NICK WRIGHT
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Phenomenology, constructionism and coaching

17/4/2012

17 Comments

 
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.
17 Comments
Jim K
18/4/2012 03:00:07 am

I think you are very brave to sort out how your faith intersects with your coaching. I appreciate your honesty and reflections in this as well as trying to establish healthy boundaries. This is much better than just pretending that our spiritual side is too private or doesn't matter.

Reply
Nick Wright
18/4/2012 03:00:59 am

Hi Jim. Thanks for the note and your encouraging feedback. I'm fascinated by the relationship between spirituality, philosophy and psychology and how they intersect and influence (and are influenced by) our development practice. With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Jim K
18/4/2012 09:58:17 am

Hi Nick,
I think the confluence of spirituality, philosophy and psychology provides the potential of convergence of energy, creativity and peace in a chaotic world. I am surprised in my own reflections how insights from one discipline informs and challenges other areas of thought. This encourages integration and wholeness as well as incredible new idea associations. The process can be messy especially if we are intuitive and have hunches that may be difficult to explain. How do we do this without weirding people out?
Jim

Reinhard Stelter
18/4/2012 09:54:11 am

For a very long periode I am integreting Phenomenology, social constructionism and narrative psychology into i theoretical and applicable frame. I have written a couple of arcticles in International Coaching Psychology Review and I am preparing an English translation of my new Danish book with the title "Third generation coaching" - hopefulling on the international market in 2013.
Great to know that there are companions out there
Best
Reinhard www.rstelter.dk

Reply
Nick Wright
18/4/2012 09:56:33 am

Thanks for your note, Reinhard. I would love to see copies of your articles in International Coaching Psychology Review - do you know how I could see them? Your book also sounds fascinating. How would you describe it's main themes and ideas? With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Nick Wright
18/4/2012 10:07:22 am

@Jim K (above). I do like your expression, 'weirding people out'! I too feel excited by the potential synergies between these different fields of thinking, feeling and practice. One of the reasons for developing this website is to try to share ideas and experiences in the arena where spirituality, philosophy and psychology meet. The hard part is that it's easy to be not understood, or misunderstood or to misunderstand others, and so keeping a prayerful open mind and heart to explore that which sometimes feels unexplorable or unexpressible feels important to me. With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Maureen link
18/4/2012 09:17:59 pm

You might be interested in what Mario Beauregard has to say on this matter of how our mind works, intuition and Spirituality. I enjoyed reading this article. It was frank and honest. I felt like you were thinking out loud and I just happened to hear you. It gave me food for thought

Reply
Nick Wright
19/4/2012 01:00:20 pm

Hi Maureen. Thanks for such encouraging feedback. I haven't heard of Mario Beauregard so I will do a Google search. Thanks for pointing me towards it, especially as I will be hosting a leadership development event in May looking at spirituality and intuition. Good timing! With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Felicity O'Hanlon
19/4/2012 01:05:18 pm

Hi Nick, I really appreciate your ability to communicate issues clearly and unemotionally and yet with honest personal reflections on where you stand.

To take your good example; what therapeutic practice means to me is definitely spiritual and that guides my conduct and aspirations for good practice. Even if the client is not a believer, those standards I believe apply to me. Therapy for the psyche or soul to me means as a practitioner to walk on holy ground. In my understanding that is why we have ethics of professional conduct. There are so many references in the NT scriptures to having the right heart so that God's Spirit can work. I don't believe it can be explained by theory but I do believe it works when you commit yourself to be there for a client and listen not only with your head but heart then often magic happens and it's a privilege to be part of.

I am so glad you mention values and the importance of acknowledging one's own and respecting and acknowledging the values of others. Being the therapist or facilitator means to me to use that potential wisely and with respect, it is a powerful position to be in. For me my position means to empower others to what they identify as important to them.

Values are hard to identify sometimes as some are subconscious and yet they direct a lot of our action. Hard for people to change them sometimes too. I have been working on a 'values diagnostic tool' for sometime now and still can't arrive at anything useful.

I too would be interested in Reinhard's book and in general appreciate everyone's comments.

Reply
Nick Wright
19/4/2012 01:11:54 pm

Hi Felicity. Thanks for such a thoughtful and encouraging response. It sounds like we are on a very similar wavelength. I loved the notion of therapy as walking on holy ground, your thoughts on ethics, having the right heart, the mystery of God's Spirit at work, the privilege of being part of it, that sense of magic etc. Beautifully expressed. I too find the notion of implicit values fascinating, something about subconscious influences on thoughts, feelings and behaviour. I haven't heard of a values diagnostic tool - say more? With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Felicity O'Hanlon
20/4/2012 09:21:04 am

Hi Nick, you are very welcome, thanks too for your response. It is great to meet people on the same wavelength in the same field. I work independently and so miss the 'fellowship' of colleagues, as it were.
While doing coaching training I came across a values exercise which I found useful but limited and wanted to develop one of my own. I am interested in creating practical tools that I could offer people even online to gain personal insight/awareness and therefore make more informed choices about what they want. If they could experience what coaching could give them practically this might make it more real and act as a catalyst to book sessions with specific goals for change in mind.
The challenge is that the more you try and pin values down, they more they elude you. How do you define a value? It's a slippery concept. There are personal values that have to do with preferences on all sorts of things, then there are cultural, social and religious aspects to values to. What is the best way to cross section them, how do you tie them down to concepts or categories, without imposing your values? In trying to pin them down do you overlap with beliefs, personality traits, etc. It becomes like trying to fish with bare hands.
But how valuable on the other hand to gain insight into how immovable and important a particular value is that you were only dimly aware of but not honoring in your life? And most importantly, what about the hidden values, that one might have suppressed for various reasons such as fear of something but in so doing is causing dissatisfaction, etc. I'll leave it here for now, otherwise comment post is too long!
best, Felicity

Nick Wright
21/4/2012 02:48:01 am

@Felicity. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and questions on the values piece. Yes, I can see how it could feel like grasping a fish with bare hands! It sounds like the issue you are grappling with touches on beliefs and motivations. What do we believe implicitly or subconsciously (which is sometimes different to what we think we believe, or believe we believe, at more conscious rational levels) and how does it influence our feelings and behaviour?

I find the social-cultural dimension fascinating too. Where to values originate and what develops and sustains them? To what degree are they socially constructed? I sometimes think of values as 'those things we value most' or 'those things that matter most to us' (using the word 'things' loosely here). It sounds like part of what you are exploring is how to help people grow in awareness of what matters most to them at the deepest levels?

I'm also interested in where ethics fit alongside values, or as a reframing of them, and what happens as coach if we help surface values in others that we consider unethical. Where do we draw the line in helping or supporting someone to ourwork or live our their values more authentically? Of course, this raises wider questions of how ethics are developed and defined, by whom and what standards etc. Mind bending. With best wishes. Nick

Reply
Felicity O'Hanlon
23/4/2012 10:49:52 am

Hi Nick, actually this discussion has been very useful because it has helped me to answer some of my own questions. What I think you are saying is that not only are values difficult to categorise or describe, they are connected to other things.
To design a fully comprehensive tool is perhaps not only impossible but not necessary. More realistic is something that could be a starting point or template that can be developed individually. Even that, as you say, would be constructed from within one culture and viewpoint and therefore biased.
Thanks for your thoughts on all this, Felicity

Reply
Dr. Anil Behal link
20/2/2017 07:03:55 pm

Nick,
Pretty amazing blog you have there! As a phenomenologist myself, I really appreciated the comments on the intersection of phenomenology, constructionism, and coaching. I had heard of ontological coaching, but was looking for a phenomenological expression of the coaching practice. Excellent work!

Reply
Dr. Anil Behal link
20/2/2017 07:04:22 pm

Nick,
Pretty amazing blog you have there! As a phenomenologist myself, I really appreciated the comments on the intersection of phenomenology, constructionism, and coaching. I had heard of ontological coaching, but was looking for a phenomenological expression of the coaching practice. Excellent work!

Reply
Dr. Anil Behal link
20/2/2017 07:05:28 pm

Nick,
Pretty amazing blog you have there! As a phenomenologist myself, I really appreciated the comments on the intersection of phenomenology, constructionism, and coaching. I had heard of ontological coaching, but was looking for a phenomenological expression of the coaching practice. Excellent work!

Reply
Dr. Anil Behal link
20/2/2017 07:05:35 pm

Nick,
Pretty amazing blog you have there! As a phenomenologist myself, I really appreciated the comments on the intersection of phenomenology, constructionism, and coaching. I had heard of ontological coaching, but was looking for a phenomenological expression of the coaching practice. Excellent work!

Reply



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    ​Nick Wright

    ​I'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? ​Get in touch!

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