Coaching with the Brain in Mind

Foundations for Practice

David Rock, Linda J. Page

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780470405680
• eBook ISBN: 9780470506776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

DISCOVER THE SCIENCE BEHIND BRAIN-BASED COACHING

By understanding how the brain works, coaching professionals can better tailor their language, strategies, and goals to be in alignment with an individual's "hard-wired" way of thinking. Written by two well-known coaching professionals, David Rock and Linda Page, Coaching with the Brain in Mind presents the tools and methodologies that can be employed by novice and experienced coaches alike to create an effective—and ultimately more rewarding—relationship for both coach and client.

This informative guide to the neuroscience of coaching clearly demonstrates how brain-based coaching works in practice, and how the power of the mind can be harnessed to help an individual learn and grow. Illustrated with numerous case examples and stories, this book is organized for immediate use by professionals in their client work.

Coverage includes:

• A succinct but comprehensive overview of the major scientific and theoretical foundations for coaching and their implications for practice
• How the language of coaching—setting goals, making connections, becoming more aware, seeking breakthroughs, and taking action—parallels what neuroscientists tell us about how the brain operates
• Neuroscience as a natural platform for the ongoing development of coaching

Building on the existing foundation of coaching by adding neuroscience as an evidence base for the profession, Coaching with the Brain in Mind shows that it is possible to become a better professional coach by understanding how the brain works. As well, the authors, through their research, present that an understanding of neuroscience research, however new and speculative, can help coaches and leaders fulfill their potential as change agents in the lives of others.

PART I

Who Are We?

It is a universal characteristic of human beings that we ask questions about ourselves, our relationships to one another, and our place in the world. As we discussed in the introduction, answers to these questions come out of our beliefs about reality. If what is real consists of physical, material stuff, then the essence of who we are is our material bodies. Ideas, dreams, beliefs, faith, and even love are not real in the same sense. During the mechanistic era, material reality was the realm of science, and everything else belonged to philosophy or religion or fiction. The spiritual, fictional world, according to an extreme interpretation of this view, was either determined by or made entirely of different “stuff” from the material world. In either case, it could not have an effect on material reality. This interpretation was never universally accepted, but in the 20th century, even its scientific anchor in Newtonian mechanics began to come loose. The result is a new set of answers to questions about the essence of humanity. And these answers make coaching relevant.

Answering the question of who we are is not a fluffy or merely intellectual exercise, especially for coaches. Unlike plants or rocks, and like other animals, human beings move. At a very general level, we move toward reward and away from danger. That is, we move toward what we value and away from what we do not value. And values are not an isolated, individual matter. As physicist Henry Stapp (2007) puts it:

Martyrs in every age are vivid reminders of the fact that no influence upon human conduct, even the instinct for bodily self-preservation, is stronger than beliefs about one’s relationship to the rest of the universe and to the power that shapes it. Such beliefs form the foundation of a person’s self-image, and hence, ultimately, of personal values. (p. 5)

Stapp goes on to point out that the question of values is relevant to science despite the fact that scientific endeavor sought to be value-free during the modern era of Newtonian assumptions. “What we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is strongly influenced by science” (Stapp, 2007, p. 5). Neuroscience has the potential to confirm a basic coaching tenet: that what we choose to value makes a difference in how well we move through life. In part I, we survey paradigm shifts in how we answer a question closely related to our values: “Who are we?”

CHAPTER 1

Bedrock—Ontology

The anthropologist and her American university student had to walk for an hour after the Jeep that had brought them from Guatemala City could go no farther. They followed their native guide up and down paths through the mountains until they came to a village made up of mud huts set in a circle. In Guatemala before the civil war that made such visits too dangerous, the group would find that each village had its own typical costume, type of products that it would sell to other villages, and even its own dialect or language. The anthropologist was investigating the ravages of kwashiorkor—protein malnutrition that, in some parts of the country, left four of five toddlers dead after they switched from mother’s milk to the corn gruel that was considered the best thing parents could give to a child. Centuries of mistrust of strangers, probably beginning even before the Spanish invasion, meant that people did not believe Western doctors who told them they should give their children cow’s milk instead of their corn gruel. As she did not know how to resolve the problem, the anthropologist was there to listen instead of give advice.

A light mist had been falling, and the sky was overcast. One woman was brave enough to emerge from her mud-covered home, bringing two child-sized chairs for the anthropologist and her student to sit on. These seats were meant as a sign of honor. The woman, several children of different ages, and the guide hunkered down on the muddy ground. The woman spoke in her native tongue, which the guide had to translate into Spanish for the anthropologist. Then, because the student spoke very little Spanish, the anthropologist translated what was said into English.

The student had spent many hours in anthropology classes, learning about arrowheads and spear throwers and languages and cultural differences. But here she was faced with a living, breathing person who may never even have owned a book, much less taken a university class. How, the student wondered to herself, could there ever be any hope of communicating at all, given such differences?

But when the woman began to talk about her four children who had died from protein malnutrition, one after the other, the differences melted away. The woman named each child, described his or her personality, and offered precious memories. Tears filled her eyes. The student knew with sudden clarity that however different their circumstances, however little she understood the actual words that were used, she would never forget the emotional impact of that woman’s experience. They looked at each other as if there were no boundaries between them. Never again could the student use the term “primitive” without putting quotation marks around it or preceding it with “so-called,” as in “so-called primitive.” It was not theory but lived, emotion-saturated experience shared with the woman in the village that convinced the student of their common humanity.

Ontology is what philosophers call the study of “being,” of how we relate to each other and the world around us—that is, the study of who we are. Questions that philosophers classify as ontological are neither new nor limited to academic inquiry:

• What is the essential nature of human beings, physical or spiritual?

• Are we just animals with illusions that our conscious decisions have some kind of effect?

• Are people basically good and simply in need of encouragement to flourish, or are they essentially bad and in need of control?

• What part do emotions play in who we are? Are they disturbances to rational thought, or do they contribute to our ability to move through life?

• Is there such a thing as an enduring reality, or is reality a subjective creation?

• Is there such a thing as free will, or are our lives determined by heredity, environment, or both?

• If there is no free will, how can we speak of responsibility or morality?

• How independent are individual persons? Are people closely interrelated with their social and physical surroundings, or are they stand-alone entities?

• Does change happen in a line or in a circle—or in a spiral?

This initial chapter covers approaches to ontological questions that are embedded in a classical or mechanistic bedrock but that contain contributions to coaching:

Western philosophy

New Age philosophy

Anthropology

Sociology

Ontology as bedrock for coaching

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek word philosophia, meaning “love of wisdom.” Philosophy examines the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Evidence of a foundation for coaching can be found in early philosophical thought. Consider whether it is better to ask a client for her ideas on how to improve her performance or to advise her based on what you think is best. Most approaches to coaching favor asking the client, based on the assumption that clients are sources of untapped wisdom. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates pioneered this approach several thousand years ago.

HISTORICAL INTERLUDE

Socrates

Socrates (469-399 BC) is important for coaches to study. Socrates taught that each person is born with full knowledge of ultimate truth and needs only to be spurred to conscious awareness of it. He believed that people must acquire knowledge and wisdom for themselves, and so he engaged his students in a process of questioning rather than providing them with answers. His famous question, “What is the good life?” (Allen, 1991) is an example of what is called the Socratic method. The modern interpretation of this method includes these characteristics:

• Questioning to move a person forward

• Creating a structure around the process of questioning

• Pursuing meaning and truth

• Refraining from offering advice in the belief that answers can be found inside the individual, rather than in external sources of wisdom

Augustine

The fourth-century AD monk Augustine (354-430) argued against a position that was gathering adherents in Rome. About the year 390, a cleric named Pelagius had come from Britannia in the north, claiming that people’s good natures should be celebrated. According to Pelagius, by their own efforts, people could reconstitute themselves and the world around them. Augustine was a brilliant logician who had made his mark with the emperor, the pope, and other clerics by opposing heretical views. He countered the Pelagian belief in the inherent goodness of people by insisting that all human beings carry the mark of “original sin” and have to rely on the church to intervene on their behalf. The fact that Augustine is better remembered than Pelagius tells us who won the argument. Original sin became the doctrine of early Christianity and largely held sway until the authority of the church was shaken by scientific discoveries during the Renaissance. A link with Pelagian “celebration of the natural” can be traced from the Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) through to today’s New Age philosophies.

Descartes

Another of the enduring debates in Western philosophy is whether we observe our way to the truth (empiricism) or think our way there (rationalism). The French philosopher Renée Descartes (1596-1650), a major figure in rationalist history, proposed a materialist model of the human body. He believed that the mind was composed of different “stuff” from the physical body. In Descartes’ view, called dualism, the mental and the physical influenced each other, but he never explained exactly how that happened. Subsequently, a more complete separation into different realms offered a solution to the political conflict between the church and scientists. Science could claim dominion over the physical realm while the church could rule the “soul,” or mind.

This “solution” provided only a temporary truce and eroded as 19th-century scientists began to study the mind and thus encroach on the church’s territory. However, as long as science assumes that the mind is simply a by-product of “real” brain activity, the battle of dualism continues to be fought, as illustrated by modern philosopher of science Daniel Dennett (1991). Dennett’s claim that subjective consciousness is an illusion is in the tradition of mechanism, or the idea that human beings are reduced “to cogs in a giant machine that grinds inexorably along a preordained path in the grip of a blind causal process” (Stapp, 2007, p. 5). Such a view implies that each cog has no choice in what it will do or how it moves—that it is determined by past material causes—so how can we speak of responsibility for one’s actions or indeed morality at all? What use would coaching be in such a universe? In contrast, the universe that is emerging from contemporary physics and neuroscience not only provides a home for coaching but, as we claim throughout this book, is part of why coaching has come to be.

Galileo and Newton took up the empiricist program of discovering laws of the physical world. Newtonian physics, or classical mechanics, assumed that objective truth would be discovered by reducing all events to their elementary particles and developing laws that determined how these elements interacted. This line of research proved enormously successful. However, the implication of applying these assumptions to human beings leads exactly to the cogs-in-a-giant-machine conclusion drawn by Dennett and others. Why, then, should philosophers bother to philosophize and ethicists to ethicize and coaches to coach?

Philosophers ignored the mechanistic implication that their theorizing was illusory, and they continued to wonder about such questions as whether people would be at their best if left to nature, to whom principles of equality applied, and how people make decisions—rationally or emotionally?

Western philosophy has a long tradition stretching from the ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates) to modern philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Viktor Frankl. We will merely touch on those traditions that contain elements relevant to coaching.

When you coach, think of Socrates, in particular his method of questioning. New coaches often tend to violate Socratic principles by offering advice too early in the coaching dialogue. Often they do not probe deeply enough, settling for the first idea that comes up during the session. More experienced coaches follow the lead of the client and explore issues in greater depth. An experienced coach may ask 10 or more questions to elicit useful insights, whereas a new coach instead may offer interpretations.

Socratic principles suggest that coaches refrain from offering advice, understanding that the client is the expert regarding his or her life. Whitworth and colleagues, in their influential book Co-Active Coaching, summarize this approach by insisting that the client is naturally “creative, resourceful and whole” (Whitworth, Kinsey-House & Sandahl, 1998, p. 3).

Many philosophers influenced the development of the social sciences, which were always suspected of not being “real science” in the Newtonian universe. The social sciences in turn contributed to the emergence of coaching. In 1911, Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933), wrote The Philosophy of “As If” (1911, 1925), a book that influenced the sociology of knowledge and constructivism in sociology, psychology, and psychotherapy. He suggested that acting as if a belief were true has real consequences in the material world, a claim that fits the systemic paradigm and that has been confirmed by social psychology and neuroscience. The ideas of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who is famous for questioning “the meaning of being” (1977), were echoed in cognitive psychology, another precursor to coaching.

Existentialism

Existentialism is one of the major philosophical movements of the 20th century and one that explores territory outside the scientific objectivity demanded by logical positivism. Martin Buber (1878-1965), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), and other thinkers of the existential movement paved the way for the humanist perspective in psychotherapy (Rader & Gill, 1990).

Buber focused on people’s immediate subjective experience. He was not attracted to the science of his day, a science that studied reality as a set of mechanisms. Buber was born in 1878 in Vienna but spent much of his boyhood with his grandparents in the Ukraine. His grandfather was a Jewish scholar, but young Buber was not attracted to abstract philosophy divorced from everyday life. By the time he went back to Vienna to enter university, he was exploring existential philosophy.

Perhaps he could experience true meaning in everyday existence itself, in life embedded in community rather than in the dry observations of science. He wrote the book that is translated into English as I and Thou in 1922 (Buber, 1970). In it he describes two basic ways of interacting with the world—not just with other people but with anything. We can hold ourselves separate from whatever is in front of us, talking to ourselves inside our heads as if we occupy one universe and the “whatever” is a thing over there in another. Even if the “whatever” is another person, we do not interact so as to open ourselves to experiencing the other’s full, engaging presence. This is an “I-It” relationship. The other mode of relating is “I-Thou.” We enter a living, breathing dialogue with another person where the boundary between “I” and “Thou” is fluid, and we draw upon each other’s existence to enrich our own. As mystical as this descr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface: Who Should Read This Book?
• About the Authors
• About This Book
• Knowledge and Action, Action and Knowledge
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I - Who Are We?
• PART II - How Can We Be Healthy?
• PART III - Why Do We Do What We Do?
• PART IV - How Can We Feel Better?
• PART V - How Can We Get Along?
• Conclusion: What Are We Doing Here?
• Internet Links
• References
• Index