Mindfulness for Coaches

An experiential guide

Michael Chaskalson, Mark McMordie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138902688
• eBook ISBN: 9781317449447
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Mindfulness for Coaches accessibly presents theory and research on the benefits of mindfulness training and explores how mindfulness can feature in coaching work. Michael Chaskalson and Mark McMordie explain how coaches can use mindfulness to become more deeply attuned to themselves and to clients, and to create transformational resonance.

The authors present a systematic methodology to cultivate and embody a way of being that enables growth and transformation in oneself and in others. The first book of its kind, Mindfulness for Coaches provides an experiential guide, inviting and supporting coaches to engage with the programme included, sharing new qualitative research into the potential impact of mindfulness on coaching process and outcomes, and explicitly linking mindfulness practice to global standards of coaching mastery. Presented in two parts, the book first outlines a unique eight-week programme, Mindfulness for Coaches, and goes on to clarify the links between mindfulness, coaching mastery and different coaching approaches, share insights from the fields of psychotherapy, leadership and organisation development, and provide guidance for further learning.

Mindfulness for Coaches will be insightful and inspiring reading for coaches in practice and in training, coaching psychologists and academics and students of all coaching modalities.

Part one
Mindfulness for coaches

The eight-week programme

1 Session 1

Introducing mindfulness

What is mindfulness?

Definitions and history

So far as we know, the Buddha – who lived 2,600 years ago – was the first person in history to talk about mindfulness, and for thousands of years the practices associated with it were confined to small groups of elite monastics living in Asian Buddhist monasteries. Now, suddenly, it has erupted into the mainstream of life in Europe and North America.

How did mindfulness – a way of continuously paying attention to your immediate experience with care and discernment – make the journey from those Asian monasteries into the hospitals, consulting rooms, boardrooms, and barracks where we sometimes find it today?

A key figure in the story is Jon Kabat-Zinn who, in the late 1970s was working as a molecular biologist at a teaching hospital near Boston where he was preoccupied by two problems. The first of these was his concern for what the hospital system was offering those patients it couldn’t fully cure. In conversation with physician colleagues, he concluded that perhaps only 20 per cent of patients were leaving the hospital without the suffering that had brought them there in the first place. What, he wondered, was the system doing for the other 80 per cent? Not much at all, he discovered, and this bothered him.

The second question that bothered him is a variant on one that often comes to the coaching room. ‘What is my purpose in life? What can I do to earn my living that fires me up so much that I’d actually pay to do it?’

Kabat-Zinn was a meditator and both questions resolved themselves in an epiphany moment that occurred while on a meditation retreat. During a session of meditation, he suddenly realised that the way he was learning on that retreat to work with his mind and mental states would be profoundly valuable to those whom the hospital system was unable to cure. In the same moment, he realised that it would be possible to present the ideas and methods he was using to people in a way that was shorn of all the ‘religious’ ideas usually associated with it. One could develop a fully secular approach that was completely available to people of all religious beliefs, or none. He imagined hundreds of hospitals around the United States having specialist clinics where the ideas and practices of mindfulness could be taught. That was a vision that has more than come to pass.

After persuading the hospital authorities to give them some space in a basement, Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues set about devising what came in time to be known as the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR). They researched the outcomes of their programme and it soon became clear that it was effective in helping patients to address issues like stress and chronic pain. What is more, biological changes started to show up in their research. They found that those patients with psoriasis who undertook the programme in conjunction with the high frequency UV light treatment that they were having at the hospital had rates of clear-up 50 per cent faster than those who didn’t take the programme. The way in which they were training their minds was impacting on what was showing up in their bodies.

This was one of the starting points in a body of neurobiological research into the effects of mindfulness on the brain and the nervous system in general and compelling data has begun to emerge from that.

Studies have shown correlations between eight weeks of mindfulness training and increased cortical thickness¹ and between similar training and increased brain grey-matter density in areas associated with sustained attention, emotional regulation and perspective taking.² Other studies show decreased levels of amygdala activation after the training.³ The amygdala is a key component in the brain’s threat-detection system – when it is less active you feel more at ease with yourself and others. Another study correlates eight weeks of mindfulness training with increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex and reduced activity in the right prefrontal cortex.⁴ The ratio of left to right prefrontal activation is a good predictor of overall happiness and well-being – if the left prefrontal is more active then you’re likely to experience higher levels of well-being.

A study carried out with a cohort of US Marines showed that, compared to a control group, those Marines who participated in eight weeks of mindfulness training experienced an increase in their working-memory capacity.⁵ Working memory is the system that actively holds information in the mind, to do tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make that information available for further processing. Measures of working-memory capacity are strongly related to success in the performance of complex cognitive tasks. It is a key component in emotion regulation and it is reduced by acute or chronic stress.

We’ll refer to these and other studies in more detail later in the book. For now, there is another turn in the story of the uptake of mindfulness that needs to be told.

In the late 1990s, a group of clinical psychologists – John Teasdale, Mark Williams and Zindel Segal – were commissioned to develop an economically affordable group-based treatment for relapsing depression.⁶ Significant depression is hugely disabling. Besides the emotional pain they experience, people who are depressed also experience levels of functional impairment comparable to those found in major medical illnesses such as cancer and coronary heart disease. The World Health Organization suggests that of all diseases, depression will impose the second-largest burden of ill health worldwide by the year 2020.⁷

Roughly one in ten people in Europe and North America will experience serious depression at some point in their lives and in some parts of the population that is more like one in four. When people have had three or more serious episodes of depression there is a 67 per cent chance that their depression will relapse.⁸

In the early 1990s, the two treatments that evidence suggested were the most effective in treating people with relapsing depression were one-to-one cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) or maintenance doses of antidepressants. Both are relatively expensive; not everyone is comfortable taking drugs and they can have unwanted side effects; and not everyone can have one-to-one CBT due to the limited availability of trained therapists.

One of the significant drivers of depression is a persistent pattern of negative ruminative thought that can become established in the mind in ways that can quickly tip people who are vulnerable to it from moments of sadness into deep troughs of disabling depression. The capacity to disengage from such thoughts, and to see them as ‘just thoughts’, can be a key component in helping people to stay well after depression.

While they were looking for a group-based way to help previously depressed patients to step away from that downward spiral, John Teasdale – who had long had a personal interest in meditation – was reminded of a Buddhist talk he had attended several years before where the speaker stressed that it is not your experience itself that makes you unhappy – it is your relationship to that experience. A central aspect of mindfulness meditation training is that you learn – among other things – to relate to your thoughts just as thoughts. In other words, you learn to see them just as mental events, rather than as ‘the truth’ or ‘me’. John recognised that this way of ‘decentering’ from negative thoughts, standing ever so slightly apart from them and witnessing them as an aspect of experience rather than being completely immersed in them, as the whole of experience, might be a key.

Looking further into this, they came upon this piece from one of Kabat-Zinn’s books:

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not ‘you’ or ‘reality’ … The simple act of recognising your thoughts as thoughts can free you from the distorted reality they often create and allow for more clear-sightedness and a greater sense of manageability in your life.⁹

They contacted Kabat-Zinn and, based largely upon his MBSR programme, they formulated their own eight-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programme. Although similar to MBSR in many ways, MBCT contains elements of cognitive therapy and theory that address the specific vulnerabilities and exacerbating factors that make depression recurrent.

Eight weeks of training in MBCT has been shown to be at least as effective as maintenance doses of anti-depressants in helping people to stay well after depression¹⁰ and NICE – The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which advises the country’s National Health Service on appropriate treatments – recommends it as a frontline treatment for relapsing depression.

This growing body of evidence has driven the rapid spread of secular mindfulness training across a broad range of social sectors in Europe and North America.

One downside of the current enthusiasm for mindfulness is that the way the word is used can sometimes be blurred – at times quite literally. At the launch party for another book on mindful coaching, a coach who had dipped perhaps too deep into the wine that was freely on offer came up to us and slurred ‘Oh yes, mindfulness, everyone wants mindfulness these days. I just keep doing what I’ve always done with my clients – but these days I call it mindfulness.’ And that really won’t do. At best, it is confused or self-deluded. At worst, it is plain deceitful.

So, what exactly is mindfulness? Perhaps the simplest description is that it’s a way of being aware of yourself, others and the world around you. But maybe that doesn’t convey quite enough and although scholars and researchers haven’t yet settled on a single all-purpose definition of the term, and perhaps may never do so, a brief look at its early Buddhist usage might give a clearer sense of what it actually means.

The language that the Buddha spoke has died out but his teachings were preserved in two other ancient Indian languages – Pali and Sanskrit – and in Pali, the compound term sati-sampajañña describes much of what we mean when mindfulness is discussed in contemporary therapeutic and organisational contexts.

Sati – the first part of that compound, has connotations of remembering; ‘it is due to the presence of sati that one is able to remember what is otherwise only too easily forgotten: the present moment.’¹¹ In the late nineteenth century the Pali translator and lexicographer T.W. Rhys Davids rendered sati as ‘mindfulness’ and the term has stuck ever since. But mindfulness, as we use the term in this book and as it’s used in clinical and other contexts these days, means more than sati – more than just remembering to pay attention. Thus, the second part of the compound – sampajañña – which means something like ‘clarity of consciou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword: an awareness of now
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Mindfulness for coaches
• Part Two Joining the dots
• Appendix A: Research methodology
• Appendix B: Our mindful coaches
• Appendix C: Good practice guidelines for teaching mindfulness-based courses
• Further reading
• Further resources and downloads
• Index