Psychosynthesis Coaching

Psychosynthesis Coaching

Personal development and the leadership coach

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16th September 2018

Aubyn Howard

‘The unexamined life is not worth living…’ Socrates as reported by Plato

Why are personal and professional development inseparable in coaching? Within psychosynthesis coaching, we view the coach’s ability to practice a psychospiritual approach as a function of their own level of personal development, psycho-spiritual training and coaching skills. In this post, I explore what we mean by personal development and how it combines with professional development for the psychosynthesis coach…

Part 1: establishing the context

Most coaching approaches will put some attention on personal development for the coach. Sometimes this can be little more than lip service and in other cases it represents a more serious commitment.  It is interesting to note that APECS is unique amongst the coaching professional bodies in asking potential members to describe their previous development in terms of professional and personal development (which they term CPPD).

Psychosynthesis coaching involves working with the inner as well as the outer world of our clients and always holding a developmental context alongside other agendas and goals. The inner world concerns our interior lives of thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, dreams and anxieties, our light and our shadow, the heights and depths of our unconscious, not just our everyday awareness. The territory includes working with the psyche and the Self in all its dimensions, which I have described in a previous post. Within this context, personal development is both essential and central to the development of the coach and their professional practice. Personal development isn’t an add-on or optional extra to professional development, it is what makes coaching in this way at deeper levels possible and increases our capacity to do it well. It is important that we show why this is the case and explore what we mean by personal development in this context – that is what this post is about.

I am inviting you as the reader to take a closer look at your relationship with your own development and to challenge you to reflect upon it in new ways. I will go further and suggest that it would be fairly pointless to learn about psychosynthesis coaching as an approach which encompasses various methods, models, tools and skills, without continuously drawing upon yourself and your own experience of development as an inner reference point.

Psychosynthesis can itself be described as an holistic approach to personal development, involving what Roberto Assagioli called personal and transpersonal psychosynthesis, as we follow our individual journeys towards self-realisation and self-actualisation.  Following a brief introduction to the topic of personal development, I will expand upon this psychosynthesis context with specific reference to Assagioli’s work.

What is personal development?

Personal development is a vast and complex topic that can be approached in many different ways.  It is inter-woven with the whole field of psychology, the story of the human potential movement, the leadership and talent development world, the popular self-help industry and of course the modern coaching profession. You are likely to have your own understanding of what personal development is based upon your history and experience, so whatever your starting point and whatever perspectives you bring are valid and relevant to the theme we are exploring here.

I choose the work of Abraham Maslow and his concepts of self-actualisation and the hierarchy of needs as a useful starting point for defining personal development, not least because many others have done so before me.

As early as 1943 Maslow defined self-actualisation as “… the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” Adding to this, the ‘Skills You Need’ website says:

Self-actualisation refers to the desire that everybody has ‘to become everything that they are capable of becoming’. In other words, it refers to self-fulfilment and the need to reach full potential as a unique human being. Maslow also says (1970, p.383) that all individuals have the need to see themselves as competent and autonomous, also that every person has limitless room for growth.

This website then offers a number of practical steps and resources for creating your vision, planning, starting, recording, and reviewing your personal development. This is certainly a useful introduction to the discipline of personal development for many people working in organisations.

In an on-line blog post, Myrko Thum defines Personal Development as ‘the conscious pursuit of personal growth by expanding self-awareness and knowledge and improving personal skills’ and quotes Jung’s “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”, as a way to focus personal development on working with the unconscious. He goes on to cite the well-known four stages of competencemodel (first articulated by Martin Broadwell in 1969) – where we start in unconscious incompetence in our relationship to a skill or capability (it’s not on our radar), then move to conscious incompetence as we recognise the need to develop the capability (we want to be able to do it), eventually build our conscious competency (we can do it but we need to think about it) before this becomes habit and part of our unconscious competence (we do it automatically). I have often seen trainers explaining this sequence using the example of learning to drive to illustrate the stages, but really it can be applied to anything, including coaching skills and models.

Another well-known tool for working with the conscious and unconscious in relation to personal development is the JoHari Window – created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955, as a model that helps people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. A simple four quadrants grid is created by combining what is known to self and unknown to self on one (X) axis, and what is known to other sand not known to others along the other (Y) axis. This creates four ‘windows’ (or ‘rooms’ as Charles Handy used to say), namely the open space, the hidden area, the blind spot and the unknown. The objective in terms of improving relationship with others is to maximise the size of the open arena through exercising the key skills of appropriate self-disclosure (to reduce our hidden area) and asking for and receiving feedback (to reduce our blind spot area). Of course, this is easier said than done and takes a life time of practice, but this represents another useful starting point for engaging in personal development alongside team and organisational development.

The JoHari Window (created by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham)

When I first encountered this model in the 1990’s, I was always curious about how we might explore the unknown or unconscious area more fully and was never very satisfied with the answers I received at the time.  Amongst other things, this led me to study psychosynthesis which uniquely seems to provide a holistic map of the psyche which can help us recognise and navigate all the dimensions of our consciousness and unconsciousness, including what is sometimes called the shadow. To quote Robert Bly, “Shadow” is one of Carl Jung’s most useful terms for a part of the human psyche… it conveys a visual image – we might call the shadow “the dark, unlit and repressed side of the ego complex”.

My own conception of personal development is that it concerns the continuing development of the person, the whole human being, of our personhood, however we might say it*. Personal development is loosely synonymous with self-development and personal growth, although as a term it is now the most commonly used to refer to the discipline, practice and professional field of working on ourselves. It is important to remember that this practice is always owned by ourselves, by the individual, and that we hold agency and responsibility for it.  I cannot have a personal development objective for you, only for myself, although I can support you in your personal development, as we do as coaches.

The implication here is that we need a theory or model of the person, of the whole human being as a reference point for personal development.  Without this, different approaches tend to work unconsciously from a received set of assumptions about the psyche that have not been made explicit. Psychosynthesis offers such a model, as well as a more nuanced understanding of where personal development might take us, and this is now where I will turn.

* A brief aside – we are using the word personal in several different ways, which may cause some confusion. As well as meaning of the person, as described above, it also confers the meaning of individual, so when we refer to personal development we are really referring to our unique individual development (as opposed to team or organisational development). Within this broad sense of the person, we focus on the personality, as with the use of personality profiling tools and addressing personality edges and issues. Finally, within psychosynthesis we are using personalto describe the middle or most accessible realm of the human consciousness, as opposed to the lowerunconscious or prepersonal, or the higher unconscious or transpersonal.  Personalcan also be used to mean the private (or off-limits in leadership coaching) aspect of our lives (as contrasted with business-personal), but we are not drawing upon that meaning here.  Phew, this can be complicated!

Psychosynthesis as a path for personal development

The relationship between Maslow’s and Assagioli’s work and how they informed each other is a recurring topic in my writing. Assagioli recognised ‘that people are not equally developed from the psychological and spiritual point of view’ (1988, p107) and offers a way of understanding how personal development takes place along two inter-related but distinct dimensions.  He recognises and endorses Maslow’s work concerning self-actualisation but shows how this only takes us so far in terms of understanding how people develop and grow psycho-spiritually.

Drawing upon his map of the psyche (the Egg diagram), which distinguishes between prepersonal, personal and transpersonal levels of consciousness (see here), Assagioli distinguishes these two dimensions of development (1974, p121):

In the terminology of psychosynthesis, self-actualization corresponds to personal psychosynthesis. This includes the development and harmonizing of all human functions and potentialities at all levels of the lower and middle area in the diagram of the constitution of man. Instead, Self­-realization concerns the third higher level, that of the superconscious, and pertains to transpersonal or spiritual psychosynthesis.

Maslow’s later work recognises this distinction as he starts to speak in terms of transcending self-actualisers as well as non-transcending self-actualisers. Assagioli’s model of individual self-actualisation and self-realisation is our orienting model for psychosynthesis coaching in relationship to personal development. There has been much debate within psychosynthesis world about the relationship between the two dimensions of development; whether they are sequential (personal psychosynthesis broadly preceding transpersonal psychosynthesis), concurrent (we are working on both aspects much of the time) or follow a pattern that is unique to each individual (which I tend to favour). In the graphic above I have drawn a spiral as an example of the way we might illustrate a personal journey alternating between the two dimensions.

The important thing is that this model helps us hold the tension between self-actualisation and self-realisation and to be curious about the developmental journey of ourselves and our clients. For example, some of us might lean towards self-realisation (transcenders) and others towards self-actualisation (actualisers) in our personal development journey. This gives us a clue as to the type of challenges and crises we might encounter along the way. Transcenders tend to encounter crises of duality as they struggle with embodiment, with being spirit in matter, with making their way in the world and dealing with the practicalities of life.  Actualisers tend to encounter crises of meaning as they strive to achieve and succeed, often evoking considerable stress in pursuit of actualising their potential in the world. Some of us will recognise both states from reflecting upon different periods of our life, and we might start to trace a pattern which resembles the spiral above (see my example below).

The focus of personal psychosynthesis is on developing a strong and healthy personal “I” (sometimes referred to the I-self, small self or the personality), as the centre of our everyday awareness and self-consciousness, the psychological container and vehicle through which we experience our higher Self and actualise our potential in our lives through engaging our will. This is about being able to function happily and effectively as human beings, both in our inner experiential lives and our outer lives of relationships and actions.  This part of personal development is about working on ourselves and the personality edges, blind spots and distortions that are unwelcomed and unconscious echoes of the past. The key here is building a level of self- awareness, knowledge and acceptance that gives us sufficient psychological and behavioural freedom to activate our will, rather than necessarily changing the way we are, which is not always possible or even desirable!

The focus of transpersonal psychosynthesis is on the higher Self – who we are most essentially, the source of our being and our becoming. Without getting too technical about this more spiritual domain, this is the territory of all the ancient and modern paths to self-realisation, self-discovery or enlightenment. This part of personal development is about learning to listen to, resonate with, reach towards and recognise our essential being and unrealised potential. This is particularly difficult because most of the time we are too identified with different parts of our experience, personality, or outer lives to be able to listen to the Self. Hence the need to start with personal psychosynthesis and the practice of disidentification and identification. This work is about discovering meaning and purpose for our lives from within rather than externally.

To explain more fully what Assagioli meant by self-realisation in a psycho-spiritual context, I will paraphrase from Psychosynthesis (1965, p21-22):

attaining the goal of self-realisation begins with getting to know and mastering our personality.  This involves an inner exploration of our lower, middle and higher unconscious, in other words, working on ourselves at different levels, to discover our true abilities and higher potentialities, and thus engaging self-actualisation. This leads to the recognition and realisation of our true or higher Self, which becomes the unifying centre for our further development – transpersonal psychosynthesis.

Within this, the starting point and main focus of the work of personal development is best summarised as getting to know and mastering our personality, through exploring all levels of our consciousness.  This is an important message both to ourselves as coaches and for those we are coaching and gets missed in more superficial approaches to personal development that only emphasise developing skills and behaviour.

Finally, let me use my own life as a (highly simplified) example of the interplay of these two dimensions – following every appearance of outward success at school (1), I hit a crisis of identity and meaning as a young adult at university (2), that led to an inner search for truth and understanding of who I was (3), in which I embarked upon a path that led to a series of peak experiences and profound self-realisation (4), liberating me to express myself fully and experience an extended period of career achievement (5), culminating in a gradual return to self-doubt and questioning at a deeper level (6), leading me to engage in a rich period of personal and professional development (7), fuelling a new phase of actualisation in the organisational world (8), before responding to a pull towards my current work with psychosynthesis coaching, bringing inner healing and resolution (9), which I am now channelling into my courses and writing (10).  Elsewhere (in the book I am writing), I will unpack this journey in a little more detail, colouring in my personal development in terms of aspirations, strengths, issues and edges during each of these phases, as well as how this translates into Assagioli’s language of personal and transpersonal psychosynthesis. For now, I simply want to show an example of how these phases illustrate cycling between periods of working on self-realisation and self-actualisation.

What next?

Having established this contextual foundation for how we might approach personal development as psychosynthesis coaches, in my next post I will introduce a model to help us and our clients recognise the psychological issues and personality edges that most need working on. I will then explore the following seven perspectives for coaches engaging with personal development:

1: it starts with an attitude –why attitudes need continuous reflection and renewal

2: know thyself, know thy client –appreciating the psychospiritual territory in which we are working as a guide

3: what’s my stuff, what’s your stuff? – and how does my stuff get along with your stuff?

4: ways of working on yourself – formal and informal, obvious and not so obvious

5: finding your edges to work on – this tricky part of personal development

6: assessing your personal development – ways of reviewing progress

7: knowing it’s always personal – not leaving ourselves out of the picture

The second post on this topic of personal development for the leadership coach will follow soon!

Thanks for reading.

Aubyn

 

P.S. Tickets for our Psychosynthesis Coaching Symposium on 14thNovember are now on sale at:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/first-annual-psychosynthesis-coaching-symposium-tickets-50022564838

 

References

Assagioli, Roberto (1965), ‘Psychosynthesis’

Assagioli, Roberto (1974), ‘The Act of Will’

Assagioli, Roberto (1988), ‘Transpersonal Development’

Bly, Robert (1988), ‘A little Book on the Human Shadow’

Maslow, Abraham (1968), ‘Towards a psychology of Being’

Maslow, Abraham (1970), ‘Motivation and Personality’, (2nd Edition)

Myrko Thum: http://www.myrkothum.com/what-is-personal-development/(2012)

Skills Your Need: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/personal-development.html(2018)

Coaching and therapy – challenging the orthodoxy

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10 January 2017

When running courses on coaching, we are frequently asked questions about the relationship, boundaries and differences between therapy or counselling and coaching. This topic is fraught with difficulty and complexity and is prone to trite or superficial treatment, so I want to have a go at shedding some light on it and set it within the larger context of shifting sands within the therapy and coaching worlds.

The prevailing narrative

If you google “what is the difference between therapy or counselling and coaching?” or something similar you will find plenty of mostly superficial answers to the question that seek to delineate territory in ways that end up limiting the scope of both counselling and coaching to fit the authors agenda (disclaimer – I too have an agenda for this piece! See later).

Michael Bader in Psychology Today (The difference Between Coaching and Therapy is Greatly Overstated, April 15, 2009) identifies this problem pretty well from stories he often hears from coaches, e.g. they work with the future and therapists with the past, coaches work to make healthy clients better, therapist work with pathology and problems, etc.  He suggests “that this is a mythic narrative that aims to insulate coaching – a profession in its infancy – from claims that it’s therapy without a license. It seeks to protect the egos and wallets of coaches while appeasing therapists on the same grounds”. He goes on to lay some of the blame for this at the door of the therapy profession for practicing “a model of psychotherapy that is so ridiculously narrow and theory-driven”.

A good example of this ‘dodgy’ narrative can be found on Tony Robbins’ website – “life coach vs therapist, learn the difference”, in which although he acknowledges overlaps, he then proceeds to define coaching in very narrow terms of client agendas (e.g. working to improve communication skills or work-life balance) that fit his target market of “ambitious achievers” (e.g. Laloux’s Achievement paradigm).

Even worse offenders (which I won’t name) of this dodgy narrative make sweeping distinctions (in addition to the common future and past delineation), along the lines that coaching deals with the conscious mind, rational behaviours, measurable goals, involves positive thinking and focusing on solutions (i.e. all the good stuff), whereas therapy or counselling works with the unconscious mind, with emotions, subjective goals, pathologies and problems (i.e. all the murky stuff).  This narrative is usually espoused by coaching schools that offer a very prescriptive method for young or inexperienced coaches on the basis that if they follow the method this will keep them (and their client) safe from straying off the path and into deep waters. The problem with this very delineated approach (this belongs to coaching, that belongs to counselling) is that people (i.e. all clients) are whole human beings who bring the good stuff as well as the murky stuff with them, their light and their dark, their conscious goals and their unconscious drives, whether to coaching or counselling.  There is another fundamental problem with any attempt to separate rational and emotional domains – all the recent neuropsychological research (e.g. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow) points towards a much greater role of the unconscious and our emotions in all our behaviour and decision making than previously acknowledged by the modern western worldview. Particularly in business and organisational life where the rational and individual agency has been elevated at the expense of the emotional and the human system, a new awareness is beginning to be established (a topic for another blog).

Some better approaches (from my google search) tackle the distinction by working through themes such as; the objectives, agendas or focus (of the activity); education, training and qualification (required of practitioners); ethics and governance (of the profession); approaches and methods (e.g. psychologies) used. The most useful commentary along these lines I found at https://www.sacap.edu.za/blog/coaching/whats-difference-counselling-coaching/, describes the relationship between professional counsellors and coaches as comparable to that of stepsiblings. The author goes on, “The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on goals, action and accountability, although an experienced coach will know when to look at the past should it inform the present and help pinpoint limiting belief systems. So, while counselling is geared towards understanding and resolving the past for healing, coaching works with functional people and uses the past only insofar as it provides a context in which future goals can be set.” This goes some way to teasing out the subtleties needed, but is still part of a static approach and as such has limitations.

A Dynamic Practitioner Framework – the Four C’s

I suggest a more dynamic approach for differentiating counselling and coaching that will (i) help us understand differences within coaching and counselling practice as well as between coaching and counselling and (ii) also help coaches and counsellors alike think critically about how they frame the work they do. We have developed an orienting framework called the Four C’s:

  • Context – what is the context of the relationship?  How has it come about? What is the wider systemic context? Are other parties involved?
  • Contract – what formal or informal goals or outcomes are the focus of the work?  How is the relationship structured and what agreements are made? What is the understanding between practitioner and client?
  • Client – what needs, issues and agendas are they bringing? What is their ego strength and stability? What is their level and depth of personal development, self-awareness and self-responsibility?
  • Capability – what is the coach’s level of education and training, professional and personal development? What is their experience and level of confidence of working in different domains or dimensions or with different types of client?

This framework further breaks into two parts:

Part One: Context and Contract determine the nature of the professional relationship or the ‘container’ – whether counselling or coaching, or what kind of coaching, e.g. life coaching within an individual or personal context or leadership coaching within an organisational context, along with a more complex multi-party contract.

Context and contracting are all important in any practitioner relationship.  We are not just saying that coaching and counselling will have different contexts, but that the practitioner (i) needs to be aware and able to hold the context of the relationship and (ii) needs the skills to contract with the client (or client system) in a way that is congruent with the context.  This doesn’t mean that everything needs to be written down and formally agreed, but the practitioner and client relationship does need a level of clarity or problems may occur.  Having established these principles, we can start to distinguish how the context and contract might differ between coaching and counselling. This is where we will generally characterise the coaching context as forward looking and outcome oriented in purpose, although this can involve working across temporal dimensions, past present and future.

I like to hold Sir John Whitmore’s (see the 5th edition of Coaching for Performance!) principles of awareness and responsibility as part of my coaching context with clients. There is something of paradox here, in that the coach can take responsibility for holding the context that the client is responsible for their own process, actions and outcomes. One thing we stress as a possible difference with counselling is that the coach doesn’t need to diagnose the client’s issues, rather they are helping the client reach an understanding or diagnosis for themselves with a view to finding solutions or taking actions. As psychosynthesis coaches our focus is on Self (who is this being most essentially and what is emergent for them?) and finding available Will – what small steps or actions will take the client forwards and release more will?  Something we notice with counsellors making the transition to coaching is the tendency to over psychologise and want to fully diagnose the client’s issues for themselves (and therefore spend too long in sessions working on their understanding rather than the coachees). This doesn’t mean the coach shouldn’t be curious or formulate hypotheses, but that they hold these lightly and leave the primary responsibility for understanding with the client.

Contracting is a major topic in itself and Peter Bluckert’s ‘Psychological dimensions of Executive Coaching’ is a good place to start.  Most coaching contracts involve regular monthly or bimonthly meetings and work with repeatable contractual cycles (e.g. of six sessions or three months) but leadership coaching can also allow for ad-hoc meetings or calls in response to emergent situations or crises.  Counselling contracts tend to involve more frequent meetings (e.g. weekly) at the practitioner’s premises and be open ended in terms of duration.  But again, there are no hard and fast rules, providing there is congruence across the four C’s.

Part Two: Client and Capability define the scope and nature of the work that can potentially take place within the professional relationship, the ‘contents’ – as determined by the openness, development and availability of the client as well as the nature of the needs and issues they bring, coupled with the professional capability and personal capacity of the coach. Different coaches can work at a greater or lesser level of depth, involving emotional, personal and psychological ground, depending upon their training, skills and experience.

The key boundary concerning the Client that we hold in coaching, is that we only work with functioning people with sufficient ego strength.  Another way of saying this is that we work with healthy neurotics who are able to function in the world (i.e. get to work, hold down relationships, pay their bills).  However, this doesn’t mean that successful leaders don’t have psychological problems or pathologies – increasingly our leader clients bring issues of anxiety, stress, addiction or depression alongside their leadership development and organisational agendas.  This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work with them or we should pack them off to a therapist as soon as one of these issues emerges.  Nor does it mean that we will work with them as a therapist would in the area of the past traumas and unresolved history. The coach can help clients become aware of how past trauma and mirrors of the past are influencing or impeding their objectives, and help them take responsibility for healing or resolving these. The key here is that the coach is helping the client find their own strategy and way forward to dealing with their past at the level of the prepersonal unconscious (or psychodymanic).  Sometimes this can involve referral to a counsellor or therapist for specific work alongside the coaching, sometimes working with the coach in a boundaried context (if the coach has the experience and training), as well as engagement with all manner of other personal development and therapeutic resources or solutions (e.g. group work, somatic work, systemic work, healing, retreats, etc.).

I draw again (see previous posts) from Julia Vaughan Smith’s 2015 APECS paper (What has trauma got to do with coaching? Or coaching to do with trauma?) to add insight into how the coach can work in relationship to past trauma: “coaches with understanding and experience of this field (trauma and personality splits) can bring something additional to the coaching work, a greater transitional space between the inner and outer worlds, which allows for deep transformation without working directly with the traumatised self or with the past. It needs a slightly different tool kit, perhaps, particularly for those clients who are clearly under the control of their survival strategies, if they wish to address some underlying issues within the boundaries of the coaching relationship and contract.”

Mapping the territory

So, how do we describe the nature and the scope of the work that takes place with a coach or counsellor in an inclusive and expansive way, that then allows for specific emphasis to be made between counselling and coaching and between different approaches within these?

In psychosynthesis coaching, we make the distinction between the client’s inner and outer worlds and agendas that they might bring to coaching. Alongside this, we can map the different temporal domains of past, present and future, with a further distinction between near and far future.

Below we map out the territory more explicitly using these distinctions:

Orientation and domain Inner world and agendas/

Being

 Outer world and agendas/

Doing
Past Healing

Trauma, reflection, understanding

(prepersonal)

 Resolution

Sense making, acceptance, completion

 
Present Inner crisis and change

Self, personality, awareness

(personal)

 Outer crisis and change

Systems, relationships, solutions

 
Near future Personal development

Will, capacity, growth

 Performance development

Behaviours, skills, actions
Far future Self-realisation

Purpose, meaning, values

(transpersonal)

 Self-actualisation

Potential, career, leadership

 

In simple terms, we might expect conventional behavioural coaching to lean to the right hand side/outer world and counselling/therapy to the left hand side/inner world and focus more on the past than the future.  As psychosynthesis coaches, we seek to hold awareness of all these domains and are open and free to work across them as needed in response to the Four C’s; the context we hold, the contract we establish, the client’s needs and issues and our capability and skills.

However, it is extremely important to add that our capability and effectiveness to work across these domains is predicated on drawing upon a core coaching psychology (or combination of psychologies) that is holistic – one that enables practitioners to work with both the inner and outer lives of their clients, navigating the past present and future. This translates into prepersonal, personal and transpersonal levels, which are embraced within psychosynthesis psychology.

Choices and challenges

Let us remind ourselves why this topic (of distinctions between and within coaching and counselling) is important. It is key for the choices of both people seeking help from these professions, as well as those seeking to train and develop in these professions, i.e. for both potential coachees and coaches. With this in mind, I want to end this piece by challenging two conventional assumptions or orthodoxies:

  1. ‘That coaches need to train as therapists if they want to work at depth’ – twenty years ago it was assumed that any organisational practitioner who was serious about working at the most meaningful and important levels with their clients would need to go down the arduous route of therapy training. Besides the time and cost commitment, the practitioner also then needs to deal with the baggage that comes with the therapeutic paradigm (more on this another time).
  2. ‘That leaders need to go into therapy if they want to heal and resolve their past’ – rather we need more coaches that are equipped to help clients frame the healing and resolution of their past within wider context of ongoing personal and leadership development, and can support leaders to take responsibility for their own healing process, whichever resources they might draw upon.

There seems to be a long-term shift taking place from Therapy to Coaching in both the life/personal as well as the leadership/organisational environment. Many people find coaching more acceptable, accessible and available that counselling or therapy. The coaching profession needs to respond to this and find ways to develop and enable coaches to broaden their spectrum and deepen their reach. This is why we set up the PGC in Psychosynthesis Leadership Coaching as an accessible first step and foundation for working in this way.  It is also supported by the Institute of Psychosynthesis’ move to offer the two-year MA in Psychosynthesis Psychology as a more realistic next step or alternative pathway (to the conventional 3-5 year counselling and therapy tracks). Please get in touch with myself or Paul Elliott if you would like to find out more about these options.

Let me end with a quote from my supervisor Fiona Adamson, in response to a previous piece I wrote on a related theme:

What is so fascinating is that some coaches are training to become therapists as they sense they need more theory and practice of working at depth. Until coaching courses can bring the methods and practices for coaches to work at depth then this will continue. So great that your course for coaches is already attending to this focus.

Transformational change – the holy grail of coaching

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17 May 2017

Change has been an enduring preoccupation of organisational development practitioners, certainly since I got involved in OD in the early 90’s. You might say that achieving successful intentional transformative change, whether at individual or collective levels, is the holy grail of our profession – desirable, mysterious, elusive, within our grasp and then lost again, with occasional standout successes. Pundits, gurus, consultants and coaches assure their audiences that if you follow their advice, method or formula you too can make the changes you want in your life, work or organisation (see these 1001 winning blog posts!). Personal experience and observational evidence mostly tells us it’s not quite so simple.

In this post, I will attempt to create clarity around this big topic of change and then share my updated model of mindset change (incorporating the somatic dimension – see my last post).

Unpacking change

First, in a Wilberian kind of way, let’s create some basic distinctions.  Change is a fat word that refers to a vast sea of different things and we tend to use it indiscriminately.  My primary distinction is between intentional and unintentional change, between change or transformation that we want to bring about, and change that happens to us, unexpectedly, often undesirably, sometimes called disruptive change.  Then, as already mentioned, there are individual and collective levels of change.

So, intentional individual change might be about developing some personal capacity or skill (e.g. I want to be better at working with conflict, or I want to develop my strategic thinking capacity) and intentional organisational change is often about shifting culture or mindsets (e.g. from a competitive to a collaborative mindset). Disruptive individual change is often caused by an unwelcomed event (e.g. losing my job, the breakdown of a relationship, a bereavement or illness), or by an unfolding inner crisis of meaning or duality. Disruptive change at the organisational level is often about a forced reaction to adverse performance or changing market conditions, or perhaps a change of ownership or a new strategy.

Then there might be different degrees, magnitudes and time scales for change and transformation.  Looking back at my life I can see a whole series of changes or developments which I didn’t see at the time (e.g. how I have become less analytical and controlling and more intuitive and emergent).

Immunity to change

There are change models that help us deal with unintentional change (e.g. Kubler-Ross or Satir’s model of change) and change models that are about making change happen (e.g. Kotter’s 8 steps or countless NLP tools).  One of the most popular new approaches to facilitating change is found in Robert Kegan and Lis Lahey’s Immunity to Change, first published in 2009. The essence of their model is that competing commitments, held in place by unquestioned assumptions or mindsets that lurk in our unconscious, may derail or block our conscious attempts to change our behaviour or transform ourselves.  They develop their model using examples of individual and organisational change, weaving together the challenge of supporting transformation through the stages of their developmental model of evolving cognitive complexity.

The book is full of insights and I like the neatness of describing developmental progress in terms of ‘making our subjective developmental stage an object of awareness, which allows us to work with it (Harryman)’. However, I found it difficult to read and for anyone having similar difficulty, I recommend the following blog piece by William Harryman, which summarises Kegan and Lahey’s works to date and offers a simple step by step version of their change model for coaches. Briefly these steps are (Harryman provides a worked example):

Step 1: Write your commitment (or goal)

Step 2: List everything you are doing or not doing that works against your commitment

Step 3: Write down what you think your competing commitment to your stated commitment might be

Step 4: Write the underlying assumption you are making about why the competing commitment is important

Step 5: Determine how best to move forwards, taking steps towards change in your life

I resonate with Harryman’s view that ‘the idea of hidden assumptions and competing commitments really is nothing new for some of us – those who have been doing parts (subpersonalities) work for more than just a little while.’

Kegan and Lahey make an important link between change, development and organisational culture: “To foster real change and development, both the leader and the organisational culture must take a developmental stance, they must send the message that they expect adults can grow”. They also refer to the age old philosophical battle concerning personal change: “are we better off trying to reflect our way toward transformation, expecting eventual changes in behaviour as the outcome of our hardworking contemplation? Or would we be better off taking up new behaviours as best we can and trusting that our minds will catch up with the realities of our new experience?” (page 319).  Thus, they contrast the insight or depth approach to psychology with the behavioural modification approach and point the way to transcending this dichotomy through praxis – “practice specifically designed to explore the possibility of altering our personal and organisational theories” (or big assumptions). This makes sense and follows the tradition of reflective practice as espoused by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon amongst others, although I am left pondering the cognitive-behavioural bias that runs through Kegan and Lahey’s work and the need to embrace systemic and somatic perspectives when approaching the challenge of change.

I am not going to unpack Kegan and Lahey’s model any more here – if you are interested in learning more about this popular approach, Jonathan Males is running a session at the 2017 APECS Symposium in June, where he will demonstrate how it works and discuss how to work with it within coaching.

Mindsets change

I work with a model of mindset change, adapted from one I first learnt about on the MA in Psychosynthesis Psychology and later used as a coach working with Roger Evans in Creative Leadership Consultants (and the basics of which can be found in Roger’s book, The Creative Manager, 1989).  There are similarities with the competing commitments model, in that our focus is to identity and become more conscious of limiting mindsets before seeking to reframe or transform them and change associated behaviour.  Crucially, I now incorporate systemic and somatic perspectives as part of exploring and releasing the mindset, which I believe increases our chances of success.

The language of Mindsets is becoming increasingly accepted within the organisational world, at both individual and collective levels.  It is important to realise that we always have mindsets (beliefs, thought patterns, unconscious assumptions, etc.) and that it is our awareness and relationship with them that we work on, with a view to giving ourselves more choice.  The same mindset can be both empowering and limiting, healthy and dysfunctional in different contexts or periods of our lives.  As we grow and develop, the mindsets that helped us survive or succeed in the past may no longer serve us, (e.g. ‘don’t rely upon others, I can do this on my own!’).  The same is true for collective mindsets, (e.g. ‘we are the best in the business!’ may serve the sales team at one point in time, but can become limiting when the organisation needs to open up to collaborative innovation partnerships. Having said that, some mindsets may point towards deeper psychological issues in our individual or collective psyches, and this is a theme which I will explore more fully in a follow up post.

For now, here is the approach referred to above, involving three parts and ten steps:

Part One: identifying the mindset

  1. What is the goal, purpose or issue you want to work on? What are you experiencing in relationship to this?  Specific blocks, barriers, failures? What are your observations?  What are your feelings, thoughts and wants?  Is this an issue that warrants deeper work to bring about change or transformation?
  2. Explore limiting mindsets which you associate with this goal/commitment/issue. These might be thought patterns or voices in your mind. Which of these feels the most significant?  Which do you want to work with? Write down the mindset, being as specific as possible and using language which is familiar to you.
  3. How does this mindset affect your behaviour and feelings? What behaviours do you associate with this mindset?  What feelings do you associate with it?

Part Two: unpacking the mindset

  1. How strong is this mind set? In other words, how much does it control you, how automatic is it? How much choice do you have around it? (10 = completely automatic with no choice).
  2. How long have you had this mind set? When and how did it first get started?  Is there a time before that you can remember?
  3. How does the mind set serve you? What do you get from it? What quality of value does it represent for you?
  4. How does the mind set limit you? What does the mind set stop you from seeing or doing about yourself or about others?

Part Three: reframing the mindset

  1. How or where might this mindset be held in your body? Can you put your hand there? Is there a shape or pattern to this mindset? Breathe into that place… and release.
  2. In what ways is this mindset held in place, supported or perpetuated by the wider system of which you are part (e.g. family, organisation, society). Which part of you is identified with this mindset? Which part(s) of you are not identified with the mindset and have choice in relationship to it?
  3. As you step back from the mindset, what new space opens up within you? What new prospects does this open up for you? What freedom or choice do you have in terms of your behaviour? In what other ways might you meet the needs or commitment this mindset represented for you?  Which empowering mindsets or affirmations could you draw upon in place of this mindset?

I am not going to promise that this is a failsafe formula to achieving desirable change – real work has to be done by both coach and client for this to make a difference. Working at depth as well as on the surface; work at mental, emotional, behavioural and somatic levels.  Work involving the unfolding of self, as well as activating or releasing the will.

The relationship between our mindsets, feelings (or emotional charge) and our behaviours that are associated with them, are depicted in the graphic above – which also shows how these are held in place through form – with individual mindsets this means the body and related somatic patterns, and with collective or organisational mindsets this can be many different things, e.g. the formal and informal shapes and patterns of the organisational system and its culture.

A word of warning about this kind of work: mindsets are slippery, and finding the mindset that needs working on in relation to a purpose, goal or issue is a serious challenge in itself. The coach’s task is to help the client self-reflect and increase their self-awareness in ways that they would not otherwise. Finding an important mindset to work with may take time, more than one session.  It may help to suggest that the client keeps a journal and records thought patterns between sessions, as close in real time as possible to significant events or behaviours they want to change.  You are trying to help the client catch their inner negative or critical voices and externalise them by putting them into words. I also capture what seem to be significant phrases my clients say during sessions, and occasionally feed them back.  By the way, I am amazed at how often these turn out to be the words used by a critical parent or authority figure.

Questioning convention

I can’t leave this topic without questioning two conventional orthodoxies concerning change.  Firstly, that change should be the primary focus of OD or coaching.  Mostly development is a better context.  Change is better seen more as a consequence or effect than a desired outcome in itself.  As a coach, I am more interested in development (e.g. of self and will) than change per se or even the goals and objectives that are driving it.  The deeper we engage with will and purpose, the more likely that superficial change objectives will fall away, dissolve, morph or shift in importance.

Secondly, the assumption that resistance to organisational change is necessarily a bad thing.  There is usually a good reason that individuals or parts of an organisation resist or oppose a planned or intended change. I am always suspicious when there is too much demonising of resistance, without any sense that the nature of what is being protected (the competing commitment) has been understood and without evidence that the resistance has been engaged with.  More often, resistance is an indication that an organisation and its leaders are those that really need to face up to change and transformation (see previous posts on Laloux), in order to create an organisation with purpose and a culture that is worthy of people’s trust and commitment.

Thanks for reading

Aubyn

 

The somatic path of coaching – working with body-mind and being

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On a recent coaching course workshop, one of our students shared with surprise, their realisation that they had been engaging in personal development for many years through the lens or filter of their survival self, rather than their healthy or authentic self.  At the time, I thought this was an interesting observation and left it at that. At some point the next day, my unconscious having worked busily away, something troubling dawned upon me – that I had been doing exactly the same, for nearly forty years. In my case, my survival self is my mind orientation and the way I seek external acknowledgement and internal control through understanding and intellectualisation. That’s not to say that I haven’t experienced much of my lifetime of personal development authentically, but that my pattern is to split and intellectualise.  On realising this, I experienced a profound shift, which felt like a descent into my body from my head, or into my being from my mind, and for the rest of the weekend I experienced resting in this new way of being. I felt grounded and present, at the same time able to access and engage my mind, but without detaching from my emotions or felt sense. I found it helped to place my hands on my chest or stomach and to acknowledge my felt senses in other ways, when later sharing this experience with the group.

In the above story, I am referencing a model of the personality by professor Franz Rupert, which is explained in a really excellent paper on “What has trauma got to do with coaching? Or coaching got to do with trauma?” by Julia Vaughan Smith.  I first saw this published as an APECS symposium paper but you can also find this on her website here.  The model shows how splits in the personality and identity structure after a traumatic experience give rise to three parts of ourselves (healthy, traumatised, survival) and Julia explores how to work with these in coaching.

She explains how trauma is held in the body and points towards related developments in somatic coaching which I will discuss below.  She concludes “it is my view that coaches with understanding and experience of this field (personality and self) can bring something additional to the coaching work, a greater transitional space between the inner and outer worlds, which allows for deep transformation without working directly with the traumatised self or with the past. It needs a slightly different tool kit…”. Julia is answering better than I have seen anywhere else the question about the boundary between coaching and therapy here, and also describing the work that we do on our psychosynthesis coaching courses very well.

Somatic coaching is an emerging approach within the coaching profession and I want to use this post to provide an overview to anyone new to this perspective. In his very readable book on The Art of Somatic Coaching Richard Strozzi-Heckler sets out the central premise of somatic work, that “…while psychotherapy focused on reasons why something is the way it is, I would ask how is it that we have formed ourselves.  For example, how do we form ourselves toward contact or away from contact, instead of Why don’t we make contact?”. In this seminal work, Strozzi-Heckler issues a call to those interested in personal and societal evolution to wake up.  He sets his somatic approach within historical, coaching and personal contexts and makes some basic distinctions between the entry points of working on, with and through the body.  The book goes on to describe a methodology for somatic coaching, the importance of attending to our rhythm of energy and ends with mapping out the somatic arc of transformation.  Below is my take on these key pieces and some suggested questions for somatic coaching…

  • Entry points for somatic practice…
    • Working on the body – addressing presenting symptoms physically or by touch, usually by someone trained in a relevant professional modality, e.g. massage, reiki, kinesiology, craniosacral therapy, osteopathy, physiotherapy, etc.
    • Working with the body – to release blocks by working physically, energetically, emotionally, relationally, etc.
    • Working through the body – engaging life energy by attending to what is, what has been, what is emergent and the call of the Self…
  • Methodology of somatic practice
    • Somatic awareness – becoming aware of our sensations, to feel, to notice…
    • Somatic opening – opening of the soma so change can occur, undoing the habitual shape to allow another shape to come to life
    • Somatic practices – e.g. breath, movement, visualisation, enabling us to embody new skills and ways of being to support our goals and our emergent self
  • Rhythm of energy (with the gestalt cycle of experience equivalent)
    • Awakening – sensation and awareness
    • Increasing – mobilisation of energy and action
    • Containing – contact and resolution
    • Completing – withdrawal and completion
  • Somatic arc of transformation (and related psychological orientations)
    • Historical shape – the prepersonal and the past
    • Unbounded shape – the personal and the present
    • New shape – the transpersonal and the emergent future

Some somatic coaching questions I use…

  • What is going on for you now? What sensations, or feelings in your body?
  • What’s that feeling? Where do you feel that in your body?  Maybe place your hand there…
  • Do you notice your posture (or shape) as you say that? What might your posture be saying?
  • Can you breathe into that place – what is that like?
  • Would it help to take a deep breath? – maybe take a few, slow deep breaths (and breathe with them)
  • As you step into that space or place, what do you want to say? What is your felt sense?
  • As you step out of that space or place, what do you notice or become aware of?

In Embodying Authenticity, Eunice Aquilina (a student of Strozzi-Heckler) adds depth and breadth to the somatic narrative in a very personal and practical account that is richly illustrated with stories of how she works with leaders and organisations (yes, this stuff is practical!). She also goes some way to weaving the somatic perspective together with other important perspectives informing leadership and coaching such as the developmental prism (e.g. Laloux, Kegan, Cook-Greuter, Torbert), complexity theory and systemic practice (e.g. Critchley, Wheatley, Stacey and Shaw), amongst others.

Eunice speaks of the need for ‘wise and conscious leaders and practitioners, who are able to tune into themselves and simultaneously tune into what is emerging in the field, taking action from a deeper sense of awareness’, and views organisation as living systems where ‘leaders can bring their whole selves as fully rounded human beings and invite others to do the same… this is the offer of somatics’ (and a response to my piece on The Leadership Gap). This is also very much the territory of engaging with Laloux’s principle of wholeness in evolutionary (or Teal), organisations. She challenges the reader to engage in an inquiry of how their ‘history literally shapes what has become habitual ways of being’.  She shows how to work with the somatic arc of transformation to ‘shape a new way of being in the world’.  She explores how we can use the ‘self as instrument’ of change, and how through the quality of our presence, we create a strong container for others where we cultivate trust and listen beyond words…”. 

This somatic approach refers to the self as the source of our energy, wisdom and insight and in many ways this is entirely congruent with psychosynthesis.  However, in my view, this work needs to be underpinned for coaches by drawing upon a robust psychology of self and will (such as psychosynthesis), and a therapeutic awareness of how the different parts of ourselves come into play, such as discussed in Julia Vaughan Smith’s paper and explored on her retreats.  If not, the somatic practitioner is in danger of waking up parts or releasing energies within their clients, which they don’t know how to deal with.  We are noticing coaches coming towards psychosynthesis coaching because they are finding clients opening-up to them and engaging at an emotional level which they don’t feel fully equipped to deal with. They are looking for a stronger context for working at greater depth and height without necessarily becoming a therapist.

Just as it has become less taboo to refer to and work with feelings in organisations (thanks in part to the popularisation of EQ), so too now with the body and it feels much easier to refer to it within the coaching context, than say twenty years ago.  Somatic working doesn’t necessarily involve touch and you will probably stay away from direct physical contact unless you are explicitly combining coaching with some other touch based modality.  Somatic working can involve engaging with human form and energy in a host of ways, including posture, shape, pattern, flow, space, rhythm, movement, stillness and breath.

I must emphasise that I have not been specifically trained in the somatic approach, however, I find it both immediately relevant and intuitively accessible as another dimension to the way that I work, whether as coach, facilitator or educator. There is a natural fit within the context of psychosynthesis psychology and the model of Body-Feelings-Mind. Roberto Assagioli explored the deeper processes of involution and evolution and emphasised the need for human beings to work towards full embodiment as well as self-realisation – in other words we need to both come more into our bodies, anchoring in the physical plane and connected to the earth, as well to discover our higher nature and transcend our material fixations.  Embodiment, incarnation (e.g. the journey from spirit to matter) and becoming grounded, doesn’t end with being born and is something we might work on our whole lives, as part of coming more into our being and presence (as I described in my story at the beginning). In other words, connecting-down as well as up, and somatic working really helps with this.  I suspect this is particularly important in modern western society where cultural splits between mind and body have become endemic and where many of us are over mind-identified (thinking is all). This may all sound a bit esoteric, but I find people referring to this need all the time in my coaching practice – I want to be more grounded and fully present… I just need space to breathe… this may sound crazy, but I feel like I’m still working towards becoming embodied…

There seems to be a paradox at the heart of this somatic path, which is held by the dual meaning of somatic – sometimes meaning of the body, but also more essentially meaning of the body-mind (as an indivisible whole). Much of the practice involves working through, with or on the body as the entry point, but staying mindful that in doing this we are engaging with the whole human being, mind-body-feelings, and activating all levels of consciousness.

For an insight into how somatic practice works in practice, two APECS colleagues, Fiona Adamson and Elspeth Campbell, are running a short session to demonstrate somatic coaching at this years’ APECS Symposium (see more below):

Coaching-with-the-body, our felt sense of awareness, is becoming increasingly accepted as part of coaching practice.  Instead of asking why something is the way it is, we explore how it is that our sensory perceptions and emotional responses have contributed to patterns of behaviour in interactions, and formed ways of being.

There is one other very significant way in which the somatic perspective has informed a change in the way I work as a coach, which is how I approach mindset change, both at the individual and organisational level. This will be the subject of my next post to follow shortly, because there is too much to include here.

In the meantime, let me encourage you to take a closer look at the 2017 APECS Symposium (June 7th at Phyllis Court Henley); although primarily a forum for our members, we also welcome guests and have allocated 20 tickets to non-members.  We have a fantastic range of 24 sessions to choose from, under the overall theme of ‘How can coaching best respond to the emerging challenges of leadership?’

Programme details and booking link is here: https://apecsevents.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/revealing-the-full-agenda-for-the-2017-apecs-symposium/

Thanks for reading

Aubyn

The alchemy of coaching

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Alchemy is making a comeback.  Cast into the shadows by the enlightenment and modern science, the notion of alchemy, albeit in a metaphorical sense in relationship to human consciousness and will, is seemingly becoming relevant again.

Definition:    al·che·my   alkəmē/   noun: alchemy

the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metals into gold or to find a universal elixir.

synonyms: chemistry; magic, sorcery, witchcraft

“a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination”.

Paulo Coelho’s allegorical novel The Alchemist, written in 1988 and 150 million copies sold, with its central message that “when a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize their dream”, brought the theme of alchemy back into modern consciousness.

More recently, David Rooke and Bill Torbert in their 2005 HBR article on Seven Leadership Transformations, use Alchemist to describe their highest stage of leadership development, with the description: “generates social transformations. Integrates material, spiritual, and societal transformation.”

More description of this stage includes “interplay of awareness, thought, action and effect. Transforming self and others”, and “anchoring in inclusive present, seeing the light and dark in situations; works with order and chaos”.

Building upon this vision of the leader as alchemist, I find alchemy a useful metaphor for thinking about leadership coaching in a number of ways, which I explore in this post.

I am using alchemy in a similar way here to the terms synthesis or transformation.  The practice of alchemy, to my mind, involves at least four essential parts: (1) a crucible, container or context and (2) a combination of elements that come together within the crucible (3) through an essentially mysterious process, as guided or initiated by (4) the alchemist, guide or wise person.

How is coaching like alchemy? Firstly, the coaching session can sometimes be experienced as alchemy, both by the coach and the coachee.  Clearly the coach here is the alchemist or guide, but what is the crucible?  Within psychosynthesis coaching, this is created by the coach containing or holding the being of the other and the space that opens up between the coach and coachee in right relationship.  We sometimes call this the space between, and other approaches might describe this in terms of active presence or authentic engagement.

The elements are simply the contents or substance of the coaching conversation, which can be viewed through different dimensions (see below), for example; the inner and outer agendas the coachee brings, awareness raising, exploring options and finding available will.  In terms of inner exploration, these elements might then include; different parts of our personality (we call these subpersonalities); aspects or levels of consciousness; our thoughts, feeling and bodily experience; the somatic, the systemic and the superconscious.

The mysterious process is what happens beyond the conscious mind to bring these elements into creative tension or synthesis, to initiate transformation or emergence, giving rise to something more than the sum of the parts.  When this happens successfully, both parties experience heightened awareness or engagement, in gestalt terms contact or resolution. If we are fortunate a sense of grace might descend, a moment of timelessness and shared experience, although this is seldom explicitly acknowledged. Good coaches draw upon the energy released to guide the coachee towards choices, actions and future testing by the end of the session rather than simply basking in the experience. Of course, most coaching doesn’t flow so perfectly as this and there are bumps, deviations and challenges along the way.  However, it may be useful for the coach to hold this template of the alchemical process in their awareness, not in the same way as conventional coaching processes such as GROW or CLEAR, but as a way of staying open to what is between and beyond.

Dimensions, levels or elements at play within the coaching space include:

  • Levels of engagement – what level are you working at as a coach? Who is your client?
    • Individual – team – system
  • Coaching agendas – which agendas is your client bringing, both explicitly and implicitly?
    • Inner: change, development, purpose; personal, being, self-reflection, inquiry
    • Outer: change, behaviour, performance; practical, planning, action, review
  • Coaching horizon – when in time is the client’s energy blocked or needs attention? What is their temporal orientation?
    • Past – Present – Future (near to far)
  • Levels of consciousness – which levels of consciousness are engaged? Where are the unconscious blocks?
    • Prepersonal – personal – transpersonal
  • Body-Feelings-Mind – what parts of their experience does the client access easily? Which aspects are suppressed?
    • Somatic awareness – emotional intelligence – mindsets
  • Leadership development – what are the priorities for the client’s development? e.g. skills, intelligences, worldviews, self-esteem, confidence, awareness, will? What are the key inter-dependencies?
    • Horizontal – vertical – inner

The inner development of leaders can also be viewed in terms of alchemy.  The crucible is the leader’s sense of purpose and values, their pull towards meaning and growth, which create a context for personal development, whether conscious and articulated or not.  The elements include the interplay of awareness and will, and the harnessing of the psychological functions (e.g. thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition, imagination) and other resources by the will. The mysterious process of development itself can be described in terms of the personal journey towards self-actualisation and self-realisation, or in terms of lines and levels of development (e.g. see Wilber’s integral model or Frederic Laloux’s leadership paradigms). Who is the alchemist or conductor of all this? In psychosynthesis terms, we view the ‘higher Self’ as an inner guide. Part of the coach’s role is to nurture the client’s connection with their higher Self, to facilitate the process of inner development.

Thirdly, I want to describe coach development in terms of this alchemical process. In psychosynthesis coaching, we use the holistic psychology of psychosynthesis as our crucible, with Assagioli’s egg diagram providing a perfect container for bringing various elements into synthesis as part of our individual and collective evolving models of coaching.  Some of the elements we bring into the mix on our courses include; transpersonal coaching, systemic coaching, somatic coaching, mindfulness, neuroscience and evolutionary coaching.

These are amongst the most interesting developments and innovative approaches in coaching today – they can equip coaches to support leaders in responding to the emergent challenges of leadership in an increasingly complex and high pressure world.  Each will be the subject of one of my posts this year.

On our courses, there is also a creative synthesis of the elements of experiential learning, skills practice and theoretical ideas. Meanwhile, each participant engages in a continuous reflective dialogue between workshop learning and their own professional practice. This whole process of synthesis takes place differently and unpredictably on each course, depending upon our participants and the unique individual experience and perspectives they bring. Thus we are always learning and evolving something new.

One of the reasons I like this alchemy metaphor is that despite the aura of mystery, the original purpose was to create gold from base metal, something very practical. Our challenge as coaches is to stay open to mystery (or that which is beyond the control of our conscious minds) at the same time as staying grounded in the practical and pragmatic, and to help our clients do the same.  To continuously hold the creative tension, for ourselves and our clients. To quote Roberto Assagioli “What is synthesis? It could be defined as a dynamic, creative balance of tensions”.

Thanks for reading

Aubyn

The leadership gap – and the call to coaching

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22nd January 2017

What are the emergent challenges that leaders need most help with from their coaches?  I’m going to highlight two big themes here, which increasingly arise in both my own coaching practice and the coaching courses we are running at PCL – and which have resonance in the broader societal context of leadership to which we are all exposed if we follow the news.

I’m skipping over perennial themes, such as delivering performance, leading change and developing new skills or behaviours.  These bread and butter agendas of leadership are most likely familiar to any experienced executive or leadership coach.  Plenty of coaching blogs deal with these, so my aim here is look beyond to some of the more challenging aspects of leadership and what this means for coaching.

The first of my two meta-themes, is complexity.  Leaders face increasing complexity in their organisational environments as well as inner lives, sometimes combining with pressure and stress to the point of overwhelm, shutout or breakdown.  Dealing with complexity is a prime imperative for all of us and involves developing new levels of awareness, capacities for understanding and strategies for action.  Specifically, we need to develop our capacity for taking systemic perspectives (e.g. Seeing Systems, Barry Oshry, 2007), and engaging with systems forces (e.g. ‘Five Dimensions of Leadership’, Roger Evans, 2017). I emphasise the need for a systemic perspective here, because without it we are simply overwhelmed by content and detail, or worse, we deny and reduce complexity to fit our comfort zone of over-simplification, with potentially disastrous consequences.

To illustrate how this is playing out on the broader stage:

“…too many of the problems in societies today stem from leadership that is ill prepared to deal with present complexity. …too many leaders have been educated for a different time, a different world. Few are prepared for the task of dealing with the complexity and chaos of today when the usual formulas and stopgap solutions of an earlier era will not help”. (Jean Houston, https://jeanhoustonfoundation.org/social-artistry/the-leadership-dilemma/)

Adam Curtis’ latest documentary film of our times, HyperNormalisation (2016), echoes this state of affairs and tells the story of “How we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed and have no idea what to do”.

Robb Smith (https://www.integrallife.com/integral-post/morning-after) expands upon this analysis of what is often now referred to as VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity): “…a rapidly-changing world that is in many ways moving too fast for all of us really is scary, uncomfortable and unsettling. We’re connected in ways we haven’t yet mastered, we’re learning at rates we can’t yet process and we are subject to forces we can’t hope to understand (even experts don’t really understand the complex dynamical systems at the core of their disciplines). We’re all in this messy, chaotic process together”.

And finally, an example Guardian columnist responding to the current crisis in society, “There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder…but we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces…we find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities.” Pankaj Mishra, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump

On our PGCPLC course we help coaches develop new perspectives on how human systems work and develop over time (e.g. with Frederic Laloux’s ‘Reinventing Organizations’, 2014), as well as how to work systemically with clients (e.g. Systemic Coaching & Constellations, John Whittingdon, 2016).

Some challenging leadership questions about complexity…

  • What are the complexities of your outer organisational world?  For example, multiple stakeholders and partnerships; rapidly changing markets; internal processes and projects; hidden politics, loyalties and motivations…
  • What are some of the complexities of your inner world? e.g. conflicting needs and motivations; creating synergy between your worlds of relationship, work, and self-understanding; aligning career direction with inner purpose and meaning; dealing with stress and crises…
  • How good are you at living with uncertainty and ambiguity?  Can you stay with not knowing? How much do you need to be in control?  How do you assert your need to be in control in complex or chaotic situations? Or do you withdraw or cut-off?
  • How developed is your systemic awareness?  Can you stand back from the human systems you are deeply involved in? Do you work with or against the systems forces in your organisation?

One word of warning – taking a systemic perspective isn’t just about clever objective systemic thinking (e.g. Senge’s Fifth Discipline). We need to include ourselves in the picture and combine big picture views with inner world (e.g. feelings, intuition, instincts) and psychological perspectives, in order to develop effective systemic practice.

My second meta-theme is being. As in the being of leadership being versus the doing of leadership, as in how to be a leader, as in creating the space for the human being in the workplace, as in being in right-relationship. The being dimension of leadership is also sometimes approached in terms of self-and-other awareness, or presence, or charisma. A door has also been opened to bringing or allowing the being to be more present in organisations through the growing popularity and acceptance of mindfulness practices (although ironically this often happens in very much a doing kind of way).

At PCL we suggest that successful leadership is as much about who you are and how you are, as about what you do (and the same is true for coaching).  Most leadership development focuses almost entirely on the doing aspect of leadership, the competencies, skills and behaviours, on strategies, tactics and execution.  Although the importance of leadership being is increasingly acknowledged, very little practical support or development of this dimension is offered.  Many good coaches might naturally bring their being to their coaching and nurture the being of their clients.  However, this can be pretty hit-and-miss so on our courses we explicitly help develop coaches’ awareness, capacity and subtle skills for working at the level of being, which we now refer to as coaching the being. This extends to helping leaders to do the same with the people they lead and create the context for what Frederic Laloux refers to as the principles of wholeness and purpose in evolutionary organisations.  Although, at an essential level, coaching the being is simply about being present, available and responsive to the other (e.g. Martin Buber’s I and Thou), attuning to our felt sense of being (see Euncie Aquilina’s ‘Embodying Authenticity’) and allowing the space between you (like in Patsy Rodenburg’s ‘Second Circle’ 2008), we very rarely find this easy given the busy-ness and clutter of both our inner lives and outer organisational worlds. As we grow and develop, our inner lives can actually become more complex and the impact of our unexplored history and unconscious drives more important.  Hence the need to explore our different levels (pre-personal, personal and transpersonal) of consciousness and unconsciousness and the psychological processes that work away in our psyche.

Some challenging questions about leadership being…

  • What does it mean to bring your being, who you are most essentially, to your role as a leader? To what extent do you feel you do this?
  • Which parts of yourself do you bring to leadership and which parts do not come so easily?  Can you be vulnerable in your role as leader? Are you open to feedback?  Can you ask for help? Are you humble or hubristic?
  • How comfortable are you with finding time to deeply reflect in your day-to-day work? Are you addicted to busy-ness and activity? In what ways?
  • How quick are you to fill spaces and pauses in conversations and meetings with colleagues?  Do you allow surprises, unexpected ideas or insights to happen around you?

If this sounds interesting and you would like to explore your personal and professional development further, I invite you to find out about our Post-Graduate Certificate in Psychosynthesis Leadership Coaching.  Our next five-month programme starts on 17 February 2017 and we have a few places left, so please hurry!

The next Fundamentals of Psychosynthesis also starts next Friday 27th January and I understand that there are some places left.

If you are an APECS member, I also draw your attention to the next Real Sessions on 24th January, titled Perspectives and Megatrends, which touches on the emergent challenges and complexity theme. Also please put a note in your diary of the APECS Symposium on June 7th at Henley Phyllis Court – more information about this to follow within the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading

Aubyn

What are we learning about leadership coaching?

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4th October 2016

Back in March I celebrated the completion of our first PGCPLC programme, with the following: Many thanks to each of our co-pioneers for trusting us enough to embark on this journey of learning and discovery (to see some of the feedback look here).  Together we have given birth to something exciting and unique that we are now ready to take out more fully into the world.  By this I mean that Psychosynthesis leadership coaching has become established as an evolving practice in its own right – to some extent building upon and consolidating what has come before, but also synthesising and evolving new directions.  In particular, the synthesis of the psychospiritual perspective (e.g. Assagioli) with the developmental (e.g. Laloux) with the systemic (e.g. Whittington) establishes a very powerful platform for leadership coaching within an organisational context.

I added I would write something in the near future to expand upon our experience of learning and discovery from this founding course, and this it is (later than intended).  It would be impossible to do justice to all the learning from that first programme so I will not attempt to.  As a team of tutors (Paul, Ruth, Peter and myself), we have already listen to the feedback from the participants, reflected upon how to improve the course and hopefully we are incorporating this in our second programme.  This includes (i) streamlining the theoretical content, (ii) improving the flow and sequencing of key ideas, (iii) shifting the learning style towards experiential learning followed by sense-making, rather than theory followed by experience and (iv) giving more time to triads coaching practice and the group process of unpacking learning about what works in terms of coaching skills and techniques.

So this piece is a very personal and partial perspective on the learning from the first programme. I am simply going to touch upon a number of themes around which my perspective on leadership coaching was changed by the course and our engagement with the pioneering students on this first programme.

Three perspectives on leadership coaching

By the end of the first programme, we had more fully evolved the the three-part theoretical underpinning to our approach to leadership coaching.  Psychosynthesis is our core psychology and provides the organising context and method for coaching with Trifocal Vision. The developmental perspective of Frederic Laloux (who neatly synthesises other contributors in this field such as Wilber, Graves, Loevinger and Kegan) provides an essential navigational perspective, both for the development of leaders and the situational diagnosis of the organisations in which they find themselves. Awareness of the transitional crises that leaders go through, as they shift between paradigms or worldviews, enhances the psychosynthetic understanding of the crises that arise from the individual journey of growth shifting between self-actualisation and self-realisation, e.g. crises of duality and meaning.  The third leg of our stool is the systemic perspective, which again is both important to working with individual leadership coaching clients and also essential in contextualising their organisational situations.  Assagioli understood the collective nature of human beings and the importance of systemic context, however thinking in this field was embryonic in his day.  Roger Evans identifies systemic awareness as one of his Five Dimensions of Leadership and I know from personal experience the importance he places on taking this perspective when coaching within organisational systems.  Through the first programme we found some practical ways to quickly equip coaches with systemic tools for their coaching, with material from Barry Oshry (thanks to Peter Young) and John Whittington (thanks to Ruth Rochelle). Whittington in particular has translated Bert Hellinger’s work on family constellations into practical methods for coaching individuals and groups within organisations and Ruth ran a group constellation in our final workshop to show how it works.

I have been pondering whether adding developmental and systemic thinking as complementary perspectives to psychosynthesis is more important for leadership coaching than life coaching.  Sometimes coaching life clients may not seem to need these wider perspectives, but I also have many experiences of supervising life coaches where the lack of either developmental or systemic awareness was getting the coach into trouble (but this is not the place to go into the specifics of these cases.)  With life clients, family constellations may be more relevant than organisational constellations, and indeed with leadership clients, family systems are also always present and may need to be visited.

Meta skills expanded

Overall I feel that the key distinction in our competencies model between core human skills, coaching process skills and meta-skills is still valid, having tested this with two different groups.  The value of the distinctions is as much pragmatic as theoretical: core human skills are universal and widely taught within personal and leadership development programmes; coaching process skills are professional skills specific to coaching but also partially transferable from similar professional roles, e.g. counselling or consulting; meta-skills are not widely taught or even recognised in organisations and are instrumental for coaches and leaders alike in making the shift to evolutionary (or teal) thinking.  An alternative approach would be to sub-divide human skills into inter-personal (communication and relationships, etc.) and intra-personal skills (some of the meta-skills, e.g. self-reflection and presence), that sit alongside psychological skills (the other meta-skills).

There are potentially many more meta-skills that we could include than I had anticipated, and I realised after the first workshop that my analytical mind had limited the options (and I’ve had the same experience from the first workshop of the second programme!) Many of the contributions students made give life and detail to the six categories we have already identified, others are potential new categories altogether. The key change that keeps us within the six category framework but allows more possibilities is to subsume working at different levels within systemic thinking and to create a new category of mastery of the psychological functions (which includes imagination, intuition, sensing etc.).  The next step is to develop the six meta-competencies framework and show this all in more detail.

The leadership context

We asked our students to dialogue about what leadership means to them, why it is important now and how this relates to their calling as a coach.  The rich and varied outputs from this reminded me of why we call this leadership coaching rather than executive coaching.   Leadership has so many dimensions to it and can be interpreted in so many ways, for example, one of the presentations made an interesting distinction between leadership of self (or personal leadership), leadership of followers (such as in a leadership role) and leadership of leaders (such as in a professional role). Leadership is about both shaping the future and responding to the emergent present and in both aspects needs to be very much anchored in the systemic awareness discussed above.  Leadership is now a far more complex challenge than it used to be in the past (in the pre-interconnected universe of Jim Collins for example), and involves having to work with the nuances of a multi-cultural and pluralistic world both within and beyond our organisational boundaries.

How positive psychology can find its place

I love the stuff coming out of positive psychology (e.g. about attitudes, happiness research, strengths-based leadership, etc.) in the same way that I loved the stuff that came out of NLP (e.g. rapport, time-lines, reframing, accelerated learning, etc.) in the 90’s.  However, I have noticed how dedicated practitioners of these approaches can become seduced by technique and how, on their own, positively oriented leadership interventions might become limiting or formulaic.

Through our workshop on coaching psychology and the psychospiritual model of development, we discovered that drawing upon humanistic and positive psychology approaches, once transpersonal awareness has been established, is more powerful and liberating.  Once you include and seek to access transpersonal energies and resources (as well as acknowledge the messages of pre-personal energies), the role of personal level positive psychology interventions find their place (e.g. Play! Explore! Empower!).

Somatic coaching is a natural fit with psychosynthesis

The Body, Feelings, Mind model of psychosynthesis provides the perfect theoretical underpinning for somatic work within coaching. The somatic perspective offers an interesting counter-point to conventional psychological thinking; it is not enough that we understand why we are the way we are (e.g. how our history has shaped our mindsets and behavioural patterns), we need to become aware of how we are the way we are (and work with how our habits and patterns are held in the body).  Our challenge is how to bring this insight into both the workshop learning experience and into our coaching. Fortunately, on our first programme we had more than one somatically aware practitioner (thanks Rachel and Angelika) who helped us attend to the energy in the room. Since the first programme I have read read The Art of Somatic Coaching by Richard Strozzi-Heckler and going forwards I am keen to bring somatic work more explicitly into the psychosynthesis coaching model.

Self in motion – an embryonic model

By the end of the programme I had made some progress with developing a flow model of coaching (Self in Motion) – in which the coach supports the healthy functioning of an individual (in terms of optimising performance and development), by attending to healthy patterns of flow in a number of dimensions: e.g. inner-outer, conscious-unconscious, parts-whole, individual-collective and realisation-actualisation. This is an embryonic model and I will expand on it at a future date.  The essence of the model is contained within a quote by Roberto Assagioli:

“Life is movement, and the superconscious realms are in continuous renewal. In this adventure we move from revelation to revelation, from joy to joy.  I hope you do not reach any ‘stable state’. A ‘stable state’ is death.”

That sums up my experience from facilitating this coaching programme pretty well – moving from revelation to revelation!

Aubyn Howard

Charles Handy’s second curve and how organisations are evolving

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11th August 2016

In my last post (14 July) I recommended Charles Handy’s recently published ‘Second Curve’ (2014). Below is a review that I wrote of this book, with some thoughts for leadership coaches added at the end.

Review

In ‘The Second Curve’ Charles Handy (doyen of management thinking for the last 40 years) shows how the ‘Sigmoid Curve’ provides a useful metaphor for thinking about initiating change in our lives (as well as in our businesses and society), at the point when everything appears to be still going well (i.e. on the up-curve of our past creativity) rather than waiting for evidence of decline before acting.  He cites Apple’s successive initiations of the iPod, iPhone and iPad as the classic example of successful second curve thinking in business and ponders whether this will continue without Steve Jobs at the helm.  He reminds us that the average life of a business has reduced from 40 years to 14 years as a symptom of the speeding up of change cycles and the consequent need to keep reinventing ourselves, individually and collectively.  This metaphor also explains why most business books about the success stories of great businesses or leaders are already past their sell-by date by the time they are published (although of course we can still enjoy the stories).  Handy is seeking to help us grasp the principle of second curve thinking and encourages us to apply it to a whole range of issues, including; the way that technology and data is changing work; our assumptions about markets, growth and capitalism; the shape and size of our organisations and the way they work for people; innovation, education and investment in the future; and the very nature of democracy and the kind of society we want to live in.  Rather than making bold predictions or proposals, he is nudging us to take responsibility for our futures and to engage in a new type of thinking that ‘requires imagination, intuition and instinct rather than rational analysis’.

Sometimes Handy stretches the second curve metaphor a little too far to and maybe he isn’t as transparent about how his ethical worldview informs his opinions as he might be, but overall these essays deliver a healthy shot of humanity, sanity and perspective on a changing world in which we seem all too happy to let our way of life change in ways which may not be for the better.  Handy illustrates this with the increasingly common scene of people gathered together (e.g. at meal times) but looking at their smartphones and even sending each other messages, rather than talking to each other.

The underlying message here is that we need to take more responsibility for ourselves and our destinies, and adapt and evolve to become more complete human beings. This means developing and harnessing all our psychological capacities or core intelligences – not just cognitive brilliance but our emotional, social and ethical intelligence too.  Handy suggest that our educational system needs to help develop people who can be creative and innovative problem solvers, able to respond to new work horizons and take effective action in the world (because all the old jobs will be going to robots). This has significant implications for our learning technologies in the workplace environment – people need to stay on top of the current curve and prepare themselves for the next one.

Several of his articles address the changing nature of work and organisations.  In The Workplace he describes new varieties of the physical workplace such as ‘club’ environments where people can meet, eat and rub up against each other to “encourage serendipity and a shared culture” but otherwise work from home or where their projects or clients are. Other organisations are going the other way to create all-encompassing “campus type centres for work and recreation a la Google”.  But for more and more people our laptops (or tablets or phones) are already our offices and physical location is becoming secondary factor. He goes on to describe how “the big organisations are discombobulating into bundles of semi-autonomous grouping”.  In The Citizen Organisation he describes how organisations are becoming shamrock-shaped; with a small core workforce representing the core competence of key intellectual and management skills (leaf one), most subsidiary functions are outsourced to contractors or semi-autonomous subsidiaries (leaf two) which is complemented by a flexible army of ‘fleas’ (leaf three), the higher value specialist individuals or small partnerships who sell their skills and expertise to organisations but are not employed by them.

In The New Management Handy goes further in describing what the second curve might look like in terms of the shape and size of organisations. He describes a trend towards what he calls “Doughnut management” (small core, large semi-autonomous surrounding), which requires “a major investment in the development of the staff.  This “may be expensive in the short term but, ultimately, trust is always cheaper than control.  In a doughnut culture people are judged on results, not on their methods, on effectiveness rather than efficiency.  Efficiency should be the servant, not the master.  The new technologies can work both ways.  Technology can be used…to eliminate discretion and control, or… it can facilitate individual initiative.”

These doughnut organisations are also smaller; “How big is big? Robin Dunbar of Oxford University came up with a number.  After examining studies of village communities and army units going back over time Dunbar suggested that one individual can only keep track of around 150 people at any one time.  More recent evidence from Facebook communities supports this number, which I would suggest, provide the maximum size for a doughnut (project team or business unit).”

You might want to reflect upon some of themes I’ve touched on in this review.  How do you see your relationship with work changing over your career?  Are you full time employed now and do you see this continuing for ever, or can you imagine yourself as a self-employed contractor, specialist or portfolio worker?  How do you want to engage in continuous or periodic learning and development to keep increasing your value to organisations as you make career shifts?  What does your ideal place of work look like, e.g. your home, a networking hub or a campus?  What does the type of organisation you want to work in look like?  We need to think about these questions because the world of work is changing faster than we realise.

How can Handy’s ideas inform leadership coaching?

In addition to the questions above, here’s three ideas:

  1. Handy’s thinking links with Frederic Laloux’s notions of evolutionary organisations and provides ideas on what the shape and size of evolutionary organisations might look like. Leadership coaches can help leaders think more radically about how organisations are designed or allowed to evolve in response to emerging needs and opportunities.
  1. The strategic challenge of senior leadership in organisations is often about second-curve thinking – the what, when and how of initiating the next strategic shift or transformation. Leadership coaches play a valuable role in helping leaders access their deeper intuition and inner wisdom (in relationship to external data or signs) to successfully distinguish passing fads from paradigmatic shifts. They can also help them disidentify from ego-based attachments to the way the organisation has been in the past and let go of projects, products or ideas which are past their sell-by date.  Coaches can guide leaders to recognise when it might be time to empower others to step up to leadership roles or even take over from them.
  1. Second curve thinking also helps make sense of the interplay between our inner and outer lives. As coaches we can support leaders to separate out the inner and outer aspects of the challenges and crises they face. As human beings, we naturally make a series of S-curve shifts throughout our lives, for example from adolescence and dependence to adulthood and independence (although we seem to lack the rituals to mark these transitions). As described elsewhere on these pages, we can continue to make significant shifts in the way we see and relate with the world throughout our lives; for example, between egocentricity and responsibility; between dedication to an established way and finding your own path to success; between success-orientation and engagement with meaning, values and purpose.  Alongside these inner developments, leaders also make external shifts in their careers; sometimes between organisations, or between roles within organisations or even between professions and careers. Coaches can help leaders make sense of these inner and outer shifts and more consciously choose when to stay or go, whether to build or transition. As Handy reminds us, previous generations might have expected to stay in the same profession for their entire working lives; my generation expects to make have a multiplicity of careers during our working lives; some of the next generation is getting used to to portfolio working or multiple roles from day one.

Hope this post interests you in reading Handy’s book for yourself.

Best wishes

Aubyn

Executive Coaching or Leadership Coaching?

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14th July 2016

A few months back at an APECS evening event, a discussion arose about whether Executive Coaching was still the best description of what members of APECS did, or whether Leadership Coaching might be a more dynamic moniker going forwards. The discussion revealed an interesting split in views; between those that value the exclusive nature of APECS, with an emphasis on coaching senior people in organisations (i.e. executives) and also value the relatively small and exclusive nature of APECS membership (keeping the benchmarks high and the process rigorous); and those that favour a more inclusive approach, both to who is coached in organisations (e.g. potential leaders are found throughout an organisation) and also to encouraging a broader base of membership for APECS (e.g. thousands of members, not just a couple of hundred). Someone commented that we might look back and see this as a point in time when the old S-curve (e.g. executive coaching) was superseded by the new S-curve (leadership coaching). History is littered with organisations and that don’t adapt or evolve with the nascent trend (for more on this S-curve thinking I highly recommend Charles Handy’s recently published ‘Second Curve’).  Needless to say, I think this is a discussion that needs to continue within APECS (a professional organisation I find of enormous value by the way, and encourage all leadership coaches to join!

In this post I want to explore some of the deeper meaning behind these terms and the wider theme of leadership.

ex·ec·u·tive

adjective: executive

having the power to put plans, actions, or laws into effect. “an executive chairman”

noun: executive; plural noun: executives; noun: the executive

a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business organization.

lead·er·ship

noun: leadership

the action of leading a group of people or an organization. “different styles of leadership”

the state or position of being a leader. “the leadership of the party”

the leaders of an organization, country, etc. plural noun: leaderships

‘Executive’ seems to be about the exercise of power, making decisions and executing those decisions.  I tend to associate executive coaching with business coaching and mentoring, often ex-senior business people, acting as a role model, sounding board, confidant or career guide for current senior business people who are lonely at the top.  Although these are all roles I have played at various times as a coach, they are not for me what coaching is primarily about.

‘Leadership’ is more about leading people and the human dimension of what goes on in organisations, creating context, vision and developing people.  Executives are appointed, Leadership is a vocation. Anyone can make the choice to be a leader, you don’t need to be given permission and in its simplest form it starts with self-leadership. Altogether, there is much more dimensionality to the concept of leadership, a pliability that allows us to imbue it with meaning. For example, we can distinguish between the inner and outer dimensions of leadership as well as help leaders explore the relationship between their inner lives and their outer roles as leaders.  In our model of leadership agendas, we distinguish between the outer aspects of improving performance, adapting behaviour and leading change, alongside inner aspects of change and development, and the need to connect with purpose, meaning and values.  We distinguish between the outer crises that leaders need to deal with in their role and the inner crises which can arise for them at significant turning points in their lives.  All this rests within an environmental context of what is sometimes referred to by the acronym VUCA: increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.  These four horsemen conspire to build pressure and stress for leaders within the organisational context of increasing performance expectations, always doing more for less.

What this all adds up to is not only an explanation of why leadership coaching is becoming increasingly important but also why leadership coaches need to be equipped to work with the whole person, helping the leader link between their inner and outer lives. Coaches need both a high degree of personal development as well as relevant psychological training that extends beyond conventional behavioural approaches. We describe psychosynthesis as a holistic depth and height psychology than encompasses working at all levels of consciousness and unconsciousness; lower or prepersonal, middle or personal and higher or transpersonal.  On our PGCPLC course (which starts again in September) we help coaches develop skills of how to work at each of these levels and an awareness of which level to work at, as well as when to shift between inner and outer focus with the leader.

On the subject of Leadership, it can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that we seem to have a national crisis of political leadership in the UK currently.  Whatever your views on Brexit, I can’t see any leaders who have come out of this debacle with much credit, and there now seems to be a wider issue of leadership deficit across the political spectrum (with the possible exception of Scotland). Politicians need as much help as organisational leaders in developing themselves (most could do with more emotional, social and ethical intelligence for example), navigating their inner crises and dealing with unexpected external crises, but how many currently use leadership coaches (as opposed to advisers or confidants)?  I suspect not many, even though I see quite a few coaches citing a specialisation in coaching politicians. I might try initiating a survey of MPs to find out more. For the first time I am seriously considering entering this arena – if you work with politicians, are drawn to our approach and would be interested in collaborating to apply it to political leadership coaching, please get in touch.

I rather liked David Brailsford’s comment the other day “…Britain has been brave enough to invest in sport and it’s paying dividends. We’re not brilliant at politics at the moment but we’re doing well in sport.”  This is certainly true in his sport cycling (and maybe tennis, cricket, rugby, athletics…), but less so in football (at the national level).  All these sports use performance coaching, psychologists and many other specialists these days in the pursuit of marginal gains, but it is interesting to notice how closely success seems to correlate to good leadership.  Brailsford himself is an excellent leadership role model, but there are leaders throughout the Sky cycling team and I’m sure in their back-up team too.  Interesting also to see how often Eddie Jones spoke of the need for ‘leaders on the pitch’ during England Rugby’s recent successful tour of Australia.

That’s all for now, I’m sure we will continue with some of this themes again soon

Best wishes, Aubyn

Psychosynthesis as a leadership coaching psychology

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3 July 2016

In early June, we (myself, Paul Elliott and Maggie Hacker) attended the Psychosynthesis International Conference in Sicily, at which we ran a well-attended workshop on Psychosynthesis as a leadership coaching psychology.  You can find a copy of our slides here (although they might need some explanation!).

This post unpacks some of my observations and learnings from the conference.

  1. My map of the psychosynthesis community subtly changed, as I discovered more camps, sub-camps and possible splits than I had previously imagined. The conference was organised (or ungenerously one might say, disorganised) by the Italian institute and mainly attended by Italian therapist and counsellors. As such it was a wonderful demonstration of how strong psychosynthesis is in Italy. I am grateful to Keith Sylvester, who helped me appreciate the distinction between the Italian school of psychosynthesis which has focused on the transpersonal dimension as well as Assagioli’s mystical leanings and the anglo-american school which evolved separately and has sought a more holistic integration of psychosynthesis with psychodynamic depth psychology and is well represented in northern Europe and Scandinavia. I concluded that the best chance of finding people sympathetic to and supportive of our project to making it more accessible to the organisational and leadership world would be with the later.  We are taking steps towards joining the EFPP (European Federation of Psychosynthesis Psychotherapists), on the basis that we could help create a group within this focused on organisational practice and leadership coaching.  We are planning to attend their conference in Germany next year, as part of continuing to build our international connections.  There seems to be an appetite for a European version of our PGCPLC that concentrates the contact time, for example into two blocks of five days and builds in more virtual meeting and self-directed learning, rather than five long weekends.
  1. I didn’t see so much of the split I had previously come across from reading a number of excellent papers, i.e. between the ‘integral psychosynthesis’ direction espoused by Kenneth Sorensen and the ‘therapeutic healing of the wounded child’ version developed by Firman and Gila. This is far too complex a story to even briefly describe here, so I will return to it in another post. Suffice to say I lean towards Sorensen’s perspective which involves returning to Assagioli’s original writing and unpicking some of the relativistic pluralistic biases which have become too identified with psychosynthesis. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Kenneth speak passionately about the seven core concepts of Assagioli and I introduced myself to him afterwards. He runs a training school in Norway but only for therapists, so I see a potential link up on the coaching front.
  1. Despite what I said earlier, we saw plenty of evidence of the rapid emergence or leadership as a hot topic within the psychosynthesis community. Despite being bizarrely left off the initial topic list by our Italian organisers, many speakers and workshop leaders spoke about leadership from a psychosynthetic perspective. For example, I attended a session on inner leadership by Dorte Schrienert (from Germany) in which she combined the same three perspectives that weave together on our PGCPLC course – psychosynthesis, developmental psychology and systemic practice (another post on the topic of leadership is going to follow shortly).
  1. We also noticed the extent to which many therapists are becoming coaches, as well as vice-versa. We met people from across the world working with both modalities or looking to run a coaching practice alongside their therapy practice. Paul attended an excellent session by Didi Firman and Jon Schottland (from the US) on life coaching and how to work with the Will, in a similar way to how we combine Trifocal Vision with the coaching GROW model.

Why are therapists migrating to leadership coaching? An obvious draw to leadership coaching is that organisations are able to pay more than individuals.  There is also the challenge of working with the complexities of organisational systems as well as an opportunity to make a difference to more people through helping individual leaders develop.  Our course is also about connecting with evolutionary purpose and meeting the emerging crises in society with a transformational and evolutionary level of leadership.

Our PGCPLC course is the only short programme that brings psychosynthesis together with leadership coaching in the UK. The six-month programme sets up new coaches to start practising and helps experienced therapists or counsellors adapt their skills to coaching. As well as a Post-graduate certification and qualification through the Institute and Middlesex University, students also gain fast-track professional membership of APECS.  HR departments increasingly expect coaches to have all of these credentials. Those students new to Psychosynthesis can continue with the MA in Psychosynthesis Psychology with the Institute to deepen their psychological mindedness, skills and development, whilst practising as a supervised coach.

Coaches learn how to work with the whole person and navigate the relationship between our inner and outer lives; to tackle issues of performance, behaviour and change within the context of purpose, meaning and values.  Our evolutionary approach focuses on the core human skills of communication and relationship, on developing awareness, activating the will and actualising potential.

Having started in Sicily I’ve ended this piece with a plug for our course, the second run of which starts in September.  Please forward this blog link to anyone you know who might be looking for a coaching course!

Thanks

Aubyn

For more information on the Coaching Programme contact:

Aubyn Howard
aubyn@psychosynthesiscoaching.co.uk
07801 861416

Paul Elliott
paul@psychosynthesiscoaching.co.uk
07967 302971

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