You may have heard it said, the longest journey a person must take is the eighteen inches from the head to the heart. It’s as if we can grasp an idea rationally, conceptually and yet still not allow it to touch us, to move us, to motivate us into action. What is this journey from passive assent to active commitment? What does it take to engender and sustain genuine engagement?
What could it entail, look and feel like in practice?
I did some work with a leadership team recently. In conversation beforehand, it was clear they believed that certain behaviour changes would enhance their effectiveness. They were convinced in principle about this but hadn’t yet tried it. At this stage, it felt like a proposition, a possibility. It was still at the head level, a compelling idea that made good sense rationally. We decided to experiment to see what would happen experientially.
The team chose three principles to focus on and practice. ‘Let’s be aware of space and pace (ensuring the right time and speed for each topic); rationality and intuition (being sensitive to analysis and feeling or discernment); speaking and listening (saying honestly what we are think and feel and tuning in to hear each other).’ We invited each other to hold up a green card each time we saw these principles being modelled.
It felt a bit clunky at first but the team members gave it a go and the effect was amazing. The conversation felt focused, deep and purposeful. The quality of contact between participants was enhanced and the work became more inspiring and effective. We paused to reflect on how well the team was modelling these principles at the end of each meeting and, over a short space of time, the impact was transformational.
I facilitated another group recently on solutions-focused brief coaching. It was a 90-minute workshop, a new event designed to inspire and equip leaders with a fresh approach to relationships. I wanted participants to leave with an experience of the difference this approach could make, to feel the positive impact rather than simply to understand the principles and concept. The
participants were enthusiastic and gave it a go.
We opened the workshop by inviting each person to share a current issue with the person beside them. The other person’s role was simply to help them think it through. The conversation had a 7 minute time limit, at the end of which they would reverse roles and repeat. We ended that piece by asking participants to give and receive feedback on how they had experienced the conversation, what had helped etc.
I then introduced the core principles and sample techniques of solutions-focused coaching, working interactively with the group to flesh them out. We looked at contracting, solutions-focused vs problem-solving questions and moving towards action and commitment. The group grasped the principles but I
wanted to progress the workshop from idea to experience, from conceptual
understanding to compelling determination to follow it though.
So I invited the group to run a second 7 minute conversation with the person beside them, this time consciously practising this new approach. Again, after 7 minutes they reversed roles and repeated, followed by giving and receiving feedback. The shift in experience was extraordinary. The participants looked surprised and pleased at such a marked shift in their own skill and the positive impact on their partners.
The pivotal moment in each of these examples, in the team meeting and the coaching workshop, was the shift from rational awareness through physical/emotional experience to genuine conviction. Conviction based on
experience can have a remarkable and truly transformational effect. It has the
potential to lead forward from belief-in-principle to positive engagement, sustainable effort and profound change.
Donald Winnicott had a theory which goes something like this. When a baby is born, it’s unable to distinguish its own self from its environment. It identifies its own existence inextricably with the existence of its primary caregiver, most often its mother. Over time, as the child develops a clearer and distinctive sense of self, it naturally grows in independence. As the child makes this transition, it typically latches onto an object (often something like a toy or a blanket) which provides an interim sense of relational presence, security and continuity, including when the caregiver is absent.
Winnicott referred to such objects as ‘transitional objects’, that is, objects that enable the child’s healthy psychological transition from merged identity to separate identity. According to this theory, the child invests its security in the object, identifies closely with it thereby it serves as a defence against anxiety. Because the child hasn’t yet developed a full and secure sense of self-identity, if the transitional object is removed, changed or appears to be threatened (e.g. if the caregiver takes the toy away to wash it) during this phase, the child can feel as if its own security is threatened.
Over time, however, most children learn to let go of the transitional object without feeling a sense of anxiety or loss. It’s as if the object has functioned as a kind of psychological bridge for the child during the transition process and, once crossed, the child no longer needs it. The question occurs of what happens for a child if the transitional experience is absent, inconsistent or disrupted. How does this influence the child’s sense of self and security in the world and in future relationships? Could the child-as-adult subconsciously grasp at other objects to enable the still unfulfilled transition?
It’s difficult, of course, to know with any degree of clarity and certainty how a baby actually experiences itself, its environment and its relationship to it. Theories such as Winnicott’s above serve as a working hypothesis. There are resonances with how adults respond to change, however, that I find fascinating and compelling. I’ve observed intriguing examples of this transitional principle manifest itself in practice. In one such case, an organisation I worked with as consultant was facing considerable change and its members were facing an uncertain future.
In the midst of these changes, one of the members decided to remove a wooden lectern from the podium from which the leader normally spoke. To his great surprise, this simple action almost provoked rebellion. It’s as if the lectern had been imbued with special symbolic significance, a transitional object that provided members with a sense of continuity with the past and thereby security in the present in the midst of considerable anxiety. Psychodynamically, the uncertainty of the current transition may have reverberated subconsciously with earlier transitions in childhood.
In a similar vein, William Bridges wrote a now famous book, Managing Transitions that explores how people in organisations deal with shifting between realities during times of organisational change. He speaks in particular of how to lead people though the interim phase, the ‘neutral zone’ where the past is left behind but the future is not yet reached. Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes on similar lines in her article, Managing the Human Side of Change on how to avoid inadvertently evoking psychodynamic defensive routines. Interestingly, Bridges draws on parallels from Exodus in the Bible.
The biblical narrative posits a radically theocentric worldview in which God takes his people on a journey, a ‘transition’, from places of relative security through wilderness and insecurity towards a promised future. The Israelites and later Christians are called upon to hold onto God, to trust him above all else. This demands profound and at times nail-biting, nerve-stretching faith in the midst of all kinds of confusing and challenging circumstances. It's a tough call to step from known into unknown, from safety into risk. In light of Winnicott’s theory, I find this spiritual metaphysic curious and intriguing.
It depicts life and human history as a macro transition process, mirrored like fractals in our earliest childhood and in different aspects of personal and social experience. We encounter, invest in and draw from ‘transitional objects’ on route, those critical relationships, experiences and resources that hold the potential to define, make sense of and fulfil our deepest identity and purpose. Some believe that faith in God is a projection of psychological need onto an imaginary being. Could it be possible, however, that God hardwired this pattern for transition into our psychological DNA?
I was once invited by a coaching supervisor to depict a live piece of work with a client. I focused on a forthcoming assignment in Asia and drew a diagram representing the different people involved, the relationships between them and the explicit and implicit agendas. I drew a solid line between myself and the key client representing ‘strategy’ (explicit agenda) and a dotted line representing my underlying expertise in ‘psychological dynamics’ (implicit agenda).
She challenged me to re-draw my dotted line as a solid line, to do it and not simply to imagine how I might feel if I was to do it. This proved to be a profound and pivotal moment for me in grasping Gestalt. As I picked up the pen and drew the line, I felt a sudden, powerful and unexpected surge of confidence arise within me. It convinced me to approach the contract with the client in more confident, proactive mode and to raise my implicit value to the explicit level.
In a later coaching session, I worked with a client who explained she felt stressed working with a particular colleague on a board of trustees. I noticed how physically animated she was as she spoke and so I suggested we might explore the issue using a physical experiment, drawing on Gestalt. She was keen to try it out so I invited her to recreate the board room where we were, to sit me where her colleague sits and to brief me on how he behaves.
She left the room, re-entered and immediately stiffened and looked tense. I reflected this back, along with how tense I now felt as she approached me in role. In order to create and evoke a contrasting experience, I invited her to practice physical loosening before entering the room. She discovered a dance-like movement that helped her relax, increased her confidence and provided an alternative entry style. The difference and impact was transformational.
Something I've noticed in my coaching practice has been a tendency to default to rational analysis as my dominant style. It’s about reflective thinking. I once spoke with a coaching colleague about some tensions I was experiencing vis a vis a forthcoming trip to Myanmar, about concerns I had about placing a national colleague there at risk. I commented that I was struggling, ‘to get my head around it’ and, apparently, gestured towards my head.
As I continued to talk about it, this colleague observed that I was now gesturing towards my heart. I wasn’t aware of doing this at the time. He challenged me: “You describe this as something you need to get your head around whereas it actually touches on emotional concerns and deeply held values. It’s something you need to get your heart around.” I suddenly became aware of how I was rationalising an emotional struggle and felt confused about why I might do this.
At a later coaching workshop, I was invited to draw a systemic view of an issue I was dealing with at work. I drew the system, using circles to depict the different parties involved. My coaching partner drew my attention to this and challenged me: “I wonder how it might be if you were to draw people instead of circles. It’s as if you are depicting the scenario in rational conceptual terms rather than expressing and exploring it as a human emotional experience.”
I want to continue to learn how to be more aware of what I am feeling in the moment in order to make greater use of self, of counter-transference. My dominant modality is thinking, hence my instinctive focus on rationality, even if I’m aware of the client’s emotional state when I choose to focus on it. I’m often only aware of what I was feeling during the session when I reflect back on it afterwards. It can feel like an opportunity lost.
Heidegger's philosophy of experience strikes a chord for me. The sense of feeling ‘called’ in the moment to act or respond in a certain way expresses well what I often experience in my coaching practice. At times, I feel an almost irresistible desire and energy to act in certain way and moment. It feels intuitive, a knowing-beyond-knowing, a calling forth from beyond myself.
I believe that such insights often emerge phenomenologically from tacit knowledge, subconscious or bodily knowledge gained through years of life and work experience, a rationally unprocessed form of knowledge that emerges as intuition. I’m interested in how this correlates with my Christian beliefs about the activity of God’s Spirit and, in particular, spiritual discernment.
My interpretation of my experience, the meaning I attribute to it, is that God sometimes reveals insight that feels intuitive and prompts action in the moment that can prove profoundly transformational. It’s not something I can make happen. It’s a deeply mysterious belief and conviction and, when I experience it personally, a purely psychological explanation feels inadequate.
A challenge in coaching is how to navigate 'spiritual' conversations about existence, identity and meaning without taking clients into places they don’t want to go. It's something about acting ethically and authentically, contracting and negotiating the depth and scope of the coaching agenda openly without imposing or manipulating a client to accept my own metaphysical beliefs.
Heidegger's philosophy also resonates with social constructionism and, in particular, the relationship between language and meaning. After one coaching session, my supervisor observed how often I reflected back to the client specific words they had used, prompting further exploration to uncover the meaning such words held for the client and her own cultural environment.
During a subsequent coaching training programme, one of the participants commented to me in private how angry and frustrated she felt that some people in the group were bringing high levels of emotional content into the room, using the course for therapeutic purposes, and how inappropriate she felt this was. “This isn’t coaching!”, she complained.
I responded that different people in the group seemed to have positioned themselves differently along a consultant-coach-therapist continuum. I felt an underlying desire to persuade her to acknowledge her own subjectivity; e.g. to reframe, “This isn’t coaching” to, “That isn’t how I think of coaching” or, “That isn’t where I would draw the boundaries between coaching and therapy.”
In doing so, I was seeking to challenge and convince her to share my own constructionist outlook. It made me wonder how far my coaching practice is influenced by a desire to persuade people that a constructionist outlook is a more ‘true’ or honest way of perceiving and articulating their experience, rather than simply enabling them to explore within their own frame of reference.
The important issue then is how to bring challenge of potential benefit to the client in what Transactional Analysis describes as Adult-Adult rather than Parent-Child mode. In order to avoid hidden agendas, I need to check I am clear about my own intentions beforehand and pose my insights or perspectives along the lines of, “This is how I see it...how do you see it?” as an invitation to explore.
Strategic thinking is about keeping the big picture in view. It’s often about asking the right questions, questions that frame or reframe an issue and place it in a broader perspective. It’s about stepping back, raising awareness, challenging assumptions, discerning what’s most important. This demands listening to God, our environment, ourselves and each other.
In order to do this well, we need to develop an ability to step back from immediate detail, plans and activity. Imagine yourself with a camera. It’s about zooming out to see the wider landscape, the ‘what else’ that can go unnoticed. It’s often the bigger frame that makes sense of what we’re seeing when we zoom in. It provides context, a basis for meaning-making.
The value of stepping back mentally, metaphorically zooming out in this way, is that we can re-evaluate our priorities, our direction, what we’re spending time and resources on, how we’re approaching things, whether we’re focusing on the right things, whether we’re allowing ourselves to become distracted by things that are not adding optimum value.
One way to develop our strategic thinking ability is to jot down sample questions that can help draw the big picture into view. ‘What do our customers or beneficiaries value most?’, ‘What are our competitors planning and doing?’, ‘What are the major forces driving change in our environment or sector?’, ‘What challenges and opportunities are emerging over the horizon?’
Be open and curious. ‘What would a great outcome look and feel like for our different stakeholders?’, ‘What do we do best?’, ‘What do we feel called to do?’, ‘Who are our potential allies?’, ‘What assumptions are we making?’, ‘What are we avoiding?’, ‘How are we constraining ourselves?’, ‘What might someone else see that we’re not seeing?’
Another way is to start with a day to day issue, perhaps something you’re working on at the moment. At an operational level, the key concern is how to do it well to achieve the desired results. It’s as if the frame has already been set. ‘This is what I need to do. I will spend my time, effort and resources on working out how best to achieve it, then do it.’
Now step back from the same issue a little and ask yourself or invite someone else to ask you some wider tactical questions. ‘What is it that makes this task so important?’, ‘What other ways could I achieve the same, or even better result?’, ‘How does what I’m doing dovetail with related tasks that others are doing?’, ‘How well does this serve our overall team goals?’
Take successive steps back until the questions you are asking draw the wider external environment and future considerations into account (as above). Now you are likely to be approaching a strategic level. The further you step back, the more research it is likely to entail. It’s about moving outwards from your normal frame of reference to consider wider issues that may prove pivotal.
What all these questions do so far is to develop an awareness of ‘what else is in the picture that we should take account of in our key decisions?’ In other words, they focus on the ‘what’. The next stage involves discernment, or the ‘so what’. What does all you’ve been thinking about, looking at, exploring and researching point towards that could be significant?
Facing multiple issues, knowns and unknowns, clarity and ambiguity, can feel bewildering. In light of this, moving forward may best involve working with others, drawing on shared thinking, experience, intuition, listening and prayer. ‘What are we hearing?’, ‘What should we pay attention to and what can we safely ignore?’
The final phase, the ‘now what’, involves making strategic decisions. These are the fundamental decisions that will form the basis of subsequent strategising and planning. The best decisions provide focus and clarity. ‘This is how the strategy will achieve our vision’, ‘This is what we will do and not do’, ‘This is how we will resource the organisation to achieve it.’
The process as a whole is about learning to plan with our eyes open. It’s about seeking to be open, exercising wise judgement and making sound decisions. In light of the fluid, rapidly changing and often unpredictable environments that many organisations are facing these days, strategic review and re-focus is now more often an on-going than periodic venture.
The can hit the ground with a clanking sound. It felt empty, painful somehow. The young woman had been sitting in her car, gazing across the countryside in the warm sunshine. She drank the drink then tossed the can through the open window. It looked wrong on the grass, an intrusion, out of place. It felt symbolic, enigmatic. The human paradox, our ability to love and enjoy nature and carelessly, thoughtlessly, to destroy it. It was selfism, nihilism, abandonment of compassion and principle.
Should I confront her, should I complain and chastise her? I felt angry, frustrated, a momentary sense of despair. Hold back, best not to speak, best to walk on. Pass by on the other side of the road. The girl looked at me and grinned, a sarcastic smile, a challenging look. I felt conflicted, annoyed but then convicted too. How quick I was to judge her. How fast I was to feel self righteous. The can felt like biblical 'sin', a scar on the landscape, and I felt its dark parallel, a cynical dynamic, tightening its grip within me too.
I became uncomfortably aware of how easily I react to things in others that I disown in myself. It's what Jesus exposed as psychodynamic projection with spiritual roots. As I walked on, I experienced a mysterious intuition, a flash of revelation in the midst of anti-revelation. It was as if God had emerged suddenly and unexpectedly as now-here in the apparent no-where. It took me by surpise as the spotlight turned from the girl to me. God holds the mirror in love and truth and now it's me he is inviting to change.
I was interviewed recently by someone doing research into coaching practice in different organisations. One of the questions she posed was, 'what makes coaching successful in your organisation?' It was a good question and so I thought I’d share some reflections here. It would be natural to assume that success depends primarily on the quality of coaches or coaching provided. After all, poor quality coaching is unlikely to have the same positive impact as high quality coaching. Assuming that to be the case, what else makes the difference?
I will approach this question from a number of angles. Firstly, why is the person undertaking coaching doing it? You can easily imagine that if a person enters a coaching relationship willingly, the outcome is likely to be different to that if a person feels forced to do it. Some organisations use coaching as a remedial intervention. People are sent for coaching if they are underperforming. Others use it as a perk or developmental intervention for high flyers or top talent. The former may approach coaching reluctantly, the latter with enthusiasm.
Secondly, what does a person aim to gain through coaching? Are his or her expectations realistic? Is coaching the best mechanism or approach, depending on what the person is hoping to develop or achieve? Coaching can make a real difference, but it isn’t a silver bullet. I often hear of people seeking coaching to develop their professional or technical expertise. Whilst coaching can certainly be used to develop professional insight and capability, technical knowledge and expertise may be better addressed through training or mentoring.
Thirdly, is there a good fit between coach and the person seeking coaching? This could range from interpersonal chemistry to coaching expertise and approach. Some coaches focus on how to navigate business challenges, others are more psychologically orientated. I advise people to think first what they hope to achieve through coaching, what they hope to be different then to explain their provisional goals and to ask the coach, ‘how might you approach that with me?’ The response will help determine whether it’s the right choice.
Fourthly, does a person know how to get the best from coaching? If he or she hasn’t worked with a coach before, what help may he or she need in managing the relationship? It’s about learning to act intentionally and proactively as a coaching client. I sometimes meet people who have felt frustrated with their coach. On further exploration, they have approached the coach in passive mode, waiting for the coach to do something magic. The trick is how to work with the coach, to co-create the agenda and provide constructive feedback.
Fifthly, how well does coaching fit with the person’s culture or organisational culture? Does the person's environment support and encourage the posing of searching questions, even if they challenge established norms or perceived authority? I have found this particularly challenging in places where people defer to the status quo out of cultural respect or fear. In such environments, if a coach asks a person, ‘what do you think?’, the person may feel confused (‘why, don’t you know the answer?’) or threatened (‘are you trying to catch me out?’).
Finally, how well does the person apply what they are learning through coaching? Does he or she allow space and time following coaching to allow deep insights to surface? Does he or she rush back into normal activities and habitual patterns of behaviour so that learning is quickly lost? The greatest value from coaching often emerges afterwards when the person steps back from the coaching experience itself (a) to reflectively journal his or her learning and (b) to experiment with new ideas and approaches to see what happens as a result.
At some level, the Haiti earthquake of 2010 shook all of us. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the quake caused 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings to collapse or suffer damage. 316,000 people died, 300,000 were injured and another 1,000,000 were left homeless. It was an urban natural disaster of epic proportions. Traumatic media images showed people struggling to escape and rescue others from the ruins. Relief agencies reported severe logistical problems with providing aid because transport and communications infrastructure had been destroyed.
As hours and days progressed, people started to ask questions. Why had the earthquake been so devastating? Would it have had the same effect in richer countries where buildings are designed and constructed to withstand such
impacts? What were the underlying causes? It transpired that Haiti had no
government-regulated building codes. Houses were built wherever they could fit, often on steep mountain slopes with insufficient foundations. Limited access to clean water and proper sanitation exacerbated risk of disease in the aftermath of the quake.
This catastrophe illustrated all too painfully a simple predictive equation used by relief agencies throughout the world: hazard + vulnerability = disaster risk. A powerful earthquake (hazard) hits a densely populated urban area with poor housing (vulnerability) and disaster results. A disaster reveals underlying vulnerability to potential and actual hazards. The global financial crisis during the same period as the Haiti earthquake revealed serious flaws in the global banking system, exposing economic vulnerability at local, national and international levels.
Against this backdrop, talk of building resilience, an ability to cope or even thrive in the face of considerable stresses and demands, has understandably become more urgent and commonplace in governmental, non-governmental and commercial institutions. Models of proactive resilience building strategies used in the relief and development sector include disaster risk reduction (identifying and addressing underlying causes) and disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery). They have operational parallels in other sectors too.
A friend put it this way. A man lives under a cliff and a rock is about to fall on him. If you can, address whatever is causing the rock to become unstable. If you can’t, do what you can to remove or shore up the rock to prevent it falling. If you can’t, encourage and enable the man to move away from the cliff face. If you can’t, provide him with a helmet and body armour to protect him when the rock falls. If you can’t, have a medical emergency team on hand to increase his chances of survival when it does happen. Once you have done all that, prepare the man for rehabilitation.
Organisations have responded to the resilience challenge in a whole host of ways including continuous environmental scanning, diversifying fundraising or investment portfolios, ensuring clearer brand differentiation, exploring new global markets, forging strategic alliances, investing in innovation, improving customer experience and retention, introducing flexible employment policies and practices, investing in talent management and engagement, ensuring transparent ethical practice. All these tactics aim to reduce and mitigate external and internal risks.
This parallels similar developments in counselling and coaching arenas where the agenda has shifted from reactive or remedial stress or crisis management to a more proactive and developmental focus. People professionals from disciplines ranging from therapy to human resources recognise that people
and people systems (e.g. families, teams, communities, organisations) are facing unprecedented challenges and need to learn and develop fresh insights, skills, relationships and resources to face them effectively and prevail.
In the UK, cognitive behavioural psychology-based approaches have become increasingly popular, helping people to think differently in order to reduce anxiety and stress and to see opportunities in the midst of all kinds of potentially bewildering challenges and changes. The principle works something like this. If I can learn to perceive a situation differently, to see it through fresh eyes, I will feel differently about it and respond or behave differently towards it. This approach can achieve dramatic and quick results and achieve a greater sense of wellbeing.
Other approaches based on psychotherapy, person-centred or human givens psychology expose and heal internal trauma or emotional struggle. If I can heal the historical pain that experiences may trigger or tap into, I can face new experiences afresh and with greater personal resilience. Psychological coaching has grown in popularity alongside traditional business or performance coaching, reflecting a recognition that how well a person deals with a situation depends as much on the person’s awareness and resilience as on the demands of the situation itself.
Recent psychological innovations include acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) which is concerned less with challenging and changing thoughts about situations than its cognitive behavioural counterpart and more with learning mindfulness. The principle involves growing in awareness, noticing and observing one’s experience rather than struggling with or trying to change it, and learning to rest in a deeper sense of transcendent self. It reframes and embraces pain and difficulty as part of the ebb and flow of life rather than as a dysfunctional problem to be challenged, resisted or resolved.
There are parallels in Buddhism and in Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought. The latter view human experience in the context of a theology of God. The Bible portrays God as actively involved in the world and invokes trust in him as a way of approaching and dealing with experience, e.g. ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don’t rely on your own understanding…’ (Proverbs 3:5); ‘I [God] will never leave you nor forsake you’ (Hebrews 13:5). The Qur‘an, similarly: ‘Nothing can befall us except that which God has ordained…the faithful should put their trust in him.’ (Sura 9:51).
Judeo-Christian theology points far beyond simple rational assent and commitment to an alternative metaphysical social construct and lifestyle. It invites an openness to a spiritual dimension, a willingness to enter into a Supernatural relationship, an ability to draw on a transcendent experience that can result in inner strength, peace and growth in the face of adversity. It also advocates attitudes and behavioural qualities that build resilience at interpersonal and macro-systemic levels, e.g. love, integrity, equality, faithfulness, forgiveness, peace, celebration and hope.
These and similar qualities were found to be highly significant in enabling people and communities to survive during and recover following some of humanity’s worst recent disasters including the Nazi Holocaust, the Asia Tsunami, the Haiti earthquake. In light of this, Western psychosocial approaches and interventions aimed at providing post-traumatic support, based largely on secular assumptions and methodologies, are beginning to revisit the spirituality question. There may in fact be more to faith, spiritual reality and experience than a traditional secular functional outlook has presupposed.
This kind of phenomenology enables us to confront crisis and disaster at deep human-existential levels. A crisis challenges our assumptions, reveals our vulnerabilities, evokes our defences, shifts our perspectives, tests our resilience. In Western societies, our culture, wealth and technology have enabled us to insulate ourselves from some of life’s more difficult trials. Since resilience is built through facing challenge with support, some psychologists now believe this external protection is, paradoxically, reducing our inner psychological resilience. Is it time to think again?
I was leading a development seminar for leaders this week, introducing various schools of psychology and their application to coaching thinking and practice, when a colleague challenged me. ‘How does Christian spirituality fit with the models you are presenting?’ It was a great question. How to develop an effective, integrative and authentic coaching approach that is consistent with Christian beliefs and values and, at the same time, draws on the best of psychological theory and coaching practice. Let me call this ‘pastoral coaching’.
The reflective practice model I’ve developed in coaching over the years could be depicted as three interlocking circles: (a) theology and spirituality, (b) theory and research, (c) experience and practice. The coach enables the client to explore and respond to these domains. The theological dimension could be conceived of as what the client and others believe about God and, thereby, as an existential metaphysic, what he, she or they believe about everything else. Spirituality could be conceived as living out personal and shared beliefs.
The theory dimension is concerned with principles or conclusions drawn from experimentation, observation and critical reflection in relevant fields of thinking and practice. Research is concerned with on-going exploration, experimentation, analysis and learning. Experience is what happens when the client acts in the world. This could be conceived of in phenomenological or rational-scientific terms. Practice is about the client enacting decisions about behaviour, action and engagement in real-life relationships and situations.
I was influenced some years ago by Foskett & Lyall (Helping the Helpers, 1988) who wrote an excellent book on developing supervision in the pastoral care arena. Foskett was a psychotherapist, Lyall a university lecturer in practical theology. They proposed that Christian development tends to deal with issues from one of two perspectives: ‘applied theology’ which entails application of Biblical principles to practice or ‘theological reflection’which entails critical reflection on Biblical material in light of experience.
Green in Let's do Theology (1990) illustrates the former as the ‘Swedish Method’ of engaging with biblical material. It entails posing a number of questions, e.g.
what things in the passage illuminate or inspire you; what things don’t you
understand; what things in the passage surprise you; what things to you agree
with and approve of; what are you turned off by, reject or question; can you
name something like it from elsewhere in the Bible; can you name something like it from your own life and experience; what are you now prompted to do?
In contrast, Lyall in Pastoral Action and Theological Reflection (Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care, 2000) illustrates the latter approach through a case study. In effect, he proposes starting with a real-life experience and posing questions to it, e.g. what are the components of the situation; who is involved; what policies or protocols applied; what ethical issues did it raise; how did the past influence the present; what did decisions taken reveal about wider social or systemic values and decisions; where were the signs of God’s grace?
The first approach starts with God and works out towards reflection and application; the second starts out with experience and works out towards reflection and God.
Green’s book expands the theological reflection method by drawing on Kolb’s learning cycle (1984) which combines experience, perception and reflection and cognition and behaviour, and applies it to pastoral contexts. In a later text, Graham, Walton & Ward published a new book (Theological Reflection, 2005) that explored a range of theological reflection methods including theology-in-action or praxis which insists that ‘proper theological reflection cannot be formed independently of practical engagement.’
It’s this praxis model that I find most compelling. Much of the Bible itself depicts God engaging actively with people and communities in the midst of the clarity, confusion, joy and struggle of normal life. If theology as an enterprise is about knowing God and not simply knowing about him, it’s difficult to see how it can be properly developed in the abstract or in an isolated classroom environment. The challenge is how to understand and relate to God authentically without superimposing our own assumptions onto him.
This is where the coaching task and agenda become significant. How to enable a person or team to make sense of complex, ambiguous experience in order to act with personal and professional integrity and to influence positive change. This is particularly important for leaders of organisations operating in fast-moving fluid environments. It’s easy to feel confused or paralysed, to lose
one’s nerve, to feel draw into regressive behaviours or to sacrifice integrity
for short-term expediency. Holistic coaching can play a role in helping leaders
navigate turbulence and stay well.
So how does this work in practice? I may start with inviting a Christian client to share an issue. It could be an issue from the Bible or an issue from experience. I may pose questions for reflection, e.g. of all the issues we could have spoken about, what is it about this issue that feels pressing or significant for you at the moment (i.e. why this, why now); how are you feeling now as you talk about it; what would you like to move towards as a result of this conversation; what questions or issues is it raising for you; what role would you like me to play?
As the conversation progresses, I may pose more questions, moving around the theology and spirituality, theory and research and experience and practice model as a conceptual backdrop. Weeson in his article, Theological Reflection on Practice (The Foundations of Pastoral Studies & Practical Theology, 1986) offers a number of particularly helpful pointers for the theology and spirituality dimension that draw on his experience or mentoring students. Since this dimension is the main focus of this blog, I will quote him fully here:
"Where is God's activity to be found in the situation we are exploring? Is the client's understanding of God limited so that he or she looks for His activity only in the (say) institutional framework or charismatic (personal) experience? What characteristics of God dominate the client's thinking? Can the client relate events and encounters with people to a theology of creation, providence or redemption? Does the client show theological imagination in forging an understanding of God's activity that is both true to Christian beliefs and relevant to the context?
Is there a link between the experience encountered and some biblical character or situation? Can the client make connection with (say) a relevant issue which
is addressed in a New Testament epistle or with the experiences of an Old
Testament or a Gospel character? Are such links drawn with integrity and with
due hermeneutic rigour or has the client a speculative tendency to make the
Bible fit? How do proper connections throw light on an appropriate Christian
strategy for engagement?
How is a particularly painful or baffling situation handled? Can the client face
and deal with ambiguity and complexity? Is there an ability to work with a
doctrine of God or an understanding of humanity that will make some sense of the complexity? Or does the client show a tendency to run back into tidy
formulations? Can the client ultimately retain convictions and yet live with
areas of uncertainty? Can he or she handle this ambiguity in an encounter with
a baffled person?
How has an event or encounter affected the level or pattern of the client's prayer life? Has the client learned how to incorporate an ambiguous situation into his or her intercession? Has an experience resulted in a deeper meditative
understanding of God and His purposes? Has the context promoted some new
biblical insights which have fed personal devotion?
What theological material demands further study as a result of the reflection on practice? Is there now an area (e.g. life and death, sin and salvation, justice and forgiveness, grace and truth, personal and corporate, freedom and responsibility, suffering and hope, holiness and incarnation, humility and leadership, discipline and love) where more work should be done? Has the client identified books, materials or people to help that further study?"
The challenge for the coach is how to help the client or client group develop and move forward without projecting the coach’s own theological and spiritual constructs onto the client or the client’s situation. This demands high levels of self-awareness, sensitivity, wisdom, discernment and skill. The coach needs to pay close attention to his or her own intuition (‘inner voice’), the voice of the client, the indirect voice of the client’s world or system through the client and, ultimately, the voice of God.
|
RSS Feed