From coaching to counselling…a spectrum…a hierarchy or a continuum?

I often find an analogy helpful in unpicking a concept, and was listening this morning to an interesting discussion on the quantum behaviour of macroscopic objects where there was much debate about superconductors and resistance........

To bring in another analogy, it seems to me that we are witnessing a therapeutic evolution which is very exciting, not just for the therapeutic world but for our clients, who have a range of needs from resolution of emotional or mental health issues to functioning at optimum level.

If we look at coaching and counselling in context, I think we can start to see how separatism of the disciplines is really an illusion. There have always been counsellors, those wise sages or elders of the village who simply had lived long enough to impart good advice to the less experienced or less wise.

There have also always been coaches, with roots in existential philosophy and motivational wisdom as in ‘The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it.’ Marcus Aurelius (161-180AD)

It seems to me that, whether people are trying to make sense out of their emotional lives or striving for peak performance in the work place, emotional intelligence underpins the process and ‘therapeutic conversation’ is the key.

It’s no surprise that, whether sports coaching, executive coaching, therapeutic coaching or counselling, the old wisdom still applies. Even Freud said ‘Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.’

To pick up the original analogy, when there is change, there will be resistance.

I see the BACP Coaching Division as a ‘superconductor’, enabling these conversations and possibly accelerating a process which is inevitable. I believe the disciplines will and should merge, and this parallels my own experience of growing organically from counsellor to therapeutic coach.

As American football coach, Vince Lombardi said “The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.”

…..which is actually a quote from Confucius (551– 479 BC) !

when two world collide

When two worlds collide

Over in Switzerland, the large Hadron collider is busy bouncing protons and neutrons off each other in an effort to discover more about the origins of our universe.

But what if some of those particles didn’t bounce? What if they merged? Fusion can be defined as: The merging of different elements into a union.

If two planets collide, damage occurs. If one planet is much larger, perhaps it absorbs the other. Sometimes that is a good thing. There’s evidence that our own planet earth was hit many times during its history, sometimes by rocks and space debris, sometimes by larger asteroids. One particularly large impact knocked Earth sideways, changing its angle of tilt. As a result, the Earth started to have seasons: winter for the hemisphere tilted away from the sun, and summer for the hemisphere tilted towards the sun.

When elements collide, there is a reaction. When elements merge, something new is formed.

The worlds of counseling and coaching have previously been viewed as separate disciplines, or two communities who spoke a different language. But with the creation of the new BACP Coaching Division, a lingua franca is beginning to emerge.

The fusion of counseling skills with coaching tools and strategies has led to the creation of something very new and powerful in the world of therapy and something which is now available to you in a brief and intensive training programme validated and accredited by the National College of Further Education.

the map is not the territory

I saw some thing the other day which reminded me of an old joke. Travelling to work, I passed the local chip shop called ‘MR CHIP but something was different this time. The C had fallen off (or been removed by local youngsters) and it now read ‘MR HIP’.

I’m used to searching for meaning as a part of my work and so I found I was struck by the difference a small change can make. Removal of the C had changed the message ‘MR HIP’ was now sending out into the community!

It made me smile and I knew I was travelling too far down the road of analysis. Even Freud said ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!’

At this point, my neural connections took me too an old joke which went:

‘My wife died’

‘Sorry to hear that. What did she die of?’

The big C

‘Yes, that’s a devastating disease.’

No, you’ve got it wrong. She was standing under the chip shop sign and the big C fell off and broke her neck!

A bit like the two Ronnie’s four candles sketch, the laugh lies in the misinterpretation, the assumptions we make. Like predictive text, our computing brains hear half a story and skip to the end or come to a conclusion even if it is the incorrect conclusion

We human beings are hard wired to do that.

It takes milliseconds to make up our minds about a person when we first see them. We try very hard to ‘box them up’ and place them into an area which says ‘friend’ or ‘foe’, ‘my tribe’ or ‘another tribe’. In the days of the caveman, that ability could, of course, be a life saver and can be today if you are confronted by an individual with whom you feel unsafe.

And yet, if we make assumptions or label people, we create a one dimensional interpretation of that person.

Stereotyping is lazy. Whilst acknowledging our predisposition to put people in handy boxes, we need to challenge our assumptions.  Once we’ve made an assumption and created the label, again, due to our wiring, we then look for the evidence that we are right and ignore the things which conflict with our assumptions. That is until we are confronted with reality or evidence to the contrary (like the chip shop joke).

A paradigm shift occurs when the map you have in your head is challenged by new incoming information which forces you to reassess and shuffles up all the paper work in your head.

Like the story Steve Covey recounts in his book The Seven Habits of highly Effective People;

He was sitting on a subway train full of commuters, some reading newspapers, some dozing quietly, when a man got on the train with four unruly children who proceeded to run up and down the carriage annoying the occupants. The man was seated next to Covey who felt compelled to say something.

He leaned across and spoke quietly ‘you should do something about your children’. The man seemed startled, like waking from a dream and replied;

‘Yes, you’re right. I should do something about my children. But we came from the hospital where their mother died this morning ……..and I don’t know what to do about my children.’

Sometimes, something is said or done, or we read something which changes our perception, challenges our assumptions and reshuffles all the paperwork in our head.

When we makes assumptions about people or events and jump to conclusions, we miss much of the story or deny ourselves the opportunity to see the three dimensional person

Our internal maps send us messages designed to help us navigate the world in which we find ourselves and are made of all our previous experiences bur as Robert Dilts explained ‘the map is not the territory’.

Staying open to new incoming information which may conflict with our assumptions allows us to stay flexible and accept that just because we think something is true, does not mean it is true.

The new accredited therapeutic coaching diploma. six work shops over three months.

become a registered and licensed therapeutic life coach

www.fusion-coach.com

‘Free up Some Memory, Mum’

My son departed for Singapore last week, but, before he went, he did me an enormous favour.

I had been aware for quite some time that my computer was running slow. I would press various relevant buttons and sit and watch the annoying egg timer on screen while the machine struggled to keep up with my commands. Things were still getting done, but I knew this was not as efficient as it could be.

‘You’ve got to free up some memory.’ My son explained. ‘Look at your desktop. It’s covered with bits of this and bits of that. Let’s get organised and put them in folders.’

He ran some kind of cleaning devise as well. I don’t need to know the details, just like I don’t need to know how my car works to drive it or how the magical radio waves get into transistor when I turn the dial.

But I was all too aware of the effect. My computer is running faster and more efficiently and I am…….calmer as a result. Now I press buttons and the screen is responsive. I simply get more done. I had started to think I needed a new computer, that my current one was old and past its sell by date.

It occurred to me that in 2011, a parallel process had been going on for me as I struggled to keep up with various commitments. I had cultivated a ‘yes’ mind set over many which meant I had a towards attitude that carried me into new projects, plans and adventures. And this was a good thing, except now I found I had little spare capacity and my internal landscape, just like my computer desk top, was full of ‘bits of this and bits of that’ as I struggled to make real progress in any one area.

Just like my old computer, I began to think my brain could not keep up with my ambitions, but thankfully I was wrong.

I simply needed to’ defragment’. I had to stop for a while and take a step back from all of my commitments and get a wider view, noticing of course, my choices. In doing so, I realised that too many ideas and projects had captured my attention and were preventing me from really focusing on something which now needed spare capacity.

The concept of therapeutic coaching, the combining of the two previously separate worlds of counselling and coaching, led me to co found the charity Reclaim Life.  I have since trained many volunteers to coach therapeutically and holistically, in a prescriptive 5 session format which now challenges the notion of how much training and financial investment it takes to have a ‘therapeutic conversation.’

That organisation is now flourishing and helping many people in the community, staffed and supported by some wonderful and caring volunteers.

Now it is time to take the next step, a leap of faith which will further challenge current thinking about what is useful in promoting emotional health and well being.

My spare capacity and freed up memory have been put to good use in now establishing the accreditation of my brief and intensive training programme by the National College of Further Education. See http://www.fusion-coach.com/ for details.

Having cleared my internal desktop from distracting clutter, I can start to focus on this new project and feel reassured that my brain had not reached capacity as I had feared, but simply needed reorganising to be faster and more efficient.

I am certainly in new territory again now and it feels a bit scary. Mistakes may be made but as I say to clients….’I can recommend a book  which I think you will find helpful called Feel the Fear and Do it Any way. You don’t even need to read it because the complete message is in the title!’

‘Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm’ Winston Churchill