A Beautiful Way to Coach

Positive Psychology Coaching in Nature

Fiona Parashar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000580457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Leaders need to renew and recharge regularly to lead more effectively. Forget the squeezed hour of coaching on Zoom or in a busy office – this book invites coaches and leaders alike to re-energise their style of executive coaching by stepping beyond traditional techniques and out of the office for an executive day retreat.

Based on the award-winning framework of the Positive Vision Day programme, this accessible book introduces a new approach to coaching, combining time-out in a natural and beautiful setting with positive psychology. The book is designed to inspire coaches and leaders to take a day away from the desk, step into nature and renew their energy and purpose. As a coach, you are needed more than ever to help leaders align their strengths and values to their personal vision. This book does just that, and provides:

• Detailed exercises linking psychological underpinnings to the goals of each exercise, including how to avoid classic coaching pitfalls.
• Journaling prompts for self-reflection and self-coaching.
• Easy-to-understand models, templates, scripts and action steps for every stage of the process.

The approach used in the book will be of particular interest to not only leadership and executive coaches, and internal executive coaches, but also career, entrepreneurship, business, wellbeing and life coaches, as well as leaders themselves who are mid-career or at a career or psychological crossroads.

PART I WHY, WHAT AND WHERE

1 The Why and the What

DOI: 10.4324/9781003220657-3

What is a beautiful way to coach?

Quite simply, it goes like this: a step into nature, the gift of a whole day, and a deep connection with another human being as you watch them simultaneously return to their inner self and envision a better self in the future. As hope rises, hearts expand. Different, more positive futures emerge. Beautiful trees and beautiful hills hold our gaze. The green earth is soft beneath our feet. I love this kind of day; the beauty is in nature. The beauty is in you. The beauty is in me. The beauty is in what we jointly see – both in the physical world outside ourselves and what is emerging in our own internal worlds.

A Beautiful Way to Coach has four components: Spaciousness, Nature-Based Coaching, Positive Future Focus and Beautiful Power Questions. Let’s have a look at these components now.

Spaciousness

Why create a rush with coaching? Why squeeze it in to an already crammed day?

When I first started coaching, I was already committed to trying to help busy people think more clearly and slow down. In order to achieve this, I particularly like to create a sense of space and time… a sense that there is nowhere else to go and that nothing is more important than what this person is saying. What a gift that is to clients – what a gift it is to anybody! It’s a rare find to land on leaders who create a sense of spaciousness during a typical work week. The workplace is a busy and hurried space. Stepping out can give us some much needed headspace. Add in a beautiful setting and a compassionate yet challenging thinking partner and you also get heartspace – by which I mean a chance for the heart to beat coherently, to metaphorically expand, versus the tightness and contraction we feel when we get scared – and thus allowing more opportunity for change and personal growth.

When I first started coaching, it was normal for sessions to last just an hour. I launched my coaching business with an unapologetic invitation to invest time in coaching. To take half a day. We would schedule three- or four-hour sessions where we would take that half a day to work through some juicy strategic leadership issues: forward planning, restructuring and stakeholder mapping. The extended session time would give us spaciousness not only to deal with the external business landscape, but to grapple with the inner war the leader might be experiencing. A chance to explore and integrate those well-known psychological demons, gremlins, imposters or inner critics.

Somewhere along the way, I got a little sucked back into the “busyness” model and started shortening my regular sessions; even so, it only felt bearable to me because I knew there was a whole day out of the office I could offer clients, if I felt we were getting too rushed or transactional in the coaching.

Interestingly, during the lockdowns of the 2020/2021 COVID-19 pandemic, when we all moved to Zoom coaching, I shortened coaching sessions even more, as everyone was so fatigued from back-to-back video conferencing. So, I started to take my clients outside virtually instead of physically in order to create the feeling of spaciousness. We would put our earphones in our ears and head out for a virtual walk and talk. Exercise, fresh air and professional development. A triple whammy of delight, resulting in a greater sense of spaciousness and with a wider horizon than a Zoom screen.

Back to life outside of lockdown, then – imagine a whole day of space. A whole day of coaching, an entire day off site to talk about yourself, your vision, values and strengths, the stories of your life so far, the highs and lows, the hurts and disappointments. A whole day really gives people the space to breathe, talk, draw, visualise, craft big powerful questions and create energising plans that will get done. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in the middle of a busy day. We need time to step outside… for a day. The impact of one day can be surprising; a new day is a new beginning, or at the least a possibility of a new beginning. Celtic philosopher and poet John O’Donohue has this to say about a day:

Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit. Days enter us. Sadly in modern life, the day is often a cage. The day is so often experienced as a cage…precisely because it is spent in the workplace.¹

Our job as leaders and coaches, then, is to find a way to reconnect with creativity and self-expression through the work we do, both for ourselves and for our clients. We can take that cage of a day and unlock it – by creating the spaciousness to use the tools of coaching with enough time and heartspace to really access the freedom of the day.

And we know this is more than just nice words – it works. Leaders will often forget the hour of coaching, however punchy it is – simply because it is just another meeting amongst the noise of the work life. However, I have seen and heard that they don’t forget their Vision days. Recently, I revisited clients from a decade ago, to interview them with about what happened next for them. Strikingly, what I noticed is that what clients recount is not so much what they learned as how they felt on that day. Many also claim the Vision Day as a turning point for when life improved for them. Here are some of their words on the matter:

• “I often think of it, as it changed my life”
• “I think about the 80th birthday all the time”
• “Life became better after my day”
• “I always tell people about the 80th birthday exercise – it gives them goosebumps”

Nature-based coaching

I have often noticed that when the eye rests on green hills, breathing alters. When I walk and talk together with a client, shoulder to shoulder through woods and fields and a wide open expanse, I notice our bodies relax, creativity rises and perspective expands. To me, this is about using nature as our inspiring teacher and letting nature share its wisdom. Taking clients outside a sterile air-conditioned or centrally heated environment and letting their mind and body unfurl is a beautiful sight to experience.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow (a founding father of positive psychology, especially with reference to his oft-cited hierarchy of needs) was interested in what he called Health and Growth Psychology and Being and Becoming Psychology. In his book Toward a Psychology of Being,² he describes what he terms a “peak experience” – an experience which can happen fleetingly, but comes with a sense of deep connection and awareness that we are part of something bigger that makes sense. This moment might not last very long, but is enough to allow us a glimpse of the desired future, our vision of what’s possible for us and within us. From what I have seen, these peak experiences are much more likely to happen in a natural setting. Unencumbered by office politics, ergonomic furniture and mass interruptions and distractions, nature lets everything coalesce into a whole and perspective brings clarity and inspiration.

Positive future focus

I have always loved thinking about the future: planning-dreaming, goal-setting, daydreaming, hoping. It turns out that not everyone does, though. There is a large proportion of successful leaders who find themselves able to strategise for the future of the business, but not so easily for themselves. A common lament I hear is “I never have time to think about myself or what’s next”.

The way I see it, our ability to envision the future is a gift, something that separates us from other species. As is our ability to dream up something that does not yet exist, then work backwards from that visualised point in order to make it happen. Momentous bridges, NASA space ships, huge building projects, the Olympic games – they all demand a strong vision of the future and immense planning to get there. This ability to project forwards is, in my opinion, the most underutilised area of our thinking. Often, people don’t like to think about their future because they feel scared; perhaps this comes from an existential angst about dying or a fear that if they commit to planning too intensely, they will fail or be disappointed with the result. When we encourage a positive future focus, as opposed to an avoidance or fear of the future, it allows us to think of ourselves like the potential held in nature – the acorn has its future massive oak inside it, a plant seed dug into a garden has its future ready to emerge and we have futures that could unfurl. The Vision Day gives us a sense of the acorn in us to see the possible mighty oak, to see what could be and what our legacy beyond our time at work and indeed on this earth could be. When we help people do a mental rehearsal or time travel in the mind towards their desired future, it can be full of riches and perspective that help drive and motivate a person forward. When we, as coaches, help the client build and deepen their relationship with their future self and the contribution and impact of that self on the world around them on both people and planet – that’s when magic can happen.

Beautiful power questions

Beautiful questions are big questions that demand the client get beneath the skin to look hard at meaningful things. The answers will help shape their identities and therefore their futures and their lives. As coaches, we are taught the power of questions to unlock fresh thinking and perspectives in the brain. But not all questions are the same. Closed questions, leading questions or small questions that shut us down or make us feel guilty, ashamed or inadequate are what we can often find ourselves asking when we are in a rut. Maybe this kind of mental rumination sounds familiar:

• What am I doing with my life?
• Why do I always procrastinate?
• Why can’t I be more like her?
• What’s wrong with me?

With beautiful power questions, however, we use language that is invitational and expansive, choosing words and questions that support personal growth and perspective, not rather than creating a sense of diminishment and negativity:

• Who am I becoming?
• How can I be more aligned to my strengths?
• What is calling me forward in the world?
• What brings me joy?
• What enlivens me?
• Where can I contribute more?
• What can I learn about myself?
• Who can I serve?
• What is nature asking from us?
• What is a positive legacy for me?
• What sustains me?

Some of these questions can feel very big and abstract, and so we work together to find a set of words that both open up our hearts and minds and feel real and purposeful. In a Vision Day, this can often be linked into leadership, and the most useful questions are those which bring together two seemingly opposed forces:

• How can I be generously available to my people, yet carve out time for myself?
• How can I deliver the day job and be planting seeds for my future legacy?
• How might I be a positive available parent for my children and still drive the ambition of my business?
• Where can I bring more of myself to the world?
• How can I enjoy learning how to believe in myself more?

Beautiful questions weren’t initially a conscious part of my Vision Day planning – in fact, I didn’t even name them. The phrase “beautiful questions” comes from David Whyte, a poet and philosopher, in his work on the “beautiful mind” inspired by the work of John O’Donohue.³ It was as I listened to Whyte speak on the topic that I realised this is what a Positive Vision Day does: it asks beautiful questions that help shape a beautiful future. Whyte and O’Donohue and their work and words helped me to name and describe a principle and practice that I now realise has been central to the nature of Visions Days since their conception.

When we ask power questions that are essentially beautiful in their shape and scope, when we take some of the bigger questions out into nature and create a safe psychological space for them to be explored… then we have the beginning of beautiful questions that help shape identity.

Reflections and journaling prompts for coaches and leaders wanting to explore different coaching practices

How can you incorporate a little piece of each of these four components into your leadership or coaching?

• Spaciousness – How might you give yourself or someone you are talking to longer for a conversation or some reflection time?
• Positive Future Focus – Write about a positive future you’d like to see with your best possible self showing up.
• Nature – Spend time in nature today, anywhere. Go for a walk or suggest a meeting with someone in nature.
• Beautiful Power Questions – Start to craft a few questions that feel rather beautiful to you. If you’re stuck, try starting with the following sentence:
  “How might I create …?”

What is positive visioning?

A vision, simply put, is a picture of the future. A positive vision then is a picture or sense of the future that enlivens and energises us. The vision should be of a desired future; perhaps a personal vision of something we would like to move towards in our life. Importantly, what a vision is not, is a goal or a strategy. It doesn’t even have to be completely realistic at the start – now is the time to dream unrealistically.

A Positive Vision Day puts us back into rhythm with our signature strengths and raises our confidence of the potential brightness of our own future. What I have found is that we coaches can energise goal-setting most effectively when we encourage our clients to savour the future. Taking time out to reflect on our possible future selves allows an expansion of energy and intrinsic motivation to change and move towards that desirable future; a future which has meaning and purpose for us.

How goal-setting and positive future visioning relate

As an executive coach for the last 20 years, coaching business executives and training coaches, I have witnessed continually the profound effect that goal-setting, done well, has in the coaching process. In executive coaching, goal-setting resonates with clients as it mirrors the goal-setting ...