Are You Positioned for Neurocoaching?

What’s the most important skill you have as a coach? According to Matthew Atkinson, a clinical coach, social worker and author of Resurrection after Rape, it’s rapport building. The ability to rapidly build rapport with a client is founded on mirror neurons, which enable the coach to express empathy and the client to feel heard. Matthew says that clinicians with the highest level of measurable positive outcomes attribute their success to the client and coach’s belief in the process. Belief engages neural pathways involved in imagery from the right lateral temporal lobes to the visual regions. These are just two of dozens of examples where understanding the neuroscience may be helpful to coaching practice.

Four years ago executives around the world were asked by Sherpa Coaching about what sort of background they thought would be helpful for a coach. Psychology and counselling came in as least desirable on the list. This year’s Executive Survey (2014) by the same firm found that neuroscience has topped the field of desirable backgrounds. What’s true for the goose is also true for the gander; 76 percent of coaches surveyed said neuroscience should play a strong role in coaching too. Coaches are now gearing up, and I am no exception! So what exactly is neurocoaching? Well it is the latest in a long line of brain-related disciplines that gather under the banner of neuroscience.

Broadly defined, neuroscience is a combination of medicine, physiology, applied psychology, immunology, the study of human behavior and some hard core imaging in big, white, expensive machines. It has been around as a scientific discipline for around 150 years and has evolved over four distinct eras:

Mechanics: Those who study brain structure are called neurobiologists. This mechanical understanding is often descriptive: “This is Broca’s area and it processes language.”

Electricians: In 1902 Camillo Golgi and Ramón y Cajal discovered that neurons have an electrical charge. Those who study neurons are called neurophysiologists.

Chemists: In 1962 Bernard Katz discovered synaptic communication. This lead to the new field of neuropsychiatrists adding back missing brain chemistry.

Network engineers: In the 1970’s Eric Kandel studied how memory works across networks. Affective neuroscientists focus on how emotions work and cognitive neuroscientists focus on how thinking and consciousness work.

In the last ten years at least five distinct application disciplines have emerged:

• Neuroleadership: informing leadership, HR, change management and training/teaching.
• Neurolinguistics: understanding how we comprehend, filter, learn language, use self-talk and how beliefs are formed.
• Neuropsychology: brain injury, brain trauma and the assessment of cognitive function.
• Neuropsychotherapy: understanding how talking therapies change the brain and behavior.

Let me make something clear before moving on. Just knowing which parts of the brain fire up when we look at a psychological test inside a brain scanner does not make brain science useful to coaches. Describing neurology and affecting actual performance are a long distance apart. Once we know that juggling improves memory (which oddly enough it does), you still have to practice juggling and recitation of facts. Once we know rapid eye movement desensitizes trauma (which again it does), you still have to go to EMDR therapy for six weeks and the results are not permanent. That’s where neurocoaching come in, because the coach can grasp what the doctoral students have learned (described) and walk their client through skill development and strategy deployment.

So here comes neurocoaching!

Neurocoaching is the integration of neuroscience breakthroughs into coaching by applying it in a way ordinary clients can actually use it. Central to a coach’s interest is the discovery of neuroplasticity – the idea that the way you think can physically alter your brain at the neural level and reverse previous learning, impairment or damage. When you think different thoughts, especially changing your inner dialogue or self-talk, you will get different neurochemistry (feelings) and outcomes. The more you practice a new state, the more it becomes the default setting.

We have signed up to become part of the emerging field of neurocoaching. We are collaborating with research scientists, Ph.D students and coaches working with trauma sufferers and exposing our coaching to the scrutiny of evidence-based research. We think neurocoaching is the future. I eagerly await the future, watch this space.