Useful info: If you want to practice listening for themes and emotion, and listen to the impact of the tone with which you offer back (diagnostic or as a question) listen to this – there are loads of episodes so lots of practice!
Claire writes: “Great coaching is about people having insights that enable them to make meaning. And we can’t make meaning for someone else! They have to do that themselves.
Thank goodness for Maeterlink’s insight: “It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.”
Teaching someone something in a coaching conversation can turn into an attempt to get them to make meaning. Lightly offering a model might be much more useful. For example, we meet a lot of people in transition. We could ask lots of questions to find out where they are in William Bridge’s transition model. When this happens we might draw his diagram quickly and say ‘does this give you some insight?’”
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Claire writes: ‘So this week’s insight about transformation also builds on Maurice Maeterlink’s comment that: “It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.”
If coaching is about people getting new insights into their own stuff, the simplest thing to do is to ask them:
And of course not everyone has insights while they are talking to us. I work with someone who is a really pacy thinker. She does all the work the day before we meet because she can see we have a meeting scheduled. Our conversation simply lands the insights she had yesterday. For many people, the most significant learning or insights happen after the conversation is over… when we land the conversation well (and that is still part of the process!)’
This is part of 3D’s philosophy of coaching. You can get them all as a postcard set from our shop.
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Claire writes: “If we aspire to work transformationally, how do we do that? I’ll be sharing some ideas over the next three weeks. They are all built on Maurice Maeterlink’s perceptive comment that: “It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.”
Saying something out loud might be enough to catalyse transformation. That is why I often say to people ‘You’ve said it now – that might be enough’. Optimistic, realistic and demonstrating that I believe they can do this. If more work or deeper work needs to be done to reach more significant change we can talk about that later. Let’s see what happens first.”
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Claire writes: “There’s lots to learn in training events. Delegates make observations or ask questions that get me thinking. I have a sheet on my desk to catch them so that I can process them later without forgetting.
We were talking about staying in connection with someone as they are thinking, and the importance of looking as well as listening. A. used to be a translator and shared with us that you can only translate if you have your eyes on the speaker all the time. As soon as you look away, you lose connection. (I’m smiling now because I ran a session on active listening on Friday where I was being translated into Russian and forgot to share that insight with them!)
In conversations where the purpose is that we are keeping someone company while they do useful thinking, connection is everything. Connection is different from control. It can look like this. How can you keep in connection in conversations?”
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Claire writes: “It’s interesting, I think, that the closer we are to something the less we see. People often talk about coaching as being a place to see the wood (or in the USA, the forest) for the trees. It’s the ability to facilitate someone else getting a different perspective that makes it work.
To facilitate their thinking well, we need to leave our opinions out – in our heads as well as what we say… or we both get too close to the trees.”
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Ruth writes: “The other day, as I was listening to a conversation, I started thinking about fishing. It sounded like the ‘professional’ in the situation was fishing for an answer, constantly casting their bait into the water, again and again trying to find a question that would catch the ‘fish’.
I don’t fish. And I imagine that casting the line in quick succession won’t get the desired result. The water would be constantly stirred up, not allowing the fish to come towards the hook.
I was left wondering how often we do that in conversations. When we ask repeated questions in quick succession – How will you know? Do you think that…? What might you need to do? and other brilliant questions I have in my stash to ask – we are constantly stirring the water, scaring away the fish. Scaring away the thought process.
I wonder if we are like fish, needing the bait and hook to be cast and for the water to settle so that we can think more clearly. As I coach I want to learn to be like a patient fisherman.”
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Claire writes: “One of the interesting things about lockdown is that we have been asked to make decisions in service of our communities. Whether we like it or not, we have stayed at home for a common cause that is bigger than we are.
‘Everything is in connection’ says Senge. Many of the connections, or systems, around us are invisible – how we connect to family and friends, teams at work or in the community, to our organisations and to society.
This morning, we ran a module of Transforming Conversations online and we were mapping out the systems in which we live and work. The process of looking at something differently brought insights and clarity to many of us.
Lockdown is, for many, an opportunity to review and reflect on how, what, where and even why or when we do what we do. If it’s time for you to review, mapping it out with stuff (coins, coffee cups, tic tacs – anything that moves) might give you some new insights, if it’s useful?”
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Claire writes: “Over the last few weeks it’s been a privilege to spend a little time with Systemic Teacher, Lynn Stoney to talk about with trauma. One of those conversations has informed this blog post.
Hellinger wrote that war, natural disasters and pandemics are ‘the greater forces that shape us’. We aren’t used to this level of not being in control. It’s a shock and our normal coping strategies may or may not work for us. Naming out loud what we can influence and what we can’t influence can be liberating. In systemic work, this is described as agreeing to something exactly as it is. The world won’t be the same again is about naming the truth of what is.
Inviting ourselves, or someone else, to say out loud I am feeling trapped in my home, if that is what they are expressing, is very different from reassuring them that lots of other people are, too. Reassurance minimises when we try and make something better.
Agreeing to what is is very different from trying to make something OK.”
[In coaching this is a skill to evoke awareness. This will be part of Wednesday’s masterclass for trained coaches which will be available as a recording from Thursday]
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Claire writes: “The best book I have read so far in 2020 is Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell. Wendy was diagnosed with dementia young and this is her story. It wasn’t an easy read but there was much to learn. At the end of the book, I wanted to know what happened next, so I looked her up. Wendy is alive and well and tweeting and blogging.
Last week, Wendy posted a photo of her bedroom wall. She had gone in and seen something huge which worried and confused her. She took a photo and left the room. Outside the room, she looked at it from a different place, and recognised the shadow of the pot plants on her window. I love that the concept of looking from a different place has such wide value.
In the last 48 hours, we have been thinking about what questions we need to be asking over the next few days and weeks about behaving responsibly and working in service of the greater good? As a result of this we have decided for the time being to stop all on site group and team events so that we can respect the UK government guidelines about social distancing. We will be focusing on offering online training, coaching and mentor coaching – so we are available to talk whenever that’s useful.
So this morning has been busy with logistics and phone calls. Now that’s all done, and I can take a step back, I am reminded of Wendy and the photograph. What I see from a distance is the opportunity to go more slowly, to focus on some useful and important developments, and to experience a different way of being. That’s exciting.”
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Alan writes: “Scientists at NASA have unveiled a re-worked picture entitled ‘The Pale Blue Dot’, first captured 30 years ago on Friday by the Voyager 1 probe. What does it show? Well, us – the earth – seen from a distance of about 4 billion miles. The iconic view was made famous by Carl Sagan in his 1994 book ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.’ He described the planet Earth as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”. The image has now been re-worked using modern techniques and software. To me it is charming and disturbing in equal measure.
One of the skills of helping people to think differently is to get them – metaphorically – to ‘stand in a different place’; if we stand in the same place we will usually see things in broadly the same way. A new view of life and its options normally follows when we are invited to make an internal shift in our standpoint. Technically we call this ‘reframing’ – and it can involve a positional shift, or a temporal shift. ‘What would it look like if you stood here?’ ‘What might it look like from the viewpoint of another person?’ ‘What might you notice if, in your imagination, you were to stand 12 months down the line and look back?’ These imaginative shifts open up new possibilities and new ways of seeing.
The NASA image has that impact on me. Thoughts turn… Smallness and greatness. Though I’m writing this gazing out of the window at the reassuring solidity of Belgravia’s elegant tree-lined streets and townhouses, and the vastness of this great city in which they are set, caught up in the seeming importance of life here (and my obsession with my life within that life), the view from 4 billion miles away moves things into a new perspective. The big things are suddenly very small indeed – and the things I suddenly need to be aware of come into focus. This tiny dot is us: and it is all we have. It is, within the ambit of the whole immensity of creation, entrusted to our care. We aren’t doing such a great job, are we? As Lent approaches, time perhaps for us to re-work our picture of life as a gift.”
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