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.

Consider the Possibilities

After more than thirty years and an ever-growing file of theories, models, and techniques, I've come to believe that being fully present and helping clients become fully present are key to being a good coach. In the process, of course, you'll be informed intuitively by all you've learned and practiced.

Below is the dialogue from a coaching session with a client who wanted to stay present in uncomfortable situations and not withdraw physically or mentally or emotionally:

Client: All my life I've had the tendency to bolt when I started feeling uncomfortable.

Coach: When you haven't bolted, when you're able to stay with being uncomfortable, how do you do that? 

Client: I tell myself to hold it in place until my sense of resistance isn't so strong. But talking to myself about it is a real struggle. 

Coach: We have three channels to communicate with our resistance: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. You seem to use an auditory process.  

Client: Yes, I think in words and paragraphs. I don't see pictures. 

Coach: That is good to know, because it means when you shift to a kinesthetic channel you'll reach your right brain processes in a way you can't with words. So hold the awareness that you want to move away from something. Where in your body do you experience that sensation? 

Client: In my gut. 

Coach: Expand that sensation and tell me what it's like. 

Client: It's kind of a frenetic energy. "Butterflies" is too gentle a word. It's wobbly, frenetic. 

Coach: Now try that on. Does that feel exactly right, that sense that it's wobbly, frenetic? 

Client: Not quite. An image comes to me from a college program in special education when I worked with autistic children. One of the things an autistic child will do when feeling overwhelmed is what's called "flapping." 

Coach: Is that a fit? 

Client: That's exactly it. 

Coach: Ah. So there's a child in you who hasn't been able to communicate except through "flapping."

We then agreed whenever she felt the presence of that child, she would listen for what the child was trying to communicate.

Notice I didn't accept the client's belief that she never thought in pictures. Instead I embedded a possibility in my response and she came almost immediately to an experience that countered her view of herself--suddenly she was seeing images.

Possibility language is also illustrated in the above interaction with the comment, "That is good to know, because it means when you shift to a kinesthetic channel you'll reach your right brain processses in ways you can't with words." 

Another aspect of possibility language was the presupposition that the autistic child would be trying to communicate in a different way.

In short order this client moved from an internal verbal struggle--trying to force herself to continue doing something uncomfortable (and reinforcing her worldview)--into a playful, imaginary interaction with a child-like part of herself who'd been "autistic," unable to communicate except through frenetic physical movement.

When you coach this way, the possibilities are endless.