-
Meta
Social media links
CSA Blog
- Working with collusion
- Relational Coaching (part 3)
- Relational Coaching (part 2)
- ‘Change happens in the crucible of relationship’ B Critchley
- Working with the Narcissistic Personality
- Disturbing your peace?
- Supervision – finding our internal plumb line
- Psychological Contracting
- Unexpected Gifts
- Narcissism – what’s that!
Sign up
Sign up to receive our regular email newsletters delivered by FeedBurner.
Random Quote
Susan IngramFull Potential GroupNextI receive the professional care and support I hope I offer my clients – it allows me to be a better coach, it allows me to be heard so that I can hear my clients.
CSA Community Blog
You are here:
Working with collusion
When I hear the word ‘collusion’, I notice the temptation to want to deny or avoid or get confused or not look deeper and then I explore how this word impacts me and I recognise the situations in which a part of me responds “oh yes I know what you mean” or I think to myself ’yeah that sucks’ or “you poor thing” or “you should try this”!
The reason I am choosing to write about this, is to share my thinking on this subject which began on a recent teleconference call with the students from the current diploma in coaching supervision course. We spent an hour exploring this topic and came up with examples of what we saw as colluding – it’s the sense of falling into the pit with the client or the highness and excitement of ‘yes you can do anything’ or furiously offering suggestions or moving on quickly over a topic the client doesn’t want to talk about or feeling slightly off balance and not exploring it.
Do any of these sound familiar?
What are the ways you collude?
Do you talk about this topic in supervision?
For me, collusion is unsconcious and it involves me leaving myself and being caught in the energy of the client and not recognising it; instead I am acting out of it to keep it all unconscious.
Using a Transactional Analysis frame, collusion can be identified as being when we are coming from any other place than our Adult; if we find ourselves in parent or child then it’s important to stop and look – what is happening here?
Do you know what these different ego states feel like or what you think or say in them – and can you recognise when you move between them?
For me, I recognise when I am colluding in my body and energy – in adult I have an unconditional acceptance, there is no judgment or right or wrong, there’s no where to get to – it’s neutral I am not attached, I have opinions and I am also aware of my not knowing – I have a curiosity and I notice with interest and it feels clean and clear. Whereas, what I notice in myself and what others who I supervise experience as colluding, is an attachment or a sticky feeling or a fogginess that is not addressed - or even a giddy feeling in sessions with our clients. It can show up as inappropriate care-taking - like being a parent, and when this dynamic is not made explicit there is often an air of secrecy!
What is it for you?
And what are you doing to work with it?
One of the first steps is to notice and then to name it, firstly and most importantly to ourselves and in some cases to our client; it depends on the relationship and contract. Once it is named we can observe it and explore it and thereby we move back to consciousness and unconditional acceptance and curiosity and the adult ego state.
Another way to work with colluding is in our contracting, to have a specific agreement to talk about the things we don’t want to talk about. Often during sessions I find myself asking myself or supervisee or coachee “what is it that is not being said?” – to bring the unconscious to conscious awareness. This is one of the reasons that supervision is so essential; how else do we get to examine the stuff beyond our awareness?
I encourage us all to get more fully acquainted with collusion – what is known, cannot blind-side us.
For more information about collusion and working with it please email me at leanne@csa.uk.net
Leanne Lowish CSA Assistant Director – CSA trainer for supervision programmes in UK and Australia
Relational Coaching (part 3)
Knowing You – the coachee
There are several ways that we can deepen our understanding of the person in front of us. Broadly speaking, we use cognitive, intuitive and somatic data to know our coachee better. All of these functions operate naturally from the moment we first speak with a new coachee; using this data to hone interventions, is a powerful coaching skill. As our coaching conversation continues, we learn more about the coachee, through the energetic exchange between us. We read this somatically and cognitively; for example, the exchange may be light and dancing or sticky and draining. We may feel pulled off centre or deeply touched by the coaching conversations, as sessions progress. It’s all information that can teach us about the person we work with and about how best to serve them.
In this energetic exchange, we may notice patterns. For example, we may notice coachees who get regularly caught up in other people’s dramas, or who try too hard and get tired. Or the coachee may put us on a pedestal; we need to know if that too, is a pattern and how it affects the power dynamic in their other relationships. It’s important to note here that we need to have a coaching approach to exploring personal history – we are not therapists. So, enabling the coachee to be more aware of patterns in their history in order to give them some cognitive holding, is valuable. What is not useful is if we unpack what we cannot hold; we need to know the limits of our own competence. That provides safety for the coachee and for us, as professionals.
Coaching Psychology has developed significantly in recent years to support coaches to ‘read’ the person in front of them and to be more aware of what is occurring in their professional relationships. Coaching has taken some excellent practices from Transactional Analysis and Gestalt theory, for example. Many coaches now use TA’s Parent, Adult, Child (PAC) model or the superb communications tool, the Karpman Drama Triangle, to get a much better understanding of their coaches and of the relational dance between them. Others may use a Gestalt or Transpersonal framework to attend deeply to both body and mind in order to understand the coachee.
We are fortunate to have access to a growing number of disciplines that can enable coaches to achieve real insight into the relational side of coaching. Since our services are more needed than ever, it is important that we equip ourselves as well as we can. I include some resources that you may find useful.
J Welwood: Awakening the Heart 1983
Lewis, Amini and Lannon: A General Theory of Love 2000
Eric de Haan Relational Coaching 2008
Rollin Mc Graty www.heartmath.com Article on The Resonant Heart.
Miriam Orriss: www.coachingsupervisionacademy.com/Resources Article on the Karpman Drama Triangle
Bill Critchley: www.billcritchleyconsulting.com Article on Relational Coaching
Edna Murdoch 2012
Relational Coaching (part 2)
Knowing ‘us’ – the relationship
When I meet the ‘other’, I enter a field of relational dynamics – some of which will be outside my awareness. Occasionally, coaches can feel intimidated by their coachees. One coach worked through this in super-vision, by first learning about the root of his habitual response to strong coachees. He began to understand cognitively, how this pattern had formed in his life and then changed his thinking around it – “ I don’t need to keep doing that”. Over time, he completely changed the relational dynamics with his client. He now feels much more empowered and they continue to work together. So, our personal history matters in this very personal, relational work of coaching.
So does the in-the-moment encounter with our coachee. In ‘A General Theory of Love’, we read that our limbic brain confers on us a largely unconscious ability to read emotion and relate to others. This indicates that “coach and client are engaged in a process of reciprocal influence’. Bill Critchley. And there’s more: contemporary sciences make it clear that the electromagnetic field emanating from our heart centre has a major impact on our relationships and conversations – without our saying a word. There is so much going on between coach and coachee!
‘the heart’s field plays an important role in communicating physiological, psychological, and social information between individuals.’ Rollin McGraty Heart Math
Have a look at some of your relationships with coachees and note their qualities. Which ones might need a little attention? How can you find out more about the ‘stuff’ between you – that ‘fabric’ I wrote about in the previous blog?
Edna Murdoch 2012. Course Director, ICF Approved Diploma in Coaching Supervision
‘Change happens in the crucible of relationship’ B Critchley
Coaches are in relationships every day. Coaches say things like:
‘It’s hard to be objective with him
I love working with this client.
When she’s angry, I freeze
He makes me confused and feel stupid.’
While we are busy creating contracts, coaching leaders or raising performance levels, we do this within a web of relationships and it is the nature and fabric of this web, which quietly but powerfully, affects coaching outcomes. So it is important that we bring to our coaching, awareness of how relationships work and of which relational skills make for successful professional conversations. In the reflective practice of super-vision, coaches have the opportunity to learn more about the subtle aspects of relationship; these skills can be the difference between being a good coach and being a great one. I have had the enormous privilege of working with Executive coaches for over 12 years and what this has taught me, is how much more powerfully we coach, when we know ourselves, know ourselves-in-relationship and can understand our coachees.
In the next few blogs, we will look briefly at these three aspects of relationship.
Knowing ‘me’, the coach
I often say: “Who we are is how we coach”. What I mean by that is that we are the main instruments of our work. Even more than our tools, skills and trainings, the person that we are, has a huge influence on each coaching conversation that we have. How we show up in sessions is part of that. How present and open are we in the stimulating, pressurized and sometimes difficult coaching conversations that are part and parcel of our everyday work? Presence requires that we have, “the capacity to meet experience fully and directly without filtering it through any conceptual or strategic agenda.’ (J. Welwood).
We might also ask: how attached are we to our tools and techniques in sessions and how does this affect our showing up authentically? ‘Technique is for a coach what a text is for an actor: they both have to forget it in order to be present.’ Luc de Belloy.
When we can allow the right tools and techniques to emerge in the session, rather than searching for them, then there is a much better chance that the coaching conversation will flow and the coachee will get what they need.
Some questions to consider about ‘who I am’ as a coach:
Edna Murdoch 2012
Working with the Narcissistic Personality
A few blogs ago, I began to write about working with the Narcissistic Personality. Here’s some more information about how this shows up for coaches and how to approach it.
EXAMPLE: Once upon a time, I worked with an executive coach who was deciding how to work with a client whose globe-trotting lifestyle was beginning to catch up with them. The client had developed quite a severe alcohol problem and health issues were surfacing. The client wanted only to keep going and to continue their success. The coach wanted my support to ensure that this client could keep up the pace and ignore the symptoms. ’Ignoring the symptoms’ was the unconscious collusion between coach and client – the coach was unwittingly drawn into the client’s system. The client had little awareness of how near the edge they were.
It’s not such an unusual scenario – highly successful people who have a touch of narcissism, give little thought to their own – or others’ – well-being. Here are a few pointers in working safely and elegantly with those clients:
1. Be informed about Narcissism – look for clusters of indicating behaviours.
2. Recognise and identify the possibility of narcissistic behaviour.
3. Help the coach to have the courage to clarify with coachee, the true motivations behind say, an insistent desire for success/achievement, in spite of the presence of considerable imbalance/dysfunction etc.
4. Enable the coachee to acknowledge dissatisfaction in feelings, relationships etc.
5. Give the coachee some ‘cognitive holding’ – he needs to understand the simple psychological underpinnings of his behaviour.
6. Give absolute support to realistic assessment of coachee’s abilities, resources, limits, vulnerabilities – be a true mirror, have a true coaching conversation.
7. Support discovery and growth of the real person behind the title – eg through expression of innate gifts: the CEO might allow herself to learn to sing, play the guitar, bath children and experience a very different kind of achievement.
8. Access real feelings – eg those of fear, humiliation etc. This may be the first time that a coachee can share in a true way, what is really going on inside. Being heard in a simple way, with compassion, can gradually bring the coachee into contact with real self and other.
9. Encourage coachee to refuse to sacrifice feelings of well being in pursuit of compensatory activities.
10. Support the ability to ‘feel’, in whatever contexts this occurs. For instance, the boss might now begin to understand how his decisions hurt staff or are affecting members of the team – he begins to have systemic awareness – it’s not only cognitive; it requires the imaginative insight which is available only if we can access true feelings.
11. Support the coach to encourage the ‘real human being’ who needs genuine connection and endorsement.
12. Encourage the coach to own up to his or her own imperfections with coachee– modelling. The Coach Supervisor too, needs to model a truth in the relationship with their supervisee.
13. Encourage the coachee to experience life bodily – get in a boat, dance again, climb a mountain, play with the kids/dog, go hang gliding, get magnificent massages. The experience of body energy and pleasure counters much of the inner stiffness of the narcissist and helps to bring them into life.
14. Teach and encourage the coachee to ‘self soothe’ – what activities brings peace, stability, quiet pleasure, deep satisfaction, healthy distraction from pressure? What enables the coachee to accept her lack of perfection and not continue the dynamic of unduly criticising herself`?
A full article on Narcissism will appear on the CSA website shortly.
BOOKING NOW: ICF APPROVED DIPLOMA IN COACHING SUPERVISION – UK and France. Dates for Australia and US to follow shortly.
Edna Murdoch
Disturbing your peace?
In an article I read recently the Bishop of Blackburn is quoted with saying that “education is settling the disturbed and disturbing the settled”. That got me thinking about whether I thought that was a reasonable definition (amongst many others I grant you). A long time ago, a new supervisee asked me to work with him because he thought he was getting complacent- being told all the time how good he was- he felt sometimes he might be coasting a bit and not stretching himself. He said he wanted someone who would be direct with him. Now I faced a little dilemma here. Was this an invitation to a game or was it a recognition that sitting on your own laurels is not a good thing. Maybe both.
If “settling the disturbed” is an aspect of education, I can see how sometimes a supervisee comes to a session thinking that they didn’t do their very best in a coaching session. Maybe they feel they let themselves, or their client down. Together, we can explore ways to do it differently next time. Quite possibly they have done a good job but are tripping over their own scripts. Recognising with greater awareness what was at play in the session and gain perspective to go back into the fray and feel more in touch with the whole piece of work is also what comes into the arena of coaching supervision. It can have that settling effect. Reflective practice brings in the opportunity to see the situation without being sucked into the assumptions that may chaff at its edges and the coaches can ‘settle’ themselves.
On the other hand “disturbing the settled” is also right up the supervision street! The supervisee I mentioned at the beginning, for example, did want to be ruffled, did want challenge to provoke his thinking and check his own assumptions about what he knew and didn’t know, as much about himself as his client. In the right place and right moment good effective challenging can be a wake up call, a reminder to check blind spots and shadow aspects. We may not need to respond to them directly but the greater the awareness we have the more likely we can be available to learn and make needed changes in the space in which we sit and work. Flexibility and wholeheartedness to go into a vulnerable space with compassion and right intention is a good bridge. I’d like to think the Bishop would be with me on that one.
What in your work just now could do with a little healthy disturbance??
Karyn Prentice, Assistant Director CSA www.fletcherprentice.com
BOOKING NOW: ICF Approved Diploma in Coaching Supervision. Starts October 2012
Supervision – finding our internal plumb line
I am thinking about what listening is, from a transpersonal perspective, something I talked about the other day on the CSA Diploma in Supervision Training. The extract below captures it perfectly. To me it says something about how, as Coach Supervisors, it is so important to go inside a bit deeper and to listen out for that individual ‘note’ not just in our supervisees, but also in ourselves. It is so easy in the heavy weather of life right now to get knocked off course, even if it is temporary. A client brings a ‘big’ surprise, a contract is not begun due to organisational cuts, a client doesn’t come for their last session, or says they weren’t ‘happy’. Supervision is a great place to come back to ‘centre’ and find our course again; get re-aligned. I guess you could call it coming home to ourselves. I sometimes use the analogy of finding our imaginary internal plumb line – a way to re-affirm what ‘true’ is for us. This extract from a wonderful book by Naomi Remen called ‘My Grandfather’s Blessings’ is a collection of her patients, and her own inspiring stories about strength, refuge and belonging. I offer you this one.
“ Integrity is an ongoing process, a dynamic happening over time that requires our ongoing attention. A medical colleague once said to her reclaiming his integrity reminded him of the moment before a concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. At first there is chaos and noise as all the parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when finally they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming. That is how it feels to me, the man said, I am always tuning my instrument. Somewhere deep inside there is sound that is mine alone and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my attention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life’s mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agendas and fears
Deep inside our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is the note that only we can hear. Eventually, when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us find our way home. “
Naomi Remen,M.D.(200) from ‘My Grandfather’s Blessing’ Riverhead Books, NY
Karyn Prentice Assistant Director CSA. February 2012
www.fletcherprentice.com
Psychological Contracting
Psychological Contracting – Leanne Lowish
Last year, I ran a teleconference call on psychological contracting with the current students on CSA’s Diploma in Supervision course. It was based on a chapter written by Michael Carroll and in it he says that: ’Individuals bring to their contracts and agreements their own assumptions, beliefs and expectations most of which will be unspoken and un-negotiated. This part of contracts is called the “psychological contract”, the subjective side that contains our hidden agendas in respect of the covert contract’.
Since that call I have been reflecting on my psychological contracting and have realized I do this stuff everywhere – my most common one seems to be: if I am nice to you then you will like me and do what I want! Of course if the other person doesn’t play ball… and why should they as they do not have knowledge of the contract that I have set up with them… then I feel disappointed and resentful – and in my less aware moments, my common exits are into victim or persecutor and I set up for myself a nice little karpman drama triangle (please look at CSA website for more information on KDT).
One of my most powerful psychological contracts that I have unearthed is with my own coach and it goes something like this – my responsibility is to turn up, pay my money and be a good client and yours (my coach) is to be the expert and to fix me! Whoa! that’s a powerful contract that’s been running the sessions. As you read this it might be useful for you to pause here and reflect on the psychological contracts you have with your coach or mentor or someone that you turn to for guidance. What are they and how do they play out – what is the impact on you and with the other and how do you work with them?
My coach’s psychological contract is you (meaning me) are the expert of you and I am here to assist you to get where you want to go. Big difference and what can happen is that I am waiting for him to tell me what to do and he is waiting for me to tell him what I think I need to do – no wonder I sometimes leave the sessions feeling frustrated – sound familiar? How many of you experience that dynamic going on with your clients? What happens, what do they do, what do you do and how does it end?
The wonderful thing is now I am aware of it and the tragedy is that occasionally, I still continue to play it out! Ah, the power of the unconscious mind. I have heard human beings being referred to as slow learners and quick forgetters – I sometimes have a big aha moment and think my life will be changed forever and then fall back into the same pattern and sooner or later have the realisation yet again.
Thank goodness for supervision and coaching and mentoring and good friendships and diaries and CPD and all the opportunities that are there are for us to be constantly reminded to reflect and explore and reveal our blind spots. This enables us to be aware of the cracks and blemishes and chips and dark spots on the mirror we look through so that they don’t impair our vision. What are your cracks and blemishes – what are the assumptions, beliefs and expectations you are bringing to all your relationships and how can you bring them out into the open?
What about your clients - is there space for them to explore their assumptions in relation to you – how often do you ask your clients about their psychological contract with you and how they feel about their relationship with you and what are their assumptions and expectations of you and this work? We do this at the beginning in the contracting but do we revisit it? Remember the slow learners, fast forgetters!
On the call we came up with some ways to unearth the psychological contract:
- Re-examining, bringing into consciousness the contracting
- Re-contracting – unearthing assumptions
- Listening to my body
- Asking what I am not bringing up or talking about
- Assuming nothing, inquiring into everything
- Going slowly, allowing spaciousness
- Having courage to say ‘hang on, can we go over that again?’
- Making sure I stay in a conversation until real clarity emerges
- Going into adult and avoiding victim or persecutor (in TA speak)
- Developing the capacity to self observe
- Paying attention to details
- Working together with the person – relationally and conversationally
Are these part of your regular practice and how could you bring them more into your work?
Leanne Lowish – Assistant Director CSA www.leannelowish.co.uk
BOOKING NOW 2012 ICF APPROVED DIPLOMA IN SUPERVISION – See Courses and Workshops
Unexpected Gifts
You know how it happens sometimes. You go looking for a particular reference and come upon something else, totally unexpected, and it’s a little gift. That’s what happened to me this morning. I got two gifts in fact. I was asked to check a document for someone and there was a short quote from Maya Angelou . I thought the last line wasn’t correct so I checked the original. What I uncovered was the much longer quote it came from. You might know it, it’s the one that ends “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Sound familiar?
So the first ‘gift’ was the reminder how this is true for our work as supervisors. If my supervisees go away feeling more resourced in themselves, if they feel that something is clearer, even if the details are still to be worked out, I have a sense I have been my most effective and maybe even motivational. If they feel somehow a bit different at the end of our session because a shift has happened and the thinking has come ‘downstairs’ into the heart and gut I’m confident they have found some of what they need.
The second gift comes from another part of the quote: “…..I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles [these} three things: a rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights….” Now that got me thinking. Firstly, how do I approach those 3 things? Do I approach them all well? The same way each time? I think I’m more generous with the first and the last. Lost luggage is a pain in the neck -or elsewhere. It reminded me that the answers to these questions help us to understand that if we can shrug off the stuff we can’t control, and not get over riled about the tiny ones that are irritating, but utterly solvable with time and patience (or scissors), then there’s a good chance our priorities are going in the right direction. When our supervisees or clients bring us dilemmas they are often a lot more serious than Christmas lights or lost luggage, but still clients can get caught up staying with the things that they can’t change. Too much energy is then focused in a brick wall direction. Helping them step back, take a “change breath” and work out where to put their best endeavours builds resourcefulness and resilience in the face of those things beyond our control but still vexing in the extreme. A light touch, too, can come in handy many times.
So from my little detour this morning I leave you with a question: if, as the author says, you can tell a whole lot about a person by the way he/she handles three things- what would be the three things you would choose to give you a good indication of someone’s measure?
Karyn Prentice Assistant Director CSA www.fletcherprentice.com
February 2012
Narcissism – what’s that!
I am currently finishing an article on how some of our clients – often the most successful ones – have a particular blindness regarding their behaviour and the enormous pressure they put on themselves and everyone around them.
“Narcissism includes the inability to accept failure and it brings with it a marked need for power and control; what the person actually feels is at the opposite end of the spectrum – he actually feels worthless, powerless and believes that he has not achieved enough; there is never ‘enough’ to compensate for what this person feels inside. Driving the compensatory behaviours is the ‘injured self’, the ‘little person’ inside who has been diminished at an early age, has not had sufficient endorsement from significant others and who tried to get love and affection through achievement. A leader with this type of psychological background usually tries to hide their true self from others, by identifying almost completely with achievement and very high standards. Coaches may find this type of coachee almost impenetrable and slow to acknowledge their need to change. Classic work/life imbalance can be a signal to the coach here. And when a coach gets to know their coachee better, this client will often ‘confess’ to feelings of not being good enough, or of fearing that others will see through them and that, in spite of huge achievements, they have little sense of pleasure and even less sense of their own personal reality. These are all major indicators of a narcissistically driven person. They are likely to be present somewhere in every boardroom.”
Coaches see behaviours associated with mild narcissistic personality disorder every day. This is especially true when we work with successful, charismatic, driven individuals – the sort who work all hours and are hugely committed to their work and their organisations. They bring so much to the table, but often at great cost to themselves.
These clients usually have little sense of pleasure outside of work and can be oblivious to the imbalances that are characteristic of this type of leader – they are often leaders. Coaching to restore work/life balance and to invite the client to begin to feel, rather than remain numb to their own feelings, is a good way to begin with them. It is also important to show up authentically and give genuine endorsement to the client. Making a true, robust relationship is very important in order to provide a container in which the client can begin – without shame or fear – to share their thoughts and feelings. It may be that you are the ‘first person ever’ that they have really been open with. I’m sure that you recognise this ‘first person ever’ comment!
Watch this space for announcement of the completed article…………..
Edna Murdoch 2012