Salutogenic coaching

Friday's Cumbria Coaching Network meeting, led by Sue Jackson, was on Salutogenic Coaching. (Salutogenesis is a medical approach focusing on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis).

The main thesis, based on work with people who have survived stressful change effectively, and the work of Anton Antonowski, is that a Sense of Coherence is a crucial factor.  A sense of coherence reflects a person's view on life, and capacity to respond to stressful and chaotic situations.  Sue works extensively with people who have a diagnosis of cancer, which grounded the work in a particular context.

A sense of coherence has three key components: Comprehension, Meaning, and Management.

Comprehension is essentially cognitive, and is about having adequate cognitive resources available to meet the demands placed on the individual.

Meaning is seen as motivational (think Viktor Frankl); that the demands are worth investing in, leading to a new or adapted frame; it leads the individual to engage with the demands. Management is behavioural, the coping/management strategies the individual engages in, so that stimuli are structured, explicable and predictable.

Thus helping people to develop or strengthen their sense of coherence may involve helping them to reorientate their life perspectives, develop the capacity to respond to stressors, and/or set up a different and balanced path to cope with change.

And there was even a four box model (from the work of Sarah Corrie) for me to add to my collection!  The key issue from that being that if someone is low on both resources and functioning, a referral to therapy is normally more appropriate than coaching.

It was a very stimulating and useful morning; and I am interested in how the Sense of Coherence model maps onto others (such as Bridges' Transition model, and my own ManyStory approach).

Coaching on Purpose

Karen Mason

Today's CPD event at the Cumbria Coaching Network was led by Karen Mason.  Intriguingly, it was called Coaching on Purpose, and I went therefore, to shed my habit of accidental coaching...

What Karen really wanted to explore with us, of course, was how we coach clients who are wanting to clarify or define their sense of purpose; and for this she introduced us to a model apprently drawn from the Japanese understanding of Ikigai (which may best be translated as raison d'être... or what Viktor Frankl might term meaning, in its most profound sense)

The model is very simple, and similar to one I have used for career transition coaching for years.  However, it has one additional circle.  My model considers Aspirations, Strengths and Opportunities. The Ikigai model shared by Karen has What you Love, What you're Good At, and What you Can be Paid For, which are closely analogous. But it has an additional circle: What the World Needs.

So a few questions arise, of course.  One is whether the labels I have used are more or less useful than the different, but analagous Ikigai labels. A second is whether the additional consideration of What the World Needs is valuable.

In our discussions at CCNet this morning, some felt that last consideration was too daunting: what the world needs is no Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un, someone suggested; but that is beyond our capacity to influence.  Others suggested that we might re-formulate it to be What Our World Needs, but others felt that was losing something of the meaning of the model.

For myself, I think one can choose to focus on the question in ways that are helpful rather than unhelpful - and indeed one could have an interesting conversation with a coaching client about whether they are choosing to answer the question in ways that are within (or potentially within) another circle - the one Covey refers to as the circle of influence. Focusing our attention obsessively on things that distress us that are outside our circle of influence is a great way to disempower ourselves.

For me, the overlaps of three circles, omitting a fourth, and their descriptors, were suggestive: these could almost serve as a diagnostic tool in some contexts: what is lacking from your Ikigai that is making you less fulfilled than you could be?

In the practical session, co-coaching using the model as a starting point, my co-coach and I both found the model stimulated interesting and thought-provoking conversations, though we took some licence with how closely we stuck to the content of the circles.  So I will play with this a bit more, think further on it, and possibly, in due course, unleash it on a client...

GDPR and Ice Cream

On Friday (16 March) we had a very valuable CCNet meeting at Abbott Lodge Ice Cream Farm. And not valuable only because of the quality of the ice cream (excellent though that was). But the real value lay in the opportunity to be taken systematically through the implications of the new General Data Protection Regulations by Mark Wightman (of Aethos Consulting).

Mark Wightman

Mark started by some myth-busting.  For example, people who claim that they can (for a fee) make you GDPR-compliant are probably overstating their case.  The regulations are full of words like ‘proportionate’ and ‘reasonable.’ What that means in practice is that until there have been a few court cases and the judiciary have decided what is proportionate and/or reasonable, we won’t know.

On the other hand, that also means that small businesses, such as those represented at the meeting, will not be held to the same standard as, say Google or HSBC or PWC.

As long as we take a reasonable and proportionate approach, then even if we get something wrong and someone complains, the regulator is more likely to say we should change our policy or practice, than to land us with a large fine.

Mark then took us through the essentials: understanding what personal data is; what principles underpin the regulations, and what sequence of steps we should take to develop appropriate and proportionate policies and practices.

All those who attended found it a very useful, and surprisingly (!) interesting morning, and we are most grateful to Mark for sharing his expertise with us.

(Cross-posted from the CCNet Blog)

Vulnerability and Shame

Last week we had a very interesting CPD session at Cumbria Coaching Network. Our guest speaker was Jacqui Sjenitzer, who introduced us (by both word and experience) to the work of Brené Brown on shame and vulnerability.

We explored themes of emotional exposure, and how the flight from that is one of the things that prevents us from truly turning up and being ourselves. We talked abut armouring up (to protect ourselves from the risk of emotional exposure), and the three strategies for that: moving away, moving towards and moving against. I was interested in the relationship of these to the Hogan HDS, where the Dark Side behaviours fall into the same categories.

And we spent a lot of time talking about The Arena. This metaphor is drawn from the famous Roosevelt speech, Citizenship in a Republic, delivered at the Sorbonne in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

This is a powerful metaphor, and the idea of turning up (see above) is closely linked to it: unless we turn up in the Arena, we are not really being true to ourselves. But the steps of the Arena is when vulnerability is most likely to strike: just as we go into that meeting when we can tell a difficult truth (ie enter the Arena) or hold our peace (stay on the steps) etc.

Such vulnerability is fed by ideas of scarcity (not enough time, money, expertise, courage, experience...) comparison (someone else is .... than me) shame, and the idea is that we can overcome it by self-compassion and empathy.

There was lots here that resonated with me, both with regard to myself and many people I work with. But I do have reservations about the Arena as a metaphor: building a philosophy on the metaphor of fighting for survival seems to me to lead to a particular way of looking at things - a particular set of possible stories - that may not be the most helpful.

Nonetheless, I found this a very stimulating and thought-provoking session, and am keen to read more of Brené Brown's work, and reflect on her TED talks: which may be seen here (on the power of vulnerability) and here (listening to shame).