 I was co-facilitating a coach training workshop for leaders last week. Sun was streaming in through the windows and I was thinking about how to illustrate the concept of psychological filters and distortions. At that very second, I looked up and saw this perfect image. A real Plato’s Cave moment. Pointing to the window blind, I asked participants to imagine what the window frame is like behind it, based purely on what they could see. ‘Curved, bent, twisted, grey?’
In my experience as a psychological coach, this can be a most important and valuable insight. We continuously filter experiences so that what we perceive and what meaning we attribute to it is influenced as much by what is happening within us as anything that is taking place externally to us in the room. I’ll introduce four types of filter or influence in these notes below, along with a brief explanation for each: projection, transference, culture and emotion. You may have heard the expression, ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’ This idea of projection is a simple and complex one. Watts illustrates it like this: imagine a projector on your shoulder, projecting an image onto a person standing in front of you. What you see is a combination of what they actually look like with an overlay of aspects of the projected image. This distorts what we perceive so that we partly relate to the person as they are, and partly as we are. The principle here is that we subconsciously project aspects of ourselves onto those we encounter. At a functional level, it helps us to identify and empathise with people. It’s as if we recognise something of ourselves in them. However, we also project aspects of ourselves onto others that we don’t acknowledge or recognise in ourselves. Perhaps I’m not aware of how compassionate I am but see it in others around me. Perhaps what I find annoying in others is a denied aspect of me too. Our perceptions are also influenced by our past. It’s as if we filter all new experiences through what we have experienced previously and what conscious (rational) or subconscious (intuitive) conclusions we have drawn from it. Human Givens therapists talk about this as pattern matching. If we encounter someone or something that reminds us of a previous person or event, it may re-trigger that previous experience so that we experience the new event along with the past. I see this happen a lot in coaching conversations. Clients may react to experiences in the present as if they are unknowingly re-living similar experiences from the past and transferring something of those experiences onto how they are interpreting the present. This kind of resonance can create an amplifying effect, causing the person to overreact to a person or issue in the here and now. Surfacing the pattern, the transference, can be releasing and create a new sense of perspective. What and how we perceive someone or something in a situation is also influenced by our cultural beliefs and values. It’s as if there is a permeable boundary between ourselves and others so that what we experience is us - but not only us. Cognitive behavioural research shows how what we feel in any given situation is influenced profoundly by what we believe about that situation. In this sense, our culture acts as a filter, influencing what we notice, or not, and what sense we make of it. Finally, our perceptions are influenced by our physical and emotional state in the moment. If a person is feeling highly stressed, for instance, they may shift into fight/flight/freeze mode which significantly affects their cognitive abilities. He or she may experience a whole range of cognitive distortions that nevertheless appear to them, in that moment, as reality. I’ve written more about this in a short article: Fresh Thinking. Perhaps the most significant point here is that for most of us most of the time, we are unaware of the filters we hold. We continually create and recreate our perceived realities. When we look at the window blind, we may assume we are looking at the window. We believe that what we perceive is what is. As far as we know, the window frame is curved, bent, twisted and grey – that is, assuming we know or believe there is a separate reality, a window frame, beyond the blind. As leaders, coaches and facilitators, we can grow in awareness of our own filters and their potentially distorting effects. We can learn to notice when we are projecting or transferring onto people and experiences. We can grow in awareness of our cultural beliefs and how they shape what we perceive and what we value. We can grow in awareness of our emotional states – what triggers them and how to handle them in the moment. We can enable others to grow in awareness too, thereby broadening the range of possibilities, of options, available to them – and to us. I would be interested to hear whether anything I’ve described here resonates with your own experiences. Notice what the photo, my language, my way of presenting ideas evokes in you. How do you feel as you read this? What does it remind you of? What are you noticing and not noticing, including within and about yourself? I look forward to hearing from you!
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Participants are arriving at the training room. I’ve never met them before and one appears very loud and confrontational. I’m taken aback, wondering how I’m going to work with this person in the group. I mention this to my co-trainer and he responds calmly, ‘Everyone has their own way of dealing with anxiety’. This was many years ago now but his words still resonate when I’m facilitating training events.
I’m back in a training room again. This time, more recently. It’s a group of senior leaders from an organisation and one of the participants repeatedly questions the trainers’ credentials as if to imply: ‘I don’t know if you have what it takes to do this well.’ He avoids taking part in activities by discussing and debating them rather than doing them. His behaviour feels resistive, disruptive, difficult. ‘Everyone has their own way of dealing with anxiety…’ OK, let's hypothesise: this man is among peers, concerned about how his performance will be perceived and evaluated. His organisation is going through leadership changes and he feels vulnerable. A subconscious voice gnaws at him from within: ‘What if I don’t have what it takes to do this well?’ ‘What if this exposes how inadequate I am?' He projects his insecurity onto the trainer and avoids activities as a defence against anxiety. At the end of the day, the co-trainer and I leave feeling drained. It’s an unusual feeling and we wonder what we are carrying from the group. The group itself feels draining, drained. After all, it takes huge amounts of energy to hold up a front, to mask and subdue anxiety, to contain it. Perhaps the group’s behaviour opens a window into its wider organisational reality: ‘We don’t feel safe; this organisation doesn’t feel safe.’ I've found this psychodynamic perspective to be valuable for trainers, coaches and leaders alike. It poses questions such as: ‘What is really going on here?’, ‘What is what happens within the room telling us about what may be happening outside of the room?’, ‘What do participants in this group need to feel sufficiently safe to work together?’, ‘What do I need to recognise and work well with complex group dynamics?’ What is your experience of dealing with group anxiety? What have you noticed and experienced? How have you worked with it? I'll be interested to hear more! I’ve been intrigued recently by working with skilful, experienced coaches who hold very different ideas about what coaching is and what it entails in practice. The main points of difference tend to lay in what the coach focuses on (or not) and what the coach does (or doesn’t do) with the client.
One coach focuses primarily on the coaching process and does not engage directly with the client's story. Here's a brief illustration: *Client: I’m struggling with lack of confidence at work. It is really affecting my performance and stress levels. I avoid situations where I feel anxious and I need to find a better way to deal with this. *Coach: OK, in relation to that, what do we need to do now to help you think through this? *Client: Perhaps I could say a bit about where I experience this most and what happens when I do. It’s mostly when I am expected to present to authority figures, e.g. the leadership team at work. It keeps me awake the night before. That means I feel tired and even less able to cope when it comes to the meeting. *Coach: So, where are we now and what do we need to do next to move this forward? Another coach focuses on the client’s story and guides the client through it by engaging in it with the client. Here's an illustration: *Client: I’m struggling with lack of confidence at work. It is really affecting my performance and stress levels. I avoid situations where I feel anxious and I need to find a better way to deal with this. *Coach: So, where would you like to get to by the end of this conversation? *Client: I’d like to come away with some ideas about how to feel less stressed, more confident, when I do presentations. *Coach: OK. What kind of presentations do you find most stressful? Perhaps you could share an example of when you last felt like that and we can work on it together. A third coach focuses on what is happening for the client, or between the coach and client, here and now. The client’s story acts as a backdrop: *Client: I’m struggling with lack of confidence at work. It is really affecting my performance and stress levels. I avoid situations where I feel anxious and I need to find a better way to deal with this. *Coach: OK…and what are you feeling here and now as you talk about this? *Client: I can feel a tension in my stomach. It’s like a dull ache. *Coach: If the tension, the ache, had a voice - what might it be saying to you? What will you say in return? A final coach reframes the client's story, encouraging him or her to re-image the issue as a positive scenario: *Client: I’m struggling with lack of confidence at work. It is really affecting my performance and stress levels. I avoid situations where I feel anxious and I need to find a better way to deal with this. *Coach: So let's imagine you arriving at work, feeling very different - confident and relaxed, facing difficult situations directly and not feeling the need to avoid them. What would you be doing? *Client: Well, I would walk into the room with head up, back straight, and look people in the eye. *Coach: OK. And what would you be saying to people? How would you be presenting yourself? What would you be feeling as you do it? What is your coaching approach? What principles guide your work and what does it look like in practice? I will be very interested to hear from you! |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! 
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