Untying the Knots

My client, Walter Frazier, was an innovative, idealistic leader. He held high standards for himself, his employees, and the company, but he was losing people's respect because of the angry tirades he unleashed whenever he was disappointed with the quality of someone's work. Walter came to me only for help in managing his anger. It would have been easy enough to coach him on how to use anger-management techniques. But my questions ran deeper: Why did he feel so much anger? How could I coach him to break out of the worldview that kept reinforcing his perfectionism? When I led him to this deeper level, he learned how to interrupt the inner patterns of processing information that made him angry. He became less harshly judgmental and his underlying anger began to dissipate. I was able to help him accomplish this shift because of the Enneagram’s power as a coaching tool.  

Most people acknowledge how important it is to act in accord with their internal needs and values. But they're often out of touch with their deepest motivations, behaving instead according to who they think they are, playing familiar roles and piling up trophies from their worldly successes. Often, the very characteristics that propelled them to reach personally important goals now get in their way. People like Walter who are idealistic and quality-minded standard-setters, for example, may find their perfectionism and inability to delegate effectively prevent them from achieving their real goals.  

When we started working together, Walter held a filtered view of how the world should work. Your clients may want to shore up the crumbling mortar of their personality styles when their usual coping strategies fail them, seeking help on how to make more money, quit feeling anxious, change to a more enjoyable job, or find a new boss/lover/spouse. As with Walter, coaching can take clients beyond their immediate requests to what they really want and often urgently need—a way to break “out of the box” of their habitual perspectives and reactions to the world. 

The Enneagram is a brilliant diagnostic tool to identify nine different ways of viewing the world, each of which has a common set of patterns. When your clients know these patterns and how to interrupt them, they'll consistently experience long-term, profound changes. If you do not yet know the Enneagram, click here for brief descriptions and follow the links that attract you.

(From Chapter 1 of Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram)

Don't Drink the Poison

Holding onto anger is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die.

We all know anger is an unhealthy emotion to dwell upon, and yet it's not easy to let go of strong, negative feelings toward someone who has harmed us, perhaps in dreadful ways. 

If you have clients who have set appropriate boundaries, held the person accountable, moved on with their lives, and still the anger persists, an imaging technique can be very effective.

Steve Andreas describes one approach in "Resolving Hate," the Case Report on page 6 of the Spring 2013 Milton Erickson Foundation Newsletter. His client "Sally" harbored hatred toward a once-admired man who'd criticized her unmercifully and with whom she no longer felt safe. Andreas asked her to picture someone she'd once hated and still didn't care for or trust, but had been able to let go of her anger, to describe everything she could about that image.

This person was... about 15 feet away from her, faded, foggy, and in muted color... straight ahead of her, down about 30 degrees from the horizon. When I asked her to move the image of the man she hated into this position, and allow it to become faded, foggy, and in muted color, she immediately felt the tension in her chest release, she could breathe easily, and her anger drained away completely.

He then asked her to imagine several scenarios in different locations where she might encounter the man who'd been a problem, and notice her reactions.

These rehearsals both tested her new response, and also programmed it in, so it would be automatic when she encountered him in the real world... About three weeks later, Sally emailed me: "Today I glanced up, saw him, had the thought, 'Ugh, I don't even want to talk to him,' so I looked in the other direction and kept walking. There was a tiny blip of irritation and then I was over it in about four seconds."

Metaphors Can Die!

A colleague asked me how I use metaphors in change work. As I described how I elicit and mirror metaphors, I rather casually gave him an example: 

You’ve said you want to be able to distinguish between falling into excitement--which carries passion and commitment, or falling into yearning--where you’re stuck in envy and unable to move forward.

Let's say I asked you what falling into excitement is like and you said, "It’s like flying, like a bird in migration that knows, that follows its instincts."

Then I might ask, "Tell me more about that bird, and where you are in the picture."

And you might respond, "I'm flying, following the bird, and it’s an eagle."

I then explained if he were my client, of course, his metaphor might be very different and it would be important to honor that, because a metaphor is only potent if it’s alive for the person wanting the change. 

“But as soon as you mentioned eliciting a metaphor,” he said, “I thought of flying!”

In his next email he wrote, “Thanks for an enlightening conversation. There is a subtle excitement in me... like the feeling I feel just before flying in a dream... a warm light that tries to burst from my chest... pulling me forward... a child's spirit... a wisdom unmistakably ancient... an eagle turning its smiling eye back at me... knowingly flapping its wings.. leaving a soothing breeze in its wake... I will follow it.”   

Unwittingly, I’d used a metaphor that was alive for him. But metaphors can be dead if they have no figurative value. Someone who sails might say, for example, “It’s like being on a sailboat in a heavy wind,” but continue the discussion in everyday language because the sailing image is literal and therefore dead as a metaphor. If the same person says “It’s like I’m balancing on top of a huge ice skate going very fast” this is probably a live metaphor. 

Listen for combinations of words that don’t fit known patterns of meaning – these are more likely to engage right-brain processes, and live on, as the eagle did for my friend. 

For What Are You Willing to Die?

When I was a girl I was struck by Patrick Henry's speech imploring Virginians to join the American Revolution, ending with the famous phrase, "...as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" Was there anything I believed in strongly enough that I would face death to preserve? The answer then was no, a response dictated by my as-yet-unexamined Enneagram personality style. Committed to avoiding conflict at all costs, I had NO opinions, much less a passionate opinion. 

My answer now is YES, I would be willing to die to preserve the rights of women and a society that honors women as well as men. I realize that's a tall order, and I'm renewing last year's resolution to mentor coaches who still have the youth and vitality to be working in the world toward true equality.

Today is a good day to set goals based on passionate principles. Stanford's Michael Ray suggests we ask two powerful questions: "Who is my Self?" ("your divinity, your highest future potential") and "What is my Work?"  ("the purpose of your existence, what you are meant to be").

Answering these questions from Bill O'Hanlon will begin to stir your passion:

• What gives you a sense of aliveness, that feels "just right"?
• What do you dream about; what holds you spellbound?
• What are blessings you could give back to the world?
• Whose work or life inspires you?
• What would you talk about if given an hour of prime time TV to influence the nation or the world?
• What makes you angry enough to correct in the world?
• What contribution of yours will be more profound than others doing something similar?

To these I add:

• What do you believe in so strongly that you'd be willing to die to preserve?

Grist for the Mill

"I love what I'm hearing. You're giving me the opportunity to see myself in a different way. Not like two sessions ago when I had a kind of tantrum after we finished: I am not going back to Mary Bast! She reminds me of my mother!

Hmmm. Well, of course the first part was pleasing. But even more so, the second half of my client's admission pleased me. First, because she felt free to tell the truth, which was useful feedback that I'd unwittingly let out my preachy side; second, because a coaching session can be the perfect place to relive and experiment with parent-child patterns that still hold influence.

As a coach you may not get a chance to observe clients in interactions with others. You'll hear only their reports of what happened and, because none of us is entirely objective, that report will be missing some pieces. So it's vital to pay attention to how a client's patterns show up in exchanges with you.

In that former session I'd forgotten a simple guideline for making process observations: describe specific behavior. Instead, I'd offered a theoretical analysis, suggesting she loved her career because it provided variety. Yes, yes, I know: ask powerful questions, don't give advice. My style is conversational, however, so sometimes an opinion comes off as a pronouncement. And I believe it's good for clients to see how we, too, get caught up in archaic patterns, and to observe how we own and learn from them instead of being defensive.

So I was able to authentically applaud my client for sharing her reaction to my off-putting behavior, model my willingness to explore a persistent pattern of my own, and invite her to signal if she felt the same way again -- confirming our equal partnership and at the same time opening the door to some real-time information about her relationship with her mother.

Years ago, in my social psychology program at the University of Cincinnati, Len Lansky gave me the best piece of advice I ever received from a mentor: "Everything is grist for the mill."

Monkey Mind

You've heard of monkey mind. Most of you will associate the term with the agitation of thoughts when trying to meditate. Some of you may also think of your mind and body as inhabited by a particularly agitated monkey when you're feeling anxious. 

If you tell me you've NEVER felt like you "might jump out of your own skin," I'll have a hard time believing you. I can feel the core of anxiety in my belly right now, no different from every other time I've sat down to write anything, no matter how excited I am about the topic or how confident I feel that it will appeal to readers.

Of course the monkey above seems quite pensive. That's because it knows something vital about anxiety. Anxiety holds on with greater strength when you try to avoid or overcome it; anxiety lets go when you let it in. No one knows this better than Daniel Smith, author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety.

Typically I use book references or quotes to support a concept I'm sharing, but Smith's book is so good, this post is also a positive review. I could pick any section at random to demonstrate his wit and honesty, but here's one about his personal anxiety scale:

It runs from zero to ten, zero being catatonic and ten being the guy in Edvard Munch's The Scream, where, psychologically speaking, you're on a bridge surrounded by faceless strangers who are unable or unwilling to help you and the sky is blood-orange-red and swirling and hectic and everything is so bleak and awful that you'd rather die than spend another second where you are.

Eventually Smith discovered what I learned from R. Reid Wilson. However counter-intuitive it may seem, when you face into your anxieties, they surrender.

You and the people you coach can design experiments that speak directly to their anxieties. One of my clients, for example, loved amusement parks but avoided the scary rides, especially the roller coaster. While exploring her anxieties, she agreed that her fear of the roller coaster could symbolize all her fears, so she went to the amusement park, sat alone in the front seat of the roller coaster car, and stayed on the ride several times, until her anxiety subsided. This shifted her assumption that her fear had her.

Smith exemplified his own, similar shift, by his reaction to cutting his finger while slicing an English muffin:

The cut was severe. I could see the pink of deep tissue and beneath it the bone. A year earlier I would have had instant visions of disaster -- the night, the week and in turn an entire existence ruined by a hasty gesture. Now I just stood in the kitchen watching the blood drip into the sink, thinking, Well, that just happened. Better do something about it. And then I allowed myself a moment of quiet pride, for such matter-of-fact poise and practicality -- such reflexive poise and practicality -- signaled a momentous shift in my mental life. When they wove the stitches in, I almost smiled.