Provocative Coaching

Making Things Better By Making Them Worse

Jaap Hollander

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781845908577
• eBook ISBN: 9781845908706
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

A fresh wind is blowing through the worlds of coaching and psychotherapy! Provocative coaching: a unique new cocktail of humour, warmth and psychological provocation. Coaches and therapists everywhere are throwing off the shackles of humming and nodding! Not only can provocative coaching be highly effective - especially with the so called 'impossible' clients - but it liberates professionals as well as their clients!

Chapter 1

He told him what he was really thinking

From provocative intuition to provocative technique

Jaap: Not everybody is here yet, but it is past 10 o’clock, so what do you say, shall we get started?

Audience: Yes!

Jaap: These days, who knows when people will arrive …

Audience: They’ve had their chance.

Jaap: Right! And we will welcome them when they arrive. It is a great honour to be here in Poland to teach you Provocative Coaching. For the next three days we’ll be working quite intensively. My goal is to help you as best I can to understand Provocative Coaching and to integrate the provocative style into your coaching work.

About twenty-five years ago I met with a colleague who had just come back from the United States. He gave me a couple of audio cassettes. For our younger colleagues, audio cassettes are rectangular plastic boxes that contain a thin ribbon of magnetic tape. We used to put them in what was called a ‘cassette recorder’ and then you could play them like an MP3 file! (Audience laughs) And my colleague said: ‘You have to listen to this! This is something totally new. They call it Provocative Therapy.’ Oh? We’d never heard of that before. So we listened to the tape and we were flabbergasted. We were both, Anneke and I – oh, I haven’t introduced Anneke to you yet. Sorry … I forgot. This is Anneke, my beloved wife and co-director of our training institute in Holland (Anneke smiles and waves).

So we listened to the tape, and both being clinical psychologists – and living in the 1980s – we were used to being extremely friendly, positive and supportive towards our clients: ‘You are okay, you are valuable, you are worthwhile, you can achieve your goals, I understand how you feel, I feel what you see’ and so on. Well, these are still useful messages if you want to help someone change. The world would be a better place if people sent out those kinds of messages more often. These days in NLP we call it ‘sponsoring’. It used to be called ‘unconditional positive regard’ in Rogerian psychotherapy: ‘I accept you as you are and I see your potential’.

Anyway, we listened to the tape and this Provocative Therapy was indeed completely different. They were telling the client things like: ‘There’s no way you can achieve this, you’re stupid, you’ll never amount to anything’. Just the opposite of what we were used to. And, the strangest thing, the results were great. Clients changed. How was that possible? We were immediately intrigued. So eventually we invited Frank Farrelly, who is the person who thought up this whole approach, the originator of Provocative Therapy, to come to Holland and teach. This was twenty-three, twenty-four years ago. I remember Frank was teaching for us when our son Florian was born, and he’s twenty-three now. So for the next ten years we had Frank over every year and we were going: ‘This is great! I wish I could do this …’ We did some of it, of course; it wasn’t as if we never tried it out. But it was difficult to spontaneously reproduce what Frank did. Of course there was a structure underneath his work, but that structure was not explicit. That had to do with Frank’s teaching style and with the way he was taught himself. He taught purely by example – ‘teaching by osmosis’ he calls it. He gave demonstrations and we watched in awe. And then he would explain what he had done. And that was it, as far as the didactics were concerned.

But at some point we said: ‘Hey, we are NLP trainers, modelling is our expertise. So let’s model Frank Farrelly.’ In NLP, modelling means making exceptional human skills learnable. You start by identifying the behaviours, the thought processes, the beliefs and the emotional states of somebody who can do something really well. The next step is to put these processes into practice, to see if you can get the same results. If that works, you translate them into techniques that other people can learn. Basically, modelling is a way to make skills transferable. So we were thinking: ‘Let’s model Frank’, and we did this for many years. We developed a coherent system of skills, behaviours and beliefs that can help you learn to do Provocative Coaching much more easily. I phrase that carefully when I say: ‘You can learn it more easily’. I did not say you can learn it without any effort at all. It still takes a good amount of work and experience to get it right.

But now that we have these explicit provocative techniques, you can take a jump-start. It’s a bit like learning to navigate in a new city. If you live in that city for a long time, you will eventually be able to find your way around. That’s like ‘learning by osmosis’, purely by example. But if you have a good map of the streets and a good diagram of the subway, it’s a lot easier. And a friendly guide, of course, which is where I come in … (Audience laughs) … So that’s the idea for these next three days, to actively learn Provocative Coaching using the structures we found in the work of Frank Farrelly and taking some next steps from there.

Okay, we’ll start out with some intervision. Normally, when you are learning something, you first take the course and then you do intervision. But we’ll turn things around today. We will start with the intervision.

Interpreter: What do you mean by intervision?

Jaap: That’s when colleagues sit together and they discuss their clients.

Audience: Supervision.

Jaap: Well, ah … yes and no. Supervision is when I’m the expert and I am teaching you. Intervision is more like discussing work on an equal basis, between colleagues. Dutch people are sticklers for equality. We have a lot of green rhetoric, in spiral dynamics terms. So here is your first intervision case.

I usually know exactly what to do, but with you I haven’t got a clue

Jaap: The client is a manager, a woman, and I’m reviewing her case with you because she had such a nice, classic provocative response. So imagine she calls you to make an appointment. You ask her what she would like to work on. She says her problem is that she feels very, very insecure. Which is actually quite a feat for most managers – the simple admission that they feel insecure. So you are lucky today, the client comes in partly cured already. So her exact statement is: ‘I want to understand why I feel so insecure. I had a bad experience with my last team; at one point they actually took a vote and they voted me out. I was their manager, and they voted me out. They didn’t want to work with me any more. And next month I will get a new team, so I want to know why I feel so insecure. If I understand it, I can do something about it before this new job starts.’ So you might say: ‘Well, isn’t it obvious why you feel insecure? Your own team voted you out. What could make a manager more insecure than that?’ That would be a logical response. But ‘No, no, no, no,’ she says, ‘there must be some deeper reason.’

Okay, this is your new client. What would you do normally? I mean as a coach, what you would do with a client like this? (Audience is silent) You are very thoughtful, you don’t jump to conclusions … (Audience remains silent) All right, most of you seem to be saying: ‘I don’t have a clue.’ It’s quite courageous of you to admit that! (Audience laughs) But that doesn’t count as normal therapy, you know. If you said that to the client, that would be a provocative intervention. You could say: ‘Usually, with any other client, I know exactly what to do. But with you … gee, I haven’t got a clue! With you, I’m drawing a blank.’ You’re doing pretty well as provocative coaches … (Audience laughs)

But let’s talk about normal therapy, normal coaching. What would you do? This is not a rhetorical question, people, what would you do?

Mateusz: First establish the contract, the psychological contract with this woman – that I’m going to ask her questions.

Jaap: So you want to ask her questions. And she says: ‘Sure, no problem. I’ll be happy to answer any questions.’ Of course she would. She has an urgent problem and she needs help. And then? What would your next move be?

Mateusz: Tell me what your goal is.

Jaap: Yes, very good. An NLP coach at work! So she goes: ‘My goal is to understand why I feel so insecure, didn’t I already tell you?’

Mateusz: To feel more secure.

Jaap: ‘Sure, eventually I want to feel more secure.’ But if a person wants to feel more secure, they first have to understand why they are insecure, right?

Mateusz: I disagree.

Jaap: You disagree. Well, actually, I disagree too … But that’s how she sees it. But I understand what you mean. Hey, things got worse without you understanding, so why can’t they get better without you understanding? It’s a respectable viewpoint, but it’s so different from hers, you will have a lot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: He told him what he was really thinking
• Chapter 2: The provocative starter kit
• Chapter 3: I’m really surprised I did all this
• Bibliography
• About the author
• Copyright