Why Transformative Coaching Takes Guts
Most trained coaches know how to be supportive, encouraging and nonjudgmental. These approaches are useful but often not enough to create a new awareness. Coaching starts by building trust and rapport, but as the conversation goes deeper you might need to generate a bit of discomfort to create a breakthrough in thinking.
What happens when you challenge someone’s thinking?
In order to define who we are and make sense of the world around us, our brains develop constructs and rules that we strongly protect without much thought. In Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (Ecco, 2011), neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga says we get stuck in our automatic thought-processing and fool ourselves into thinking we are right. When someone asks us why we did something, we immediately come up with an answer even if the response doesn’t make complete sense. We instantly concoct a brilliant reason for procrastinating on a task, for prioritizing reading email over a project deadline or for making life decisions based on how we will feel in the future when, in truth, we can never be sure how the circumstances will impact us emotionally.
To disturb this automatic processing, you reflect holes in your client’s logic and ask questions that reveal the fears, needs and desires keeping the constructs in place. NeuroBusiness Group founder and CEO Srinivasan S. Pillay, M.D., writes that this coaching approach is the only way to stop the automatic processing. Reflection and questions crack the force field that protects your client’s sense of reality, enabling her to explore, examine and change strongly held beliefs and behavior.
The reaction to bringing these things to light will register somewhere between slight discomfort and an emotional outpour. Momentary confusion and abrupt realizations trigger emotional reactions. The truth can hurt or at least surprise you before it sets you free.
Therefore, negative emotions can be a good sign. When your client realizes she has blocked a truth that was in her face the entire time, she may feel mortified, angry or sad. She is finally confronting her rationalizations and seeing her blind spots. For a moment, her brain does not know what to think. As Nessa Victoria Bryce writes in the July/August 2014 issue of Scientific American Mind, this pause in certainty as the brain rushes to reinterpret information is necessary for a clearer and broader understanding of the situation to emerge. In researching how coaching works in the brain for The Discomfort Zone, I found this moment of uncertainty is necessary for behavioral learning to occur. Only with this new awareness will your client willfully commit to behaving in a different way.
How do you know what to say to trigger the brain to learn?
The powerful questions that change clients’ minds emerge when you listen to your heart and gut as well as your head. You ask about what you sense—what fears, disappointment, needs or desires are conveyed to you without words. Your client then stops and questions herself.
You need to access your entire nervous system to pick up signals from your client’s entire nervous system. Some people define this process as listening to your intuition; biologically, it means you’re listening to and trusting all of the signals you receive from your heart and gut, as well as your head. In so doing, you access the critical data you need to fully comprehend what is going on in the human you are conversing with.
To activate your full sensory capabilities, you need to feel grounded in the present moment and visualize opening all three centers in your neural network where you receive input. Then you have to trust what you sense and courageously ask your client for permission to share these notions. When you do, you need to bravely accept how she reacts.
Depending on your personality, you may find it easier to access one sensory capability over the other. People who tend to be helpers listen more easily from the heart than the gut. Risk-takers who move quickly on instinct find it easier to listen from the gut than from the heart. As a born risk-taker, I have to consciously open my heart when I coach, teach or argue with my partner. I may feel vulnerable, but it’s effective.
If you intentionally practice listening from your various centers every day, you will come to more naturally access your intuition. This will help you discover the reflections and questions that will crack the force field protecting your client’s sense of self and reality, allowing a new awareness to emerge. The more you can get the neurons sparking in the brains of your clients, the greater the chance for a breakthrough in awareness to occur. Have the guts to use your heart and guts in coaching.
Marcia Reynolds, MCC, PsyD (USA)
Marcia Reynolds, MCC, PsyD, is a world-renowned expert on how to evoke transformation through conversations. She is a past chair of the ICF Global Board of Directors, the training director for the Healthcare Coaching Institute, and on faculty for coaching schools in China, Russia, and the Philippines. She has spoken at conferences and taught workshops in 41 countries. Her books include Wander Woman; Outsmart Your Brain; The Discomfort Zone; and Coach the Person, Not the Problem. Read more at covisioning.com.
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Hi Marcia! Greetings from Buenos Aires.Your article helps me recall this answer that come again and again when I work with coaches teaching them a somatic approach: Whichs is the emotion needed when posing unconfortable questions? many coaches thinks they have to be annoying. In my experience the authentic curiosity, taking the risk of not knowing is helpful as well acting like an explorer, and antropologist: We need to know the coherence in the inner world of the coachee. Regarding the rapport issue confidence is built more than anything trough body language, and this is a ” deuda pendiente”, a task not made it for manygraduates
Hi Andrea! Yes, many somatic approaches help coaches to be aware of the messages they are receiving beyond their brains. Yet we still have to be conscious of the emotions we feel throughout the coaching and shift them back to curiosity, compassion, and courage as needed. When delivering a challenging and powerful reflection or question, we must first know the trust and intimacy has been set, and that we as coaches are sharing because we care about our clients and know they have what it takes to break through their blocks to move on. Then we shouldn’t be afraid to be direct with our reflections and questions. The client might react emotionally as they work through the process but this is the best way to help them break their blind spots and resistance. In the end, it will be a fulfilling session for you both.
THANK YOU for your courage to teach this to other coaches!
there is already a transformational and generative coaching training programme available. It is called mBraining. You become qualified as a multi-brain (head, heart, gut) integrative technique coach. I am a trainer for this is New Zealand. Their website is mBraining.com. It trains people who already have a basic coach training.
Sadly, the ICF has declined giving the programme CCEU points
It is the best training a coach could add to their skills. Neuroscience meeting ancient wisdom. How to align a clients head heart and gut to bring into living from their highest levels of living and being. Check it out.
I do reference Grant Soosalu & Marvin Oka’s work in my book, The Discomfort Zone. They have done outstanding research and programs. As for CCEU’s, it probably has to do more with meeting the basic requirements around who is teaching and how it maps up to the competencies. But I agree with you that the techniques are wonderful for coaches to know.
I cannot agree more with your point of view that integrating head, heart and gut in coaching makes for a transformative outcome. I experience it again and again with clients.
In this regard, I find the work of James Flawerty at New Ventures West most valuable. In what he calls ‘six streams’, he focuses on the cognitive, emotional and somatic streams as you do in your posting. He adds another three streams: relational, spiritual and integrating (or integral). I find the relational stream valuable given how critical it is for a client to build and maintain a support network in achieving the desired transformation you speak about. A spiritual stream allows for broadening past the self and the immediate environment. Where magic happens, so to speak, is when all five come together integrally, when the dots connects.
Spot on! this is in a nut shell the basis of true transformational coaching!
Inspiring post to start the week, ‘to have guts to use heart & guts in Coaching’
To coach from a state of Being!
Great article Marcia, and very elegantly articulated. Bill.
This website was… how do you say it? Relevant!!
Finally I have found something that helped me. Thank you!
This post is interesting, i want to practice those points !!
Thanks so much, Marcia, for sharing your crystal clear thinking in this important area.
Sherry
Being transformative coaching is always a challenging task as you need to trigger someone’s thinking and try to make them think positive. Sometimes a coach may tell you the things that looks stupid and funny in the first go which may be very very helpful later on. So as a coach, telling those things to an audience needs guts.
A great & informative article and keep sharing the same on a regular basis.
Hello,
This is the blog that is very helping information transformative coaching is great. thank you for share this blog