Coaching: An Inside Job

Take this to heart as a coach: change always occurs. You can influence and accelerate that process. Give yourself time and appreciation as you try out the practices below--and remember to have fun.

My approach to coaching is not always linear. I've used examples, stories, symbolic behaviors, and metaphors. The following three principles can inform your work no matter what coaching model you follow:

Acknowledge and Validate the Client's Worldview: Transpersonal change is more likely to occur in a coaching relationship where there's deep rapport--where clients feel known. Accessing their inner worlds gives you both insight and compassion. Paradoxically, they'll be more open to change when they feel accepted exactly as they are. Once they have that assurance, you can help them recognize and change patterns of behavior based on subconscious, outmoded beliefs.

Help Shift that Worldview: Most people will come to you having tried to avoid or overcome something they don't like about themselves. That approach tends to block positive energy. In contrast, your clients will release energy for change when they learn to observe their patterns of thought and behavior without judgment. Such compassionate self-awareness may be enough to support spontaneous changes. In addition, there are many inventive, even playful ways to help them alter the patterns they observe.

Focus on Solutions, Tapping Their Resources, Experience, and Ideas: Sometimes a solution focus means merely encouraging more of what works. It can also mean reframing--problem in the past and solution in the present or future. Change occurs when a problem is specific enough that it can be solved, when it's seen as a positive vision for the future.

As I mentored coaches over the years, I also found it helps to have a concrete how-to summary. The skills below will help you evoke transpersonal change:

1. Develop rapport: Acknowledge and validate client's worldview without judgment or prescription; share human to human responses.
2. Hold a vision of what's possible: Reflect second-order changes that occur in interaction with you.
3. Presuppose positive outcomes: Make statements that embed a positive expectation and assume a desired change. 
4. Teach Clients Self-Observation: Show them how to observe patterns without judgment; reinforce evidence of neutrality and change.
5. Use Possibility Language: Restate problems in the past, solutions in the present and/or future.
6. Focus on Solutions: Elicit brief problem description; ask how solution will look (videospeak); discover how they behaved in exceptions to the problem and encourage doing more of what works; if no exceptions, co-create achievable steps as fieldwork.
7. Help Shift from Either/Or to Both/And Thinking: Identify the "X" and "Y" that are apparently incompatible. Explore existing parameters. Ask "How can you do both X and Y?"
8. Honor Resistance as Energy for Change; Stay in Flow: Use everything that happens as grist for the mill, including all blocks, tasks not done, relapses, etc.
9. Use Evocative Tactics: Engage clients through stories, metaphors, humor, spontaneity, inventiveness, playfulness; bypass logic's censors.
10. Co-Invent Transformative Fieldwork: Co-create fieldwork that breaks old patterns with new responses; take them to their edge (doing anything different, however small, can promote significant change).
11. Make Process Observations: Comment on interactions with you as a source of learning about patterns.

A "Clean" Sweep

Over a period of years David Grove identified questions that would least influence clients in their metaphorical journey, hence the term "Clean Language." Carol Wilson, "Metaphor and Symbolic Modelling for Coaches."

Even though metaphors are commonplace in everyday language, we sometimes miss their potential to open doors that logic and its accompanying censors keep firmly locked. Think about it. If logic ruled the day, you could simply say, "I'm going to stop feeling defensive when someone criticizes me" or "I want to lose 15 pounds," and voila! It's done. 

Just as our unconscious patterns and resistances defy logic, they can be accessed and transformed with metaphor. It's really fun to follow a client's metaphor and see where it leads. And I've found they'll accept suggestions that might otherwise seem strange or silly, if presented with confidence. 

So, for example, when I asked a client about her loneliness, she said it was like being stranded on a desert island. Dropping assumptions about my role as helper, I followed her into her own metaphor, trusting that her internal resources would lead us somewhere healing. 

(It's a long story, but a key player was a talking bird, a guide neither of us could have anticipated.)

If coaches comes into metaphor play with their own worldview, make assumptions about what clients see in their own metaphors, and take them where the coach thinks they should go, this negates clients' experience and dismisses the potential for their own solutions. Psychologist David Grove suggested that metaphors are not only symbolic of a problem but also contain clues to solutions. He developed questions he called clean, meaning they don't engage a cognitive process but rather keep clients in relationship with their own metaphors.

Angela Dunbar's article "Using Metaphors with Coaching" will give you a good start with Clean Language. The first question is always, "What would you like to have happen?" and clients are typically in a logical, left-brain mode, as my client was when she said she wanted to feel connection instead of lonely. So it may take a while for a metaphor to arise, but soon, as you follow the client's lead, a whole metaphorical landscape begins to appear.

Here are a few examples of clean questions and content taken from a session of about 30 minutes. I'll use the word bird to represent my client's metaphor (one of many before she became aware of a voice, which then became a talking bird):

1. To develop awareness: "What kind of voice is that voice? or "Whereabouts is that voice?" or "Is there anything else about that voice?" (She sees a bird landing next to her.)
2. To understand the bigger picture: "Then what happens?" or "What happens just before?" or "Where could that bird have come from?" (She says it's a talking bird that comes from a ship she sees in the distance."
3. To explore relationships and connections: "And is there a relationship between that talking bird and feeling connected?" or "And when the bird talks to you, what happens to feeling connected?" (She says when she reaches the ship she'll be connected, and the bird is telling her how to reach the ship.)
4. To find out how the goal can be reached: "What needs to happen for you to feel connected?" or "And can that connection happen?" (The client at first says she has no way to get to the ship, she can't swim that far, but eventually the bird tells her how to build a raft and she is able to do that.)

A complete session is very much in flow and may move between questions, as new metaphors and even new goals appear.

It's important to hold a playful attitude as a coach. Even if you've never done this kind of work before, you'll be surprised how freeing the process can be for both you and your clients.

Implicit and Covert Factors in Contracting

On Monday, January 7, 2019, my dear friend and mentor on my PhD committee at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Leonard Oseas, passed away. In tribute to Len I want to explain how he changed the way I think.

My dissertation explored "The Status Dimension in Helping Relationships" with a focus on O.D. (organizational development) consulting, where "consultants have been perplexed by the difficulty in achieving collaborative relationships with clients." O.D. clients typically work in hierarchical organizations based on an authority structure, and are not necessarily used to collaborating.

The desired outcome from the consultant's perspective is for clients to be able to solve their own problems, and social science theory suggests this can only be brought about through consultant/client collaboration.

However, my research suggested that "collaboration is difficult to achieve because it runs counter to social structure, to role expectations, and to personality characteristics that elicit dominance-submission. Collaboration as a value tends to lead consultants to insist on collaboration, which reinforces their dominance.  Furthermore, this communication ('You will collaborate') is paradoxical to clients. If they 'collaborate' by going along with the consultant, they will be praised for in fact doing as they are told; if they choose not to collaborate they will be negatively labeled ('resistance') for self-initiated action. No wonder our clients seem confused!"

From the pages of my dissertation featuring Oseas' unpublished manuscript, "Implicit and Covert Factors in Contracting," University of Cincinnati, 1976:

"...it is Shapiro's hypothesis that at the implicit level the 'child' of each makes a primary contract with the 'parent' of each. 

Issues of power and influence become very central in the actual human contracts formed, despite the legal, business or social forms of these contracts. (Shapiro, 1968: 175)

"On the above point Oseas goes so far as to say:

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the helping contract cannot be an agreement between equals... When it is based on the unequal distribution of expertise, a relationship of legitimate dependency on the more expert member is both fair and sensible (p. 3).

"Oseas attributes this 'fair and sensible' inequality to the natural feelings of inadequacy and self-recrimination accompanying the decision to seek professional help. In part, then, he sees the obstacles to achieving parity as arising from client characteristics. In citing the O.D. literature on contracts, Oseas observes the stated desire to make the terms of the consultant-client agreement explicit, guaranteeing against the abuse of  authority. He points out, however, that not all matters important to the agreement can be made explicit, some being only dimly perceived as relevant and others being so deeply ingrained as to be nonnegotiable.

"In the context of norms and values, Oseas discusses the impact of disparities between consultant and client. The consultant values openness, risk-taking, emotional expressivity, and collaboration, toward which the client's reservations are likely to remain unexpressed. Thus a given of the implicit contract 'to which the client's diffidence appears to be giving tacit approval' is that 'faulty norms will invariably be found at the root of the client's difficulties' (p. 10). The terms of this implicit contract would require the client's norms to be relinquished in favor of the consultant's, a difficult contract to be fulfilled:

... compliance... would require them to discard behavior that is habitual and constantly reinforced; that stabilizes their organizational world; that has the sanction of authority in the organization; that earns them meaningful rewards; and thus is a condition of their being members-in-good-standing of the groups that matter to them (p. 11).

"Oseas concludes that collaboration of these two 'systems' requires that each maintain its integrity. The explicit terms of the contract must, therefore, be perceived as consistent with the ingrained habits and beliefs of each."

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Conversations with Dr. Leonard Oseas that expanded my thinking about how best to consult with clients have influenced my entire career and every coaching book I've written. So, Len's ideas about implicit and covert factors in contracting have been published.