A Sabbatical

For obvious and thoroughly appropriate, if sad, reasons, all my booked group work for the next few months has been cancelled or postponed. One-to-one coaching , supervision etc that can be conducted remotely (via skype/zoom/phone) is going ahead; and I am investigating the practicality of online facilitated workshops.

Nonetheless, that means that I have a lot of time suddenly free in my diary, and have been giving some thought to the question of how best to use that.

As a base line, there is something about wellbeing for me and my family (my 95 year old mother in law lives with us, so we have been taking social distancing very seriously). Wellbeing or resilience in these difficult times involves putting in place suitable routines to keep us healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

But I don't want merely to survive the current crisis; I want to make it as positive a time as I can for myself and others.  There's not a huge amount I can to for others, for obvious reasons; though we are clearly participating in the local village mutual support scheme, and I have also joined the EMCC's 4*4 offer of free support to people professionally; and am working on some more specific offers for my client base.


But this is clearly an opportunity to invest time in ways that are normally not easy; so I have decided to treat the next few months as largely a sabbatical, and set myself some aspirational targets, both work related and beyond work.

So, for example, I had already signed up to David Clutterbuck and Peter Hawkins' virtual course on Leadership Team Coaching which is running over the summer.  This is an opportunity to invest much more significant time in that to make the absolute most of the learning available.  So in advance of the programme's start, I am re-reading Hawkins' book on the subject and making more detailed notes.

Likewise, our garden will never be the same again!  And I have a number of other goals, spanning the various roles in my life.

So I recommend giving some thought to that question: when this extraordinary crisis is over, what will I need to have done, so that I know that I have used the time - both the challenge and the opportunity inherent in it, in the most positive way that I can?

Empathy

One of my coaching clients was asking about empathy, the other day. Which set me thinking... and one of the things I thought was that Gerry Egan is bound to have wise words on this, and likewise Carl Rogers.  Which set me reading...

Egan, as ever, is very good. His book, is a foundational text for all those in the helping professions, and has a couple of chapters on empathy.

In the first he focuses on reflecting and checking what you have heard as the core of the other person’s communication; a typical structure would be: ‘you feel…. because….’ in a tone of voice that suggests enquiry rather than judgement.  That is designed both to demonstrate that you have been listening and are trying to understand (in particular) the emotional weight of the communication; and also to invite the other person to amplify, modify (or if necessary correct) the impression that you are forming. It is also an invitation to the other person to talk further - a signal that this is discussable stuff and that you are open to that discussion.

In a later chapter, he discusses ‘advanced empathy’ and specifically:

• Helping clients to make the implied explicit
• Helping clients to identify themes
• Helping clients to make connections
• Helper self-disclosure

These are all valuable approaches, of course, and regular tools in the coach's kitbag. But it useful to have them listed in that way, and to do a mental audit of how frequently, and how well, one uses them.

Rogers, in Client Centred Therapy, focuses more on the tonality of the exchange: how important it is that the way in which the helper (coach, in my case, though therapist in his language) is heard by the client to be on the client's wavelength; and above all not judging the client.

And then, by one of those leaps of insight that mark me out as a man of exceptional something or other (one client referred to my interventions as a 'blinding flash of the obvious,' which I take as a compliment...) I reflected on how much Nancy Kline's work (in which I am particularly interested) serves to create the conditions for empathy.  Indeed one might say that her ten components of a Thinking Environment offer an excellent blueprint for creating the conditions for empathy.

The ten components are: Attention, Ease, Equality, Diversity, Appreciation, Information, Encouragement, Feelings, Incisive Questions and Place. 

So these three perspectives, I think, offer a very useful way of triangulating our thinking and self-reflection on empathy. As ever, I am indebted to my coaching clients for provoking my learning: mine is a truly privileged job!

Intuition

I have long been interested in Intuition, and in particular, the intuition of coaches during coaching sessions with their clients; and likewise the intuitions of supervisors during sessions with coaches.

It happened again the other day, in a supervision. The coach I was working with had asked me, as her supervisor, to share some of the interventions I frequently use in coaching, so we spent a few minutes towards the end of our session on that, and it was a useful and interesting conversation. And we moved on and talked about other things. 

And then, I was struck by... well let's call it an intuition, for want of a better word: another tool that I thought it would be helpful to share. And this one really caught her attention - as I was describing it I could see her engagement and she only just managed to stop herself from interrupting my explanation to tell me about a situation that she faced (and which she had not previously mentioned) in which this particular tool would be invaluable.

As I reflected on this, wondering where the intuition had come from, it became clear to me. Although she had not discussed the specific situation with me, she had discussed that client with me; and I think at some barely-conscious level I was noticing a pattern in their interactions, as she described them, that this tool would helpfully disrupt. So perhaps it was no surprise that she should see its relevance and apply it immediately - in the same context, albeit to a different specific situation, to the one that had prompted me to think about it.

I suspect that is often the case; and that intuition is a name that we give to a process that includes:

• listening, observing and noticing with a high degree of attention and accuracy; 
• processing that in a part of our mind that is not under our direct observation (barely-conscious, or unconscious are words I often find myself using in that context) 
• discovering (as if from nowhere) an idea that is highly relevant (drawing from a huge range of our previous knowledge and experience those elements that are most appropriate) 

And as I have mentioned before, my supervisor, Jan Allon-Smith has pointed out that such intuitions are actually co-created by the two parties involved and the process that they are working through, so again, it should be no surprise that the insight I mention above was so readily recognised as valuable by the coach with whom I was working.

Coaching Supervision (revisited)

Yesterday, I finished the last assignment for my ILM 7 qualification in Coaching Supervision. I have blogged previously about a question that arose early in the programme about the difference between supervision and coaching a coach.  That difference has become ever clearer as we progressed through our joint exploration, and in particular through the experience of practicing supervising.

But one of the things that most clarified it, was reading the excellent book Reflective Practice in Supervision (about which I have also blogged previously, here and here). Along the way, and almost in passing, Hewson and Carroll remark that one of the key purposes of supervision is to help the practitioner to review and revise their practice framework.  A practice framework, they further explain (and this is from memory - the book is upstairs - so don't assume this is verbatim...), is a set of values, skills, habits, behaviours and attitudes that inform our practice. More often than not (like the engine of a car) it is under the bonnet, as it were, and we don't attend to it. We merely drive (to push the analogy about as far as it will go) and it all works.  

But to become better coaches, we need to look under the bonnet; to tune it up, replace components that no longer work etc. So the supervisor's job (inter alia) is to help the coach to make explicit all those implicit aspects of the work, to examine them, improve or replace them, and so on. This is the formative, or developmental, aspect of supervision.

That's not the only role, of course.  The supervisor has two other key functions. One is the normative function, which is about ethical and professional standards. This is actually an area to which I think I need to pay more attention in my supervision. The ethical aspect is one I am interested in and typically attend to: I love that kind of discussion.  But professional standards, including things like checking a coach has appropriate insurance, discussing membership of appropriate professional bodies etc, is something I can easily forget to raise.  The third function is restorative, which is about helping the coach to process and deal with the emotional weight of his or her coaching client relationships and the issues discussed. I am better at that one.  Attentive readers will have made the links between these and the coaching rooms described in the Hewson and Carroll book, which I blogged about a mere three months ago.

So plenty to think about as I move ahead (and there's a lot more, of course) but for the moment , I think it's time to sit back and put my feet up, and enjoy the feeling of having smashed the (self-imposed) deadline of finishing my work on this qualification before the end of January.

Feelings

In my last blog post, before Christmas, I wrote about the importance of place, one of the ten components of Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment.  

In this post, quite by coincidence, I am writing about another component, Feelings. (This may turn into a series: having found I have something new [I think] to say about these two components may lead me to consider what I have to say about the others - but I digress).

The coincidence that leads me to write about Feelings is that I came across a powerful passage in Kathryn Mannix's book, With the End in Mind.  I was given this powerful book, which seeks to encourage people to talk about death more, and more openly, for Christmas; and I have already written about it on the Shifting Stories blog. Kathryn Mannix writes on this topic based on her many years of experience as a medic doing pioneering work in palliative care with the dying. But what made me think about the Feelings component of the Thinking Environment?

In a chapter called Beauty and the Beast, Mannix tells the story of a young mother who is dying of cancer. After sitting with her patient through an extremely emotional outpouring (the first this young woman has allowed herself) Mannix says:

Kathryn Mannix

’She gulps and takes a deep breath, but she is now so busy thinking about her thoughts that she is no longer awash with emotion. Here is an important truth in action: by being able to sit with the deepest anguish and not shut it down, it is possible to enable people to explore their most distressing thoughts, process them, and even find more helpful ways to deal with them.’

That is precisely the reason that Nancy has included Feelings as one of the components of the Thinking Environment: unexpressed feelings inhibit good thinking; and by enabling and allowing someone to express their strong emotions, and for that to be all right, we can help them to move on to do more excellent thinking. I was already fairly sure that this was accurate,  both from Nancy's reasoning and from my own experience, so it was fascinating to have that confirmed by someone highly experienced in working with people at times of intense emotion in a very different field.

Incidentally, Mannix's book is well worth reading for many other reasons, which are, perhaps, best summed up by the sub-title Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial. There is a link to her BBC talk about 'Dying is not a bad as you think' on the Shifting Stories blog.

The importance of Place

I had a final coaching session recently with a client whom I have been meeting for just over a year. It has been a very positive and successful piece of work - so much so that I have been reflecting on why it went so well.

One of the distinctive features of this coaching relationship is that we have been meeting at my office, in my house, rather than at the individual's workplace.

That made me reflect on the other clients whom I meet at my office, rather than their workplace; and the fact that all of these coaching relationships are going particularly well.  Could there be a link?

A few things occur to me. One is the obvious value of getting away from the workplace with all its distractions, and even associations.

A second is the quiet and the beauty that my location, in a hamlet in the Lake District, is able to offer. And we try to make the visit a bit special, too, with home-made cakes and biscuits - as Nancy Kline has observed, it helps if the place says 'You matter!'

But I am increasingly inclining to a third hypothesis: that the travel time is important. Because I live in the middle of nowhere, my clients have inevitably travelled some distance for their coaching appointments.  That gives them time to de-compress, as it were, from the immediacy of their urgent work stuff, and think about what they truly want to address in the coaching. Likewise, the return journey gives them further processing time, to consider what they have thought about in the coaching session, to reflect upon it and internalise it.

Which raises an interesting question: should I advise that coaching always takes place at my office, or even insist on it?  I strive to be client-focused, and so I often travel some distance myself to make it easier for my busy clients to fit coaching into their schedule.  But am I doing them a dis-service in doing so?

Part of me thinks, yes: I really do believe the benefits of travelling to a different location add significantly to the coaching experience; but then I worry that my experiment is flawed. Clearly people who are prepared to invest hours in travelling, on top of the coaching time itself, are highly committed to the process.  Maybe that is what accounts for the very high very positive success rate for that group of clients. And maybe people who are unable to take that much time away from their work have a greater need for coaching support, and denying it to them would work against the values of my business...  (and that's without even thinking of the phone or Skype coaching I  sometimes do: I can't really get my US client to fly over for a 2-hour session - should that mean I cease to work with her?... And likewise the people I coach in Belfast - I get there from time to time, but try to minimise flights, for all the obvious reasons - and remote coaching seems better than no coaching - and indeed, I think has a power all its own - but that's the subject of another post, I think.)

And so I vacillate.  I think what I'll do is raise the issue of Place more explicitly at the contracting phase of new coaching relationships; talk about the benefits of a venue away from the workplace - and one that allows some travel time for all the reasons I've mentioned, and see what creative ideas new coaching clients and I come up with, between us.

Through the Looking Glass

At last week's Staff Development Forum Conference in Gateshead, there was a very thought-provoking presentation by Chris Watt and Albina Shashyna, called Looking glass logic: Free your inner Alice.

It was clear from the start that this was to be no ordinary conference presentation. The presenters did not introduce themselves, nor the purpose of the session, but launched straight in with a dialogue from Alice: the dialogue between Alice and the White Queen:

"I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.""I can't believe that!" said Alice."Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Chris went on to explain the link between the ability to believe impossible things and creativity, adaptability and flexibility etc.

The presentation continued in a somewhat unorthodox fashion: thought bubbles appeared on the screen showing what Chris was thinking when Albina was talking, and vice versa.  We played an interesting game in which we had to make up stories, using the Alice jigsaw pieces we were given (and Albina kindly gave a passing plug to Shifting Stories, mentioning that it was reading that which made them suggest naming our stories).

Chris mentioned that some of our own stories - the ones we tell about ourselves - were like the drink in Alice that makes one very small; whilst others are like the cake that makes us big and strong.  And yet, somehow, we continue to tell ourselves the stories that make us small.

They had a disconcerting slide that asserted that we were not going to learn anything from all this.

And they ended with a clip from the film of Alice, in which, in order to slay the Jabberwock, she has to belief six impossible things: including that she can kill it. There was no summary or conclusion, they didn't stick around for any applause (or questions) - they slipped out while we were watching the film clip.

And I have been thinking, since, about this unorthodox presentation.  On the one hand, it made me realise why it is helpful to start with the purpose, conclude with a conclusion etc. - it was discomforting not to do so.  But on the other hand, I have been thinking about, and remembering, this presentation more than many I have sat through...

And recognising, on reflection, the art that concealed art: for example the beautiful circularity of ending where we began, with the need to believe in six impossible things.

So if the purpose was to leave me thinking, reflecting, remembering... then it was certainly an effective (as well as enjoyable) presentation; and much more so than most more typical conference keynotes.

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