Gareth Morgan in Images of Organisation (1986) commented, ‘People have a knack for getting trapped in webs of their own creation’. It’s as if we can create ways of seeing the world personally and between us that become fixed and prevent us seeing alternatives. According to social construct theory, we never really see the world for what it is, but rather as how we learn to perceive and make sense of it. This means that we attribute meaning to people, objects and situations, rather than perceive them objectively.
Personal and social construct psychology are interested in how people, groups, organisations and societies create their own ‘reality’. The language, images, metaphors and stories we use both reveal and reinforce how we see, experience and respond to the world. So, for instance, if we talk about a team, an organisation, an organisational structure etc, it may be to us as if those abstract entities actually exist in their own right, rather than simply as a way of thinking about and organising our psychosocial perceptions and experience. Depending on what images, beliefs, values and assumptions we hold about such ‘constructs’, we can find ourselves holding fixed views that blind us to alternative ideas and options. Social construct coaching is not about unearthing ‘the truth’ but exploring alternative constructs. Social construct coaching aims to help a person or group to surface, examine and challenge the constructs they have inherited and created and to experiment with creating alternative constructs to see what they may reveal, release and enable. Sample techniques: *Invite the coachee or group to depict a real work scenario, e.g. by drawing on paper, using objects (e.g. toys) or configuring people in a room to see what picture (or ‘construct’) emerges. *Encourage the coachee or group to reflect on what has emerged, e.g. who or what have they included and why, how have they positioned themselves in relation to others and why etc. *Challenge the coachee or group’s assumptions, e.g. who or what is missing, what evidence is there to support any assumptions, what evidence could point towards contrary conclusions? *Urge the coachee or group to consider how people from diverse situations might perceive or approach the scenario, e.g. from different genders, cultures, ages, jobs, positions in hierarchy. *Support the coachee or group to experiment with radical alternatives, e.g. draw the diagram upside down, swap roles and places, play with opposite words, images and metaphors. Person and social construct coaching can enable changes in perception, resulting options and personal-cultural behaviour. The most exciting examples result in a fundamental paradigm shift, a total reconstruction of how an individual or group perceives, shapes and responds to the world.
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Who or what has most influenced your OD thinking and practice? What maxims or principles do you bear in mind as you approach organisational issues from an OD perspective? Someone asked me this question recently and I crystallised my response into seven statements, drawing on background influences including Morgan, Schein, Bolman & Deal, Gergen and Burr:
*Organisations do not exist but people do. *Every action is an intervention. *Actions have symbolic as well as rational meaning. *What’s important is not what happens, but what it means. *The same event has different meanings for different people. *People get trapped in their own psychological and cultural constructs. *What passes for rationality is often irrationality in disguise. These statements, taken as a whole, create a metaphorical lens through which I often view, analyse or interpret a situation or experience. They help me to consider an underlying question, ‘What is really going on here?’ before attempting to work with a client or organisation to devise a way forward. What maxims or principles do you use to guide your practice? People sometimes become stuck and struggle to find ways forward in their work and relationships because of how they perceive and respond to people and situations. I ran a workshop recently to help managers develop insights and skills in cognitive behavioural coaching (CBC). CBC is based on cognitive behavioural psychology. It is interested in how a person’s thinking influences his or her feelings and behaviour. It aims to improve a person’s effectiveness by reducing stress and opening fresh possibilities for the future.
Cognitive refers to mental processes: what we are thinking and what we believe. Behaviour refers to what we do: how we act in relationships and other situations. Coaching refers to helping a person enhance their life quality and effectiveness. CBC aims to help a person surface, examine and challenge limiting or self-defeating thoughts and beliefs. It is not just about positive thinking but more about reality-orientation. It focuses on what’s happening ‘here and now’ and on helping the person approach the future differently. A CB coach invites a person to talk about an issue, a challenge or something they are experiencing. Often, it is something that is causing the person frustration or stress. Sometimes, however, it could be simply that a person feels limited by a way of working or is struggling to find a way forward. In order for the person to be honest, the coach needs to demonstrate genuine interest and trustworthiness. The person needs to feel free to be open, without being judged, and to know the coach has the person’s best interests at heart. Listening and confidentiality are very important. If the person is feeling anxious, stressed or highly emotionally-charged, it’s unlikely that he or she will feel able to engage in a conversation about thinking patterns without calming down first. Creating the right cathartic space, perhaps over a coffee, can help the person relax and engage. A CB coach will allow a person to introduce an issue or situation he or she is dealing with and listen out for indicators of ‘cognitive distortions’, that is, ways in which the person is thinking about the issue or situation that are out of synch with reality or proving counterproductive. Common examples include polarising issues into extremes; over-generalising from specific experiences and ignoring all evidence to the contrary; predicting the future and excluding all alternative possibilities; assuming what other people are thinking or feeling; anticipating the worst possible outcomes. The coach will draw attention to these thinking patterns, invite the person to examine them, and offer supportive challenges that help the person think in new ways (e.g. ‘what assumptions are you making?’, ‘how far is what you’re thinking supported by the facts?’, ‘what are you not noticing?’). Finally, the coach will help the person plan a way forward to deal with the issue or situation differently. This could involve e.g. conversation, vividly imagining new scenarios or role playing to practise and reinforce new ways of thinking and behaving. Coaching is often characterised as two people sitting down together, engaged in conversation, with one person helping the other to think things through. I ran a short workshop today that introduced insights and practises from Gestalt psychology and coaching characterised by a more experimental, experiential approach. Gestalt is a field of psychology that focuses on awareness in the here and now. Insight can emerge through pausing for a moment to notice what we are thinking, feeling or experiencing in our bodies. Gestalt views thoughts, feelings and somatic experience as interconnected.
We reflect this analogical experience in our language. For example, I may feel tightness in my throat when I approach a situation where I struggle to have a ‘voice’. I feel ‘gutted’ (accompanied by a stomach ache) or find this situation a ‘pain in the neck’ (accompanied by tension in my neck). Our minds filter our thoughts and feelings, partly to enable us to focus (rather than being aware of everything going on within and around us, all at the same time, which would be overwhelming) and partly if those thoughts and feelings are unacceptable to ourselves or others, or cause discomfort. What we experience in our bodies is unfiltered by the mind. Sometimes, what we experience in our bodies is analogous to what we are experiencing psychologically. Paying attention to what we are experiencing physically can raise unacknowledged or suppressed beliefs or issues into awareness. In Gestalt coaching, the coach may help the client explore issues or experiences by physical experimentation. This typically means doing something, rather than simply talking about it. As with all experimentation, there is an element of let’s try this and see what happens. Examples: *Rather than telling me what you want to achieve, show me what you want to achieve by acting out what it would look and feel like if you were successful. *Rather than explaining to me what you would you like to say to a person, say it to me directly as if I were that person, or enact a conversation playing both parts. *Rather than tell me what obstacles you anticipate facing, create physical obstacles in the room that represent the obstacles, then experiment with tackling or moving them. *Rather than describe the relationships between stakeholders, try using figures or objects to represent the people and experiment with placing yourself within the system too. *Rather than outlining your key priorities as a list, draw them in proportion size-wise and try changing their relative sizes to see what new insights emerge. The coach’s role is to help the client design a suitable experiment, stay attentive and observe what happens for the client in the here and now as they do it. Some coaches feed back their observations to the client, some encourage the client to reflect on their own observations. When a client acts out a posture or scenario, the coach may mirror the client’s posture or movement, inviting the client to notice what he or she sees and feels when the coach does it. Finally, the coach helps the client make sense of any insights that emerge and how to apply them to the client’s context. I took part in an ‘immunity to change’ coaching psychology workshop this week. Based on work by Kegan and others, we looked at how and why personal and organisational change can be so difficult to achieve and sustain. The notion of immunity is taken from the physiological system where the immune system serves to protect and preserve. The psychological parallel could be regarded as an anxiety management system, designed to protect us from feelings of insecurity and threat.
The psychological immune system provides relief from anxiety. It enables us to function in the world, to maintain a degree of psychological health. The problem is that we can become locked in defended patterns of belief and behaviour, often out of conscious awareness, that prevent us facing fresh challenges and growing in resilience by surfacing, confronting and working through our deepest fears. It’s as if we become subject to our beliefs and assumptions, rather than choosing them. In the workshop, we worked through a 4-step process known as creating an X-ray or immunity map. Draw 4 columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, write down the ‘one big thing’ about yourself that, if you could change and achieve it, would make a significant positive difference in your life and work. You may want to take feedback from others too. For example, what do key colleagues believe would make the biggest positive difference to your performance at work? In the second column, write down what you do (or, conversely, don’t do) that works against you fulfilling that goal. In other words, how do you actually behave in practice that’s different to the ‘one big thing’ that you want to characterise your behaviour in the future? Try to be very specific. ‘I do X’ or ‘I avoid doing Y’ rather than describing feelings or states of mind. You may want to ask others for feedback too on what they observe you doing or not doing, e.g. in the workplace. In the third column, start first by vividly imagining yourself behaving in real situations in the opposite way to how you described yourself behaving in the second column. Try focusing on those behaviours and situations that could feel most scary, threatening or dangerous. Allow yourself to really feel the feelings, to feel the deep discomfort, anxiety or pain that such behaviours and situations evoke for you. You may find this best to do with a coach who can provide appropriate support. In the fourth column, reflect and write down the core beliefs and deep assumptions you are carrying that lead to the feelings you are experiencing. These are often assumptions drawn from childhood experiences, e.g. ‘I must do everything perfectly if I am to be loved and accepted by others.’ Such assumptions are often unspoken, subconscious beliefs that guide our thinking, feeling and behaviour. Again, it can be useful to work with a coach to help you tease out such beliefs. This 4-step process is designed to surface underlying beliefs and assumptions that have such a powerful influence that they hold our current behaviours in place. They are the subconscious anchors that can hold us back from changing. By surfacing and ‘objectifying’ our beliefs, we have opportunity to weigh them up, examine and challenge their validity. How true are they? What evidence supports them? How well do they serve us? What alternatives could be more realistic and releasing? We closed this activity by setting up four chairs in the room, each representing one stage of the process. The person acting as ‘client’ would sit in one seat at a time while the coach coached them through that stage of the process. On completing one stage, the client would move to the next seat. We also experimented with physicality too, inviting the client to act out their goal at the first stage and their feelings at the third stage. The impact was dynamic, vivid and visual. According to the theory underpinning this approach, change efforts fail if they address profound issues at a surface, technical or behavioural level without attending to underlying psychological dynamics too. Deeply held beliefs and assumptions act like an elastic band, pulling the person back to where they started once the pressure to change is released. If the person or group is enabled to explore their personal and wider cultural beliefs, genuine transformation becomes possible. ‘Could you be more direct?’ I took part in a 2-day workshop recently, a Gestalt approach to conflict, challenge and confrontation in groups. There were 12 in the group, mostly therapists of one kind or another, and we started by introducing ourselves in 2s. ‘This is my life’ in 5 minutes. Next, after each had spoken, we commented on what we had noticed. ‘We’re the same in that…’ and ‘We’re different in that…’ It drew our attention to what we notice in first encounters and how we tend to deal with sameness and difference in groups.
There’s something about sameness that can provide a sense of comfort, of security, of being part of something bigger than ourselves. When we feel insecure, we may seek out points of sameness in order to build rapport, establish connection and thereby reduce our anxiety. Safety in numbers. In this context, difference can feel distancing, even threatening. If we continue to focus on sameness, an awareness of group identity emerges, a feeling of belonging, a sense of differentiation between the ‘us’ and the ‘not us’. This is an important principle in group and inter-group dynamics. The inclusive dynamic that creates a sense of group within a group is the same dynamic that can exclude others. If we focus exclusively on sameness within our group and on difference between our own group and other perceived groups, we create boundaries between us. If difference emerges within our group, we may ignore or resist it because it doesn’t fit the group norm, the norm we have subscribed to in order to feel secure. This can lead to collusion and group think. A way to break through unhelpful group and inter-group barriers is to acknowledge what the group provides for us, its functional value at a social psychological level, and yet also to draw our attention to the differences between us within the group and the similarities between us (or at least some of us) and those (or at least some of those) in other groups. This has the effect of raising fresh awareness, reconfiguring group identities, enabling us to see different patterns of sameness and difference and thereby fresh possibilities. A later activity in this workshop was to practice immediacy. We split into two groups. One group sat in a circle in the middle of the room, the others around the outside observing those in the inside circle. The inside group was invited and encouraged to practise speaking very honestly, clearly and directly with one another. The conversation started.‘I would like to facilitate the group.’ ‘I’m happy for you to facilitate.’ ‘I feel anxious.’ ‘What do you feel anxious about?’ ‘I feel anxious in case those on the outside judge my performance.’ It continued. ‘If I lose interest, I will check out.’ ‘What will checking out look like, what will we see?’ ‘I will gaze out of the window’.‘What do you want us to do if we see you gazing out of the window?’ ‘Call it.’ ‘I don’t know what you are thinking or feeling and I want to know.’ ‘Why is that so important to you?’ ‘Because I don’t feel a connection with you, I feel distant from you.’ Our task was to focus on what was happening within and between us here and now and to articulate it openly and courageously, even if it risked evoking conflict. Asking, ‘What is happening here and now?’ is such a powerful question. It draws attention of a group away from a topic, issue or abstraction into the immediate moment. ‘I’m thinking…’, ‘I’m feeling…’. The impact in the workshop group felt both profound and electric. To ask, ‘What is going on for me now?’ is a great way of establishing contact with myself. To articulate what I am thinking and feeling in a group or to hear others do the same invites others to be open too and, thereby, builds the quality of relational contact within the group. This can prove tricky cross-culturally, especially where it could be considered inappropriate, disrespectful or even offensive to speak out in a group. In other situations, it may simply feel too risky to acknowledge openly what I’m thinking or feeling. The challenge in this workshop was to experiment with being more open, less constrained, than we would normally behave. ‘If I asked you on a scale of 10 how honest and up-front you are in groups, what would you say? What would really happen if you were to ratchet it up a notch?’ 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. 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. Griffin & Tyrrell in their excellent book, 'How to Master Anxiety' (2006), talk about the ‘three pertinent Ps’ that can contribute to anxiety or depression. It’s something to do with how a person perceives events or experiences and what meaning he or she attributes to them. Using this model, the coaching task could be to help a person surface and test his or her assumptions and conclusions.
The first P is ‘personalising’. It’s about whether the person believes that what happens to and around them is a result of something he or she has done. ‘I must have done something to offend her’, ‘It’s all my fault’. It’s as if the person perceives him or herself as the cause of whatever happens. It moves beyond, ‘I may have contributed to this’ to believing, ‘I’m solely responsible for it.’ The next P is ‘pervasiveness’. It’s about whether the person believes that the impacts of an event or experience in one aspect of his or her life or work extends to all other aspects. ‘It’s all ruined’, ‘I’m hopeless at everything’. It’s as if the person perceives a single incident or experience as indicative of how everything is. It’s a case of rash generalisation from the specific. The third P is ‘permanence’. It’s about whether the person believes that an experience or the consequences of an action will extend forever into the future. ‘It will always be the same’, ‘This will ruin my whole life.’ It’s as if the person believes a current experience is a definitive predictor of how life and work will be from now on. There is no room for alternative possibilities. Now there are of course situations where a person may indeed be responsible for something that happens, e.g. he or she may have said or done something that upset a colleague. The person may have taken a decision or acted in a way that had wider consequences than expected. The person may have experienced something genuinely challenging or life-changing. The ‘pertinent Ps’ are about making incorrect inferences or assumptions, attributing causal relationships where there may be none, drawing invalid conclusions and projecting a fixed view onto reality and the future that, if combined with what I would call a fourth P, ‘pessimism’, trap the person in a stressful, despondent world that could lead to anxiety or depression. I mention the pessimistic dimension because it’s possible, for instance, that a different person could experience the same ‘pertinent Ps’ positively, e.g. attribute positive experiences to themselves, believe that success in one area means success in all areas, imagine a bright future on the basis of what’s happening now. In this case, the person may feel confident and optimistic. The difference and potential coaching solution may lie in a fifth P, ‘perspective’. As we have noticed, it’s something to do with how a person perceives an experience or event. Albert Ellis noted this in his ABC theory of emotion. What a person feels is a consequence of what she or believes about an event or experience, rather than a direct consequence of the event or experience itself. The tricky part in coaching is that changing perspective is sometimes easier said than done. After all, our perspectives are shaped by history, including previous relationships and experiences, and culture. They can feel so familiar, so much part of us, so intrinsic to our way of seeing and experiencing the world, that to change them can feel threatening or disorientating. A sixth P, ‘person’, can make a difference. When a client feels authentic interest, empathy and support from a significant other, which could include the coach him or herself, he or she is more likely to feel less anxious, less defensive, and thereby more open to consider alternative perspectives. It’s as if the relationship itself allows the metaphorical cognitive dust to settle. One final P, ‘prayer’, can draw these domains together with profound effect. Deep prayer is trusting, loving relationship, sharing intimate presence with the ultimate significant Other. It’s a here and now experience where we are drawn and inspired into see a glimpse of the broadest possible perspective. It can become a true source optimism and confidence for both client and coach. It only takes a moment to change the whole world.
A sudden change can rearrange our mental and emotional landscape, raise new things into focus, shed different light on the familiar, move earlier preoccupations into the background and force us to re-evaluate our lives, values and priorities. It can feel exciting, alarming and disorientating. My Dad had a stroke 2 weeks ago. Suddenly, we were confronted with challenges of communication, especially over the phone at a distance. Dad’s health that we had taken so much for granted was suddenly threatened. Even a few slurred words felt miraculous. Our central heating broke down last week. Suddenly we were confronted with the challenges of staying warm in the freezing weather. The heating system we had paid no attention to became the centre of attention and concern - and rejoicing when it was repaired. In Gestalt psychology, this phenomenon is about changes in perspective, alterations in what we notice (figure) and what lies in the background, out of awareness (ground). It’s about paradigm shifts, a marked transition in what we perceive and experience. Advent draws our attention to a moment, a cosmic kairos, a world changing event, the arrival of Christ. An encounter with him is deep impact, reeling drama, a healing crisis. It can shake, disorientate and re-orientate our whole lives. May God grant you a special encounter, an inspiring Christmas and a Spirit-filled new year. |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! Like what you read? Simply enter your email address below to receive regular blog updates!
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