Two-chair work in coaching

Two-chair is a very powerful work that many schools of psychotherapy have borrowed from Gestalt therapy and psychodrama. In therapy, two chair work takes a person into the past to resolve unfinished issues. It could however, be very effectively adapted for coaching.
One application of this when clients experience conflicts within themselves, when they are of “two minds,” or when they are “at war with themselves.” Splits or conflicts often involve issues of desire and criticism or of desire, fear, and criticism.
These kinds of situations involve a harsh and critical voice (also known as the “inner critic”). In this two chair work, one chair embodies the critic, and the person speaks from this perspective while in the chair. In the other chair, which is known as the experiencing chair, the person expresses how it feels to be criticized. An example of is of a client who wanted to get back to her writing and found herself procrastinating because she would make very high demands of herself. She was able to have dialogue between the critic and the creative side of herself. She discovered that both sides were frightened of each other. She was able to work out moderated bursts of creativity that did not allow her critical side to be overwhelmed.
Another kind of inner dilemma can be found around decisions. Indecision may reflect a conflict between two values or choices in the future. Decisions to take a new job or stay in the current one may not have a clear right or wrong answer. Having each chair represent a side of the argument and having the client speak from that perspective (“I want to stay in my current job,” “I want to take the new job”) can help him or her get a clearer sense of the emotional valence of each side as well as some historical factors and introjects that may be contributing to the indecision.

Experimental Freedom in Coaching

While coaching is about talking and helping a client generate options, there are a variety of techniques that the coach can borrow from various schools of therapy that can be brought into play. Here are some techniques that can be brought from Gestalt therapy which is more experiential than talk therapy.

Through experiments, the coach supports the client’s direct experience of something new, instead of merely talking about the possibility of something new. The coach creates an experience in which a client might learn something as part of their growth.

Examples might include: (1) Rather than talking about the client's boss, a coach might ask the client to imagine the boss is present, or that the coach is the boss, and talk to that boss directly; (2) If a client is struggling with how to be assertive, a coach could have the client say some assertive things to the coach or (3) A coach might notice something about the non-verbal behavior or tone of voice of the client; then the coach might have the client exaggerate the non-verbal behavior and pay attention to that experience; (4) A coach therapist might work with the breathing or posture of the client, and direct awareness to changes that might happen when the client talks about different content. With all these experiments the coach is working with process rather than content, the How rather than the What.

A letter to yourself

In this blog, I am going to make a list of tools to use in coaching. Here is one called "Letter to yourself" - an NLP technique. This is preceeded by a visualisation about the person the clients wants to be in the future. "With soft eyes - open your eyes slowly, staying connected to the future you. Let the future you write a letter to the present you, giving practical advice on how to be ... what yo believe... what you have learned that will continue to unfold and benefit you from now on.. what kind of actions to take... what kind of physiology is useful... what to say to yourself... what to say to others...what you can do on a dily basis... Let the free, wise, future you guide you now!"

The roles of a peer coach

An extract from Marshall Goldsmith's article on peer coaching.

“ Each coach plays three basic roles for the other. From the peer coach’s point of view:
• I’m your thinking partner
• I’m here as objective support
• I’m here to help you be accountable

Thinking Partner:

It’s always easier to see someone more objectively than yourself. Even if I’m struggling to improve in the same developmental areas as you, I am much more capable of identifying a solution for you than I am for myself. It is difficult to know what to do when we find ourselves in the heat of a developmental opportunity.
Having someone I can turn to for direction when I’m lost in my old patterns is
enormously helpful, especially when this person is someone who knows me and, and is
someone I can trust enough to reveal my blind spots and vulnerabilities.

Objective Support:

My stakeholders know my old patterns well because they’ve lived and worked with them
over time. You as my peer coach come from a fresh point of view. You can see beyond
our history, and you can see many more possibilities and strategies that are way outside the box of my habitual work experience.

Accountability:

I know you’re going to ask me how I’m doing with the goals I set last week. You’re the one I entrusted with my list of what I really want to accomplish, and what I’ve committed to myself I’ll actually do. I’m counting on you to remember to ask me."

Scaling questions

Scaling questions are useful in helping clients to assess their own situations, track their own progress, or evaluate how others might rate them on a scale of 0 to 10. Scaling questions are relatively easy to use and extremely versatile.
Here are some guidelines for scaling questions.
After you introduce them to the scale ( 0 being the worst and 10 being the best in what they desire), ask them where they see themselves currently. Often you can ask the client to describe what 0 and 10 means to them. Ask them what they are already doing that allows them to be there (What are you doing right already? What has worked for you in achieving this? Who has helped?) This allows them to see what they can build on. Ask what they would do differently to get to the next number. Visualise success by asking the client to describe the next level. Ask if the client has in the past ever been in a higher position on the scale. Ask what helped them get there. Ask how they could replicate that in a sustained manner. Scaling questions could also be asked to compare self perception with social perception (How would your boss rate your risk taking on the same scale?)
Scaling questions can be used at the beginning and end of any session. They can be used at the beginning and end of a coaching relationship.

In what way is a group more powerful than one-on-one coaching?

I experience game playing on part of a client much more in a one-on-one setting than in a group setting. Here is an extract from Daniel Kahneman’s 'Thinking, fast and slow" that may explain why that is so. He says, “It is much more easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognise our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinion of others.”

When I get stuck with a person, I often invite others to share what they see. The sharing of the others is a powerful reinforcer to what I attempt as a coach. It also gives me some time out to look at the conversation in a detached way and approach it from another angle.

Another thing I have seen is the as each person is working through an issue, every other person in the room is connecting with it. It is a powerful permission to talk about one’s own difficulties. People often report feeling more empathetic. They are able to understand the motivations behind what they would otherwise label as difficult behaviour. Most of all, the fact that they are not alone in what they experience, reduces the struggle and leads to an acceptance of the situation. Without the struggle, the issue is a lot more manageable. That is why I love group coaching.

Three people working – the client, the coach and the process

When a coaching session is successful, who should take the credit? While it may seem like the coach made it happen, the real credit is the client’s who actually made the change. However, there is one more factor that aided the success – that was the process. The coaching process is designed to make a client successful. Here is how the process contributes.

The client chooses to participate and brings the agenda. What can be a bigger contributor to the success than this!
The process is contractual. The coach and the client and working towards the goal stated by the client
The ownership of the issue and the change is with the client. That is the fundamental principle of development.

People often say that they might have arrived at the same solution if they had thought about it on their own. That is possible. But do they? Another simple but significant reason why coaching works it makes people take time out for reflection. They focus on problems that they may have otherwise ignored. And there is something about articulation and the supportive relationship that helps open up options, the way just reflection doesn’t. The safety and the inquiry all adds to the person coming up with options he/she is committed to.

At the end of a session, a client states what he/she is going to do. We take promises that we make to others much more seriously that we do promises we make to ourselves (remember new year resolutions!). Thus a lot of change may happen, just in the process of listening without the coach having to do anything significant. Quite a humbling fact for coaches. The process is powerful.

The miracle question

An extract from Wikipedia :
This is a question that the coach uses to aid the client to envision how the future will be different when the problem is no longer present. Also, this may help to establish goals.
A traditional version of the miracle question would go like this:
"Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, some time in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened overnight nobody is telling you that the miracle happened. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? ... What else are you going to notice? What else?"
There are many different versions of the miracle question depending on the context and the client.
In a specific situation, the counselor may ask,
"If you woke up tomorrow, and a miracle happened so that you no longer easily lost your temper, what would you see differently?" What would the first signs be that the miracle occurred?"
The client (a child) may respond by saying,
"I would not get upset when somebody calls me names."
The counselor wants the client to develop positive goals, or what they will do, rather than what they will not do--to better ensure success. So, the counselor may ask the client, "What will you be doing instead when someone calls you names?"

What’s wrong with reviewing the past?

I see a lot of different jargon in the world of coaching and therapy. I came across a kind of therapy called Solutions Focused Brief Therapy. Wikipedia says - “ It focuses on what clients want to achieve through therapy rather than on the problem(s) that made them seek help. The approach does not focus on the past, but instead, focuses on the present and future. The therapist/counselor uses respectful curiosity to invite the client to envision their preferred future and then therapist and client start attending to any moves towards it whether these are small increments or large changes. To support this, questions are asked about the client’s story, strengths and resources, and about exceptions to the problem.”
This sound exactly like what I do in coaching to me – this would be appreciative coaching. Focusing on the dream and drawing on strengths to achieve the dream. I find the statement that “It does not focus on the past” a little painful. Which form of therapy chooses to focus on the past? Therapy, any therapy, is about the future. The past may be visited if it interferes with the present and the future. If it does, then it is imperative that we go into the past and resolve the issue. Without it, no amount of focusing on the future will bring change. Having said that SFBT has some interesting tools that can be powerfully used in coaching.

Contracting for the session

I have seen several coaches plunge into questions after the first sharing of the issue by the client. For instance, if a client says, “I find that I do not have anybody whom I consider a successor in my team and I am under pressure to create a succession plan,” a coach might say, “Why do you say you have no successors?” or “Who could be a good successor?” or any other question. In supervision, if we ask them what the contract was, they would say “He wanted to find a successor.” Did he? That is not clear from the problem statement. The vital question that is often missed by coaches is “In sharing this what are you looking to achieve?” or “What would be a useful outcome for you from this conversation?” This is one question that I have seen makes clients go silent and introspective. It is powerful because it forces them to phrase their problems in the form of a learning goal. It moves them from victim / persecutor positions to adult. That alone sometimes is sufficient in bringing about a change – framing correctly what they want to achieve. Often they are unable to do it, which can be indicative of their readiness to change. A clear can keep the conversations results oriented and prevent game playing. To summarise, the key contracting question, “What outcomes would you like to walk away with at the end of this conversation?”

The power of a group

Yesterday, in a group coaching session, one of my clients contract was “I have been choosing roles I enjoy and avoiding roles and people that I do not enjoy. I don’t seem to be motivated by “growth”. I am very content and relaxed now but people around me feel I am losing out. I would like to think through whether what I am doing is OK.” We went through a very interesting conversation on returns and risks of possible choices, impact on self and others, short term and long term impacts. At the end, he concluded that he was fine being himself. However, the group was not very fine with it. They shared with him that he “should” grow. They felt that he was avoiding pain and running away from challenges. There ensued a very involved debate on the definition of growth and whether everyone was motivated by growth. What was magical was the transformation of the group – from an immediate rejection of the notion to an admiration towards the client for choosing to be himself despite all the pressures. They also recognised that far from being a difficult co worker, this kind of clarity would allow the organisation to carve a role for him around his strengths. It is actually good for an organisation if some people are content doing what they are doing and do not aspire for anything bigger or larger. In listening to the coaching session and learning to accept him with his beliefs, they experienced growth. That is the power of a group!

More than “just questions”

Often people assume that coaching is all about questions. However there are eight kinds of interventions, each appropriate at different times, with questioning just being one of them. Berne defines these as Eight Therapeutic Interventions. These are interrogation, specification, confrontation, explanation, illustration, confirmation, interpretation and crystallisation.
Learning to use these operations is both an art and a science. Like in a dance the pupil masters each step individually by repeating it and perfecting it. Then he /she strings steps together into a single skilled sequence. Eventually the whole act becomes a gracefully flowing act of co-ordination. The steps blend into each other without throes of conscious ordering, it feels automatic. This is where the science becomes art. The coach makes an intuitive decision, but in hindsight is able to resurrect the whole thought process behind it. Explaining the logic of the intervention may take ten to fifteen minutes, yet all this reasoning is condensed to a few seconds of the intervention.
The coach moves through these interventions adeptly, smoothly and effortlessly – with only one goal in mind – helping the client move forward in his/ her goal.

Voice anchoring

Anchoring is a neuro-linguistic programming term. In this a response becomes anchored to (associated with) some stimulus, in such a way that perception of the stimulus (the anchor) leads by reflex to the anchored response occurring. Anchors are capable of being formed and reinforced by repeated stimuli, and thus are analogous to classical conditioning.
In coaching, I use anchoring to repeat permissions. It is Ok to fail. It is ok to make mistakes. It is OK to go slow. Whatever the permission is, as a coach, I repeat it multiple times in the session, very powerfully.
In a coaching session, a client experiences an intense state - where the mind and body are strongly involved together. In such a state when a phrase is repeated and client feels relaxed at listening to the phrase, the phrase and the relaxed state become neurologically linked. We could say that the permission has been taken in. Anchoring works on the unconsious mind. It can suport a person powerfully in making the change

Just giving myself some very good advice

And I am going to follow it, unlike Alice. I am writing this blog to find my own voice. There are so many little nuggets of learning in every coaching session that I do. By capturing this in notes to myself, I can not just push the efficacy of my own coaching but hopefully can create knowledge, tools and frameworks for the coaching world at large. Helping each person make progress faster by choosing the most appropriate intervention, fine tuning questions, using both left and right brained approaches, identifying parallel processes, cracking tough nuts, increasing the reach of coaching – I want to write about anything that will give more power to coaching in this world

Why coaching is unbeatable

Coaching is a wonderful process. It works because the ownership of learning is firmly placed with the client. It is contractual and therefore result oriented. Thus a lot of game-playing is avoided in the very design of the process. Again, I love it because it leads to change. Even a single session can be life changing. Although results are not guaranteed, the chances of success here are much higher than any other developmental process that I am aware of. It is based on trust, support, listening, empathy – all the values that seem to be dying in our race to get somewhere. It makes people feel more empowered and confident. What else do we want?