Generative Coaching Volume 1

The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change

Robert B Dilts, Stephen Gilligan, Antonio Meza

• Publisher: International Assoc. for Generative Change
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780578900605
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

Generative Coaching Volume I

The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change

There are times in the life of every individual, every marriage, every family, every culture and every business, where what has been done in the past will not help you to successfully go forward into the future. In these situations you have to do something completely new that has not been done before.

To be generative means to create something new. That is what this book is about. How do we creatively support ourselves and others to find new solutions and develop new possibilities?

Situations calling for generative change also frequently involve a lot of uncertainty, risk, and potential danger. This can bring out inner obstacles and resistances which block creativity and that need to be identified and transformed. To effectively do so requires the ability to engage multiple intelligences and use "out-of-the-box" thinking.

In this book, internationally renowned coaches and authors Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan present a simple yet powerful six-step approach to navigating the complex path to a more meaningful and fulfilling future. Drawn from transcripts of live seminars, and brilliantly illustrated by Antonio Meza, this first volume provides a clear, practical and lively introduction to the magic of Generative Coaching.

Whether you are an experienced coach or someone interested in learning about how to support others to reach more of their potential, this book will provide you with a useful and inspiring road map for navigating the journey of creative and sustainable change.

Chapter 1

Overview of Generative Change

Background and Beginnings

The seeds of what we are calling “Generative Change” were planted over 40 years ago when the two of us met at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s. We were both students of John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the co-founders of NLP. We were also students of Gregory Bateson, who was a professor at UCSC at that time, and of Milton Erickson, the world-renowned hypnotherapist. These teachers were important influences on both of us and on the foundations of our Generative Change work.

One of the other things that we share is that we are both half Irish. Gilligan has the father half. Dilts has the mother half, which was Garigan. So it’s Garigan and Gilligan. We like to say, with an Irish twinkle in our eyes, that Generative Change has an Irish father and an Irish mother.

And we also both went to all-boys Catholic high schools in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of this was a very generative time socially.

So, we share many things and are also very different in many ways. Our paths diverged for a while after our days at UC Santa Cruz. Professionally, Robert went on to become one of the main developers and trainers in the field of NLP. His NLP University in Santa Cruz is one of the most well-known and respected NLP training institutions. Steve became a major figure in the field of Ericksonian hypnosis and developed his own body of work known as Self-Relations.

After traveling our separate professional paths for some 25 years, we reconnected on a professional level in 1994 and began doing programs together that explored areas of common interest and integrated our complementary developments and styles. One of our first joint ventures was a program titled Love in the Face of Violence. Others included Genius and the Generative Self, The Evolution of Consciousness and The Hero’s Journey, which became the basis for the book we co-authored on that topic entitled The Hero’s Journey: A Voyage of Self-Discovery (2009).

As a result of these frequent generative collaborations, our complementary approaches became more integrated and a new, common body of work emerged that we call Generative Change.

The Three Branches of Generative Change

In this chapter, we will present a framework that defines what we mean by “Generative Change.” Generative Change is a larger area of change work that contains the three different tracks of 1) Generative Trance, 2) Generative Coaching and 3) Generative Change in Business. Generative Trance is the result of the work that Stephen has done over the last 40 years, integrating Ericksonian hypnosis with his own innovations. Generative Change in Business is based on Robert’s Success Factor Modeling work and his developments in NLP over the last 40 years and has to do with application of Generative Change to entrepreneurs, companies, organizations and leadership.

Generative Coaching is the fruit of our mutual collaboration, particularly over the last 15+ years. It involves applying the principles of Generative Change to the area of personal development through Life Coaching and Executive Coaching.

The principles and processes of Generative Change provide a “deep structure” that has many different applications. This deep structure of Generative Change can be applied to many diverse “surface structures” or issues and situations relating to individual, organizational and social change.

We are going to start with an overview of the Generative Change model and then, in the coming chapters, go into how we apply it specifically to coaching and the Six-Step Generative Coaching process that we have developed.

For a New Beginning

Before diving into that, we both like to begin whatever we are presenting with a poem. We do this partly to honor our Irish roots, but also partly to emphasize that, in creativity, we’re using language poetically and musically at least as much as literally. That is, we are looking to use language to open a space that includes yet transcends words at the same time.

The great writer Emerson used to say that, in fact, every word was a “fossil poem.” That means each word has a history in it. Since we are not the first ones to speak them, the words we use carry clues about their origins and their evolution through time, like a fossil. But each word is also a poem, in that no word is really ultimately literal. It always has other layers of meaning.

The poem we would like to begin with is by an Irish writer named John O’Donohue. O’Donohue was probably best known for his book Anam Cara, which is the Gaelic term for “friend of the soul.” But he wrote other things as well, and this is from a book of blessings that he wrote called “Benedictus.” The poem is aptly titled For a New Beginning

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

John O’Donohue

This poem captures a lot about the journey, challenges and joys of Generative Change – the often unconscious processes that trigger it, the struggle between the desire for familiarity and safety with the desire for growth, the energy and expansion that goes with connecting to your deepest passion and motivation, and the excitement of bringing something new into existence.

What is Generative Change and Why is it Important?

If there is one word that you could use to describe what Generative Change is about, it is creativity. When we grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60’s, we thought it was all about love. However, now we believe that creativity is even more important than love, because creativity is not something that just a few special people do, but it is the heart and soul of everything we know as reality in the world. Modern neuroscience has established that anything that we humans know, we create. And so it brings up the question, “What is it that we want to create?” Generative Change work provides support for how to answer that question and implement our answers in a mindful and wise manner.

Generativity is actually a special type of creativity. Many types of creativity essentially involve reorganizing or incrementally improving something that already exists. Generativity is creativity in which you are making something completely new that has not existed before; i.e., “stepping out onto new ground” and where “your destination is not yet clear” as the poem describes.

There are times in the life of every system, every individual, every marriage, every family, every culture, every business, where what you have done in the past will not help you to go forward into the future. This is not everyday. Most of the time, you can use versions of what has worked in the past. However, where those of us who are change practitioners – coaches, consultants, therapists – come into people’s lives is often where what they’ve done in the past can’t help them in the present nor to achieve what they want for their future.

People sometimes use the metaphor of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” as a way of referring to the ineffectiveness of superficial change when you are in big trouble. Repositioning the chairs is not going to save the boat from running into an iceberg and sinking. You’ve got to go into a deeper place and make a more substantial change. In this sense, generativity is about profound change. It’s about deep structure change. You can have superficial creativity that just rearranges what you already know but, for us, generative change is about de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Generative Change
• Chapter 2: Introduction to Generative Coaching
• Chapter 3: Step 1 - Opening the COACH field
• Chapter 4: Step 2 - Setting Intentions/Goals
• Chapter 5: Step 3 - Establishing a Generative State
• Chapter 6: Step 4 - Moving to Action
• Chapter 7: Step 5 - Transforming Obstacles
• Chapter 8: Step 6 -Practices for Deepening and Sustaining the Change
• Chapter 9: Putting All Six Steps Together
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• About the Authors