in the moment, all of a sudden I became the father. I was 15, 16. Now, don’t take me on the months and day, I didn’t write it down. But I went, like, white and then look how you become from a child, you become the father. “Dad, please don’t do that.
Guide Furlani: Speak with me. Tell me when you are feeling these things. I mean, come on, it’s our family.” All of a sudden, I had an image. I can tell you the image. I... It wasn’t real, it was a perception of reality. I saw this big boat of this family, that if this man was going to kill himself, who would have protected and tended to the family?
Guide Furlani: How could have we, me, myself and I, my brother and my sister, which I became the father of in that precise moment. Who would have protected, fed? My mom alone could have not. So I became the father at 15, 16. Then I removed it. I never told my mom what I saw. I told her years later when she was on the deathbed.
Guide Furlani: I said, “You know, one day dad called me up in the studio and he showed me the noose.” “Oh, why did you need to tell me?” Because when it happens, we are not ready for the trauma. Nobody by the door told me, “Hey, ps, be strong, man. React. Don’t fall into that.” Nobody behind the door told me, “Hey, it’s a trick. It’s a trick that’s gonna make you the father of this freaking family.
Guide Furlani: Get out of it. You need to becoming actor, you need to become a coach.” No, nobody told me that. I wasn’t ready. So what happened? What do you think I did? When I saw the noose, I was like, . No reaction. I took it in. Bang! Actually, bang.
Guide Furlani: How long it took for me to solve that, to reopen that? Truth, 2008. I went onto a stage. I did a powerful acting work. In acting we don’t dab into things. We don’t nibble it. We fully immerse ourselves. It’s a big job. It’s all emotions. I went on a big stage and I said the story for the first time to the public, July 2008.
Guide Furlani: That event happened probably in March of 1982. It’s a lot of time. That’s why I am a coach today. That’s why I do trauma work. That’s why I work in early family history issues, which is a name given by my beautiful wife. I said, “I don’t know what to call what I do.” She said, “Early family history.” It’s not coming from me.
Guide Furlani: It’s coming from her. She’s around there, having completed a beautiful class of coaching. That’s why I am who I am. So can I say that’s terrible what happened to me? Yes, I can, but I also can say it’s great because I learned what does it mean to have something that you don’t know how to deal with, that for 20 years made me a father no, we are not supposed to be father at 15. We are not supposed to be anything that we are at eight, seven, six 11, 12, 20, every age need to be respected, cherished, and having his own thing. We need to be free. That’s why I do what I do. I hope it’s... I don’t know. So I’m not the one that tell you, “Hey, guy, I’m perfect.
Guide Furlani: I nail it all.” No, I come from that. I come from dysfunction.
Barbara La Pointe: But you’ve helped us to realize all the gifts wrapped up in dysfunction and trauma and thank you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Andrew Folkler: Definitely. Thank you.
Guide Furlani: When I then entertain more relationship with my first mentor, Professor Francesco Benzo, I began to understand part of it.
Guide Furlani: And then one day I realized that in that manure, in that raw diamond, there was the gift. And that day I was probably 20, I said, “One day I will leverage this dysfunctionality to help others to get out of it quickly, faster.” We are free. You are beautiful. We all have a gift. Picasso said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift.
Guide Furlani: The purpose is to give it away.”
Barbara La Pointe: That’s beautiful. Thank you for that. That’s a beautiful place to close today, and we’d love to have you on in the future again because there’s a lot we didn’t touch on today, and I’m sure you have a lot more wisdom and love and freedom to share with us. So thank you again for today.
Guide Furlani: Barbara, my pleasure. You are two incredible humans, and we never related professionally or friendly. I don’t know what to call this conversation today. It’s a mix of it. Humanity is... need to... For me to work, humanity need to be all wrapped around. Nothing... I don’t have a corporate bone in my whole body.
Guide Furlani: It’s all for humans. I am delighted. I hope that the moment when I went too philosophical and I began to talk about the mindset and the philosophy of coaching and the paradox are still intelligible, not because they are difficult concept, because I hope that I had enough clarity and sequential lining in my speech.
Guide Furlani: It’s the first time I do it, so forgive me if certain moment you lost me, guys, or it’s was confusing. It is all coming from philosophy, and the Greek had it right. We need to understand the science of life.
Guide Furlani: We need to understand the science of life. Philosophy is a beautiful Greek understanding.
Guide Furlani: We need to be philosopher again.
Andrew Folkler: I wholeheartedly agree. All right. Well, what would be the best way for listeners to reach out to you if they wanted to learn more about your practice or engage you for coaching or anything like that?
Guide Furlani: Absolutely. Being the terrible marketer that I am, meaning I love my ideas and I love to help and I love to create and vision and philosophy and create mindsets because coaching, it’s easy.
Guide Furlani: Coaching, it’s easy. To coach people, it’s easy. My main activity is coaching people in trauma, PTSD, or early family history. I love that. It’s funny because when I began, I said, “No, I want to coach executives and corporate. I want to coach all the guy that speak with a big.
Guide Furlani: “No, I want to coach only people with 500,” whatever. I could care less. I want to coach humans that need to become who they want to become and just be who they are, whole and complete as they were created. There is nothing to be added. The receipt... Excuse me, the recipe. My ESL come through. And I don’t know why I mix up receipt and recipe.
Guide Furlani: No idea. It keep happening. I will die with mixing receipt and recipe. The recipe is there already, perfect. It just need to be seen.
Guide Furlani: You just need to be seen.
Barbara La Pointe: So Guide, for someone who wanted to become whole, complete, and be seen, how could they reach you for coaching today?
Guide Furlani: I know that in my philosophical diversion, I completely eluded the question of Andrew, and Andrew was going like, “Come on, tell me how.”
Guide Furlani: They can reach me at guide@whiteeaglecoaching, which is a powerful symbol, which I didn’t even know it was a powerful native spirit of North America when it came to me as a vision. Like everything in my life, it’s always coming from a vision. guide@whiteeaglecoaching.com. I promise soon there will be a website on, but they can also look me up on LinkedIn at Guide Furlani, PCC, MNLP, Wakamazu, bippity, bloppity, wamba, wamba, all the things attached after my name.
Guide Furlani: But again, for everybody, beware that sometime titles are just what they are, titles. The difference is how humans operate with knowledge from the heart and what choice they make when they wake up. Will I work for the white side of the force, or will I work for the dark side? They both exist. So reach me there.
Guide Furlani: That’s it. I think I don’t have any other contact. Then when you reach me there, I can give you my telephone number. Or my Zoom account. Oh, important. I am not on Facebook anymore. I finally closed the account down, and the reason fundamentally was that Facebook is going into a values direction that is not more my value.
Guide Furlani: I don’t censor anybody. Censoring in my world is prohibited. If you censor someone, I censor you. So I left Facebook. I am on Telegram, on Gab, on Parler. Still on LinkedIn because it’s professional, and there is where I have all my professional conversations and I help others. So LinkedIn is a very good platform to meet me.
Guide Furlani: And the same wise, I closed WhatsApp and Instagram and a bunch of other censoring dudes. Goodbye censoring.
Andrew Folkler: This was a very, very powerful conversation that we had, so thank you again. Thank you. And to everyone else, I hope that they got at least... They were able to follow the philosophy. I know I was because like we said earlier in the beginning, I guess I am following a very similar journey to that you have kind of been walking.
Andrew Folkler: And the philosophy that I’ve been learning and questioning and wanting to know more about, you spoke at great length with great fluency, so thank you again.
Guide Furlani: Thank you, Andrew. We are in the final few seconds. Feel free if anything I said sounds caustic, Latin, sounds unintelligible or too convoluted and in the ending I’m not driving home the point, the salient, salience is very important, the salient point, the need to be understood or better expressed, feel free to connect with me again.
Guide Furlani: We can have as many conversation as we want. One quality of mine is generosity. I am not jealous of what I am creating. We don’t have time for jealousy. We don’t have time for ownership. We have a short amount of time to wake up as many consciousnesses as we can. So I am happy to share every direction, anything that could go like, “Ah, I’m not sure I got it.”
Guide Furlani: I am happy to explain it until we get it.
Andrew Folkler: Thank you.
Andrew Folkler: All right, everybody. That is all we have time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or the various podcasting streams.
Andrew Folkler: Once again, we have a downloadable document below. It’s gonna be on Barbara’s website. It summarizes everything we’ve talked about and gives you a chance to work through it and learn more about trauma, NLP, and how to use NLP to work through that trauma. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: BarbaraLaPointe.com or barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Barbara La Pointe: Or LinkedIn.
Andrew Folkler: And you can find me on LinkedIn as well, and you can... or you can just email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.