A Thought About Client Resistance to Change in Coaching

Readiness to change is not automatically a trait that the client brings into the conversation or one that the client recognizes in its totality, but it can be brought about through interaction with a coach who is attentive to the signals and signs of motivation toward change and responds in a way that enhances them.

What is called “resistance” or “denial” is, in fact, the product of the practitioner’s assumption that the client is closer to change readiness than he or she actually is.

Resistance and denial are actually problems generated from the practitioner and not the client.

Satisfaction Saturday

My friend and colleague Iris Arenson-Fuller has invited me to be a part of what she has named "Satisfaction Saturday"... a day to integrate appreciation of the present and its gifts. This is my acceptance to her fine invitation:




I am fortunate to be blessed with what I call the happy gene. This does not mean I have no struggles or deep and dark passages, but that my urge seems always to surmount these, or go through them, and to appreciate them. I honestly cannot think of a time in the past that I prefer to be in... I like the idea of the future and though I have the normal levels of reverie about my past, my memories and my experiences, I am intrigued and interested in the future and work to be present in what the present offers me. Not always easy, but ultimately do-able.

I think, if I learn anything from my rough passages, and I have been blessed/cursed with some horrific ones since earliest childhood, it is that survival itself is a given, that change is unavoidable, and that I will learn to cope, adjust and find meaning... real meaning with real spirit and light, real appreciation.

I anticipate, on an individual and collective level, that this dark night of the human soul we are inevitably recruited to pass through together, will offer me the same gifts. This does not mean I will not feel despair at times, or loneliness, grief and even hopelessness, but that those times too shall pass and give way to other times until I no longer inhabit this bag of tissues and great spirit that is my home. Perhaps I shall take these thoughts too into my "Satisfaction Saturday"!

Viktor Frankl as a Basis for Coaching Practice

I am exploring resources for a paper I am writing as a final requirement in my work with International Coach Academy and I thought I'd like to share this one. The following is from the website of the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy (link below). While I recognize there is a boundary between coaching and therapy, I think each can learn from the other. At any rate, I think many of Viktor Frankl's primary premises, or assumptions, are at the core of good coaching practice.

Assumptions of Logotherapy

The assumptions of Franklian Psychotherapy can neither be proved nor disproved with any certainty. This is also true with all psychotherapies. To see if these assumptions make sense in our lives we must assume that they are true. According to experiences of Logotherapist, these assumptions make sense. These assumptions include:

1. The human being is an entity consisting of body, mind, and spirit.

2. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable.

3. People have a will to meaning.

4. People have freedom under all circumstances to activate the will to find meaning.

5. Life has a demand quality to which people must respond if decisions are to be meaningful.

6. The individual is unique.

The first assumption deals with the body (soma), mind (psyche), and spirit (noos). According to Frankl, the body and mind are what we have and the spirit is what we are.

Assumption two is “ultimate meaning”. This is difficult to grasp but it is something everyone experiences and it represents an order in a world with laws that go beyond human laws.

The third assumption is seen as our main motivation for living and acting. When we see meaning we are ready for any type of suffering. This is considered to be different than our will to achieve power and pleasure.

Assumption four is that we are free to activate our will to find meaning and this can be done under any circumstances. This deals with change of attitudes about unavoidable fate. Frankl was able to test the first four assumptions when he was confined in the concentration camps.

The fifth assumption, the meaning of the moment, is more practical in daily living than ultimate meaning. Unlike ultimate meaning this meaning can be found and fulfilled. This can be done by following the values of society or by following the voice of our conscience.

The sixth assumption deals with one’s sense of meaning. This is enhanced by the realization that we are irreplaceable. In essence, all humans are unique with an entity of body, mind and spirit. We all go through unique situations and are constantly looking to find meaning. We are free to do this at all times in response to certain demands.

http://www.logotherapyinstitute.org/

Poem About the Cycle of Life

What the Ravens Want


What is it the ravens want squawking
this early as the sun struggles
to come through the iron clouds?

Some predictions of winter would have them
hover near the road waiting for another
accident involving porcupine or raccoon

or, for their whole clan, a doe.
It seems too early for such frozen dead delights
but still they remind us, when they flap up

away from our blind speed, as it gets colder
the more we kill with our fast passes or failed swerves,
the more they can clean away.

It is the sordid forgotten version of the story
of our emptying highways. Even now, as the cars
are sparser this far into the forests, the first flocks

of red orange leaves reflect in the glassy lakes.
Until a stiff arctic wind, that is. Up here
the waterfalls and last yellow wildflowers

down close to the floor of the woods
are accustomed to a final cover (big blueblack birds
out of a grip of white) of laconic early snows.

Love and Desire

Desire: A dangerous flame

Jeanette Winterson

Thursday, 18 September 2008 , The UK's Independent

Why is the measure of love loss? In between those two words – love, loss, and standing on either side of them, is how all this happened in the first place. Another word: desire.

While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for 10 minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say "Will you..." my answer is "Yes", before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.

Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.

When we are the object of each other's desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room... Our eyes met... From the first moment... and so on.

It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it is as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, "I'd love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year...", they are not talking about love at all – it's desire they mean.

And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.

Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled, packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.

Simple. Perfect.

Until it goes wrong.

The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth.

For many people, this is a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt, though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.

We live in an "upgrade" culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year's model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throwaways in our society; we don't do job security and we don't offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we were doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

I don't want a return to the 1950s, when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?

Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you "upgrade" to the next relationship, it is also easier – for a while.

If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts.

We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt. It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.

An upgrade culture, a now culture, and a celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn't give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of "desire".

Don Giovanni – with his celebrated 1,003 women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins.

Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God. Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah's are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the "Song of Solomon"; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.

And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed.

You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under 30 should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don't mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn't love at all.

The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.

It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that its real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.

There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Unsurprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn't know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.

My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene-led social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow "me first" that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.
There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for conventions of any kind, and it crosses genders, age, social classes, religion, common sense and good manners with seemingly equal ease.

This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.

Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.

I don't suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.

For me, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely more illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or common sense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.

Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.

The Poetry of the Integration of Grief and Loss

The following is a poem by someone, Iris Arenson-Fuller, I have had the great pleasure of meeting through my work at the International Coach Academy. I reproduce it here because I believe it succinctly and movingly reflects on the ways our history of grief is necessarily interwoven into and an essential part of how we intuit, visualize and actualize our future... whether we see the future as out of our control and fated, or decide to take as much control of it as we can to make our dreams and hopes a reality.

Over the years in my work with grief and loss with those who have sustained a series of losses, traumas, or are facing the kinds of losses and great life transformation represented by the advent of a life-threatening disease, I have come to understand that the ability to go forward healthily into a life that is informed by such events or series of events must necessarily include the management of how those occurrences are present in our store of sense and emotional memory for the rest of our lives. That is, they are filters and batteries in the circuits of our generator of traumas, joys, learning and genetic predispositions that inform how we go forward and approach our remaining years. They cannot be escaped. They must not be avoided because they cannot be avoided. They are, for lack of better words, encoded, and can become part of how we are gifted as a species that is able to transform trauma into progress and enlightenment, for the purpose of survival, or they can, through avoidance or misplacement, become the source of continuing un-managed anguish and self-destruction... neurosis and even psychosis and collective evil.

Because I believe literature has been the greatest repository of the most complete understanding of how these dynamics come to the fore and are played out in the drama of our lives, I look to it and always have looked to it for guidance and understanding of the human psyche and the wisdom, love , grief and tragedy of our species.

Poetry especially is able to bring great truths, clarity, resolution and acceptance to our struggles as individuals and as a collective of souls. This poem is especially adept at bringing such truth to the surface of conscious understanding and I thank Iris for it!

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Bear Daydreams
-Iris Arenson-Fuller (http://irisarensonfuller.wordpress.com/)


Forty-five black bear sightings this year in town
help me imagine a large stuffed furball seated
on the pine glider, shaded by the tall
Dutch Elm awning and framed by beds of lilies,
strawberries and cream.
She smiles and turns pages of a storybook
about three little humans who visit her den
and sample her hospitality.
She is sure she belongs and never questions
in whose life she has come to live, or why,
or whose daydreams she has annexed.

I lean into the sun in the old lady’s field
behind the barn, hoping to coax my skin
into a warm new friendship instead
of claiming the redhead’s cancer birthright.
My grief sits on the grass in a Chinese takeout
carton where I packed it up for safe keeping
Sometimes I place it on the soft curve of my
belly and it rests, no longer heavy like cold stone
calling cards on graves, but now light, airy
nuggets of tears stir-fried carefully with smiles
and frozen-frame memories.

This grief is like some prosthetic limb
I wish I did not wear, and when I detach
it and hang it on the chair, I find it still
under the old worn quilt.
It steadies my core and carries me over
young meadows that wake early to stretch
and rub the dew from green eyes.
The limb is part of the body now,
incorporated into a company I did not know
I would ever inherit.
Daydreams crawl into my arms to nuzzle at
my breast as I study the sky, hoping
it is not a mirage.
Unlike my bear, I sometimes wonder in whose
life I have come to live, or if some creature
from a world I never dream has hijacked
my soul to weave into an intricate tale
and nested it in a florist’s box.
Then I spot the box, next to the bear
on the glider and I understand that
They have both been there, rocking,
waiting for me to find them today
under the Dutch Elm.

Powertool: The Authentic vs. The Mask

The authentic is a line from one thing

along to the next; it interests us.

Strangely, it relates to what works,

but is not quite the same. It never

swerves for revenge,

Or profit, or fame: it holds

together something more than the world,

this line. And we are your wavery

efforts at following it. Are you coming?

Good: now it is time.

--- William Stafford,
( from the poem “An Introduction to Some Poems”)



As with most coaching powertools, upon first consideration, the terms in question appear to have a relationship of opposites. Truth vs. Fraud, Action vs. Delay, Respect vs. Invalidation, Trust vs. Doubt, all imply and carry a tension of opposing meaning and understanding of the action that the words carry with them. One might easily arrive at the conclusion that there is an inherent good/bad, positive/negative, implied in these pairings. It would be good to dispel this assumption from the very beginning in this discussion of how The Authentic and The Mask work as a kind of actionable “team” in coaching practice.

Perhaps the model of a yin-yang can be most useful in discussing the relationship between what is the authentic and what is the mask. No self-respecting Taoist would ever go so far as to imply that the darker side of the yin-yang symbol is bad. There is a movement and a relationship between the light and dark side of the symbol that clearly connotes the way these two forces are contained within one another and move each other.

We can say the same thing about the nature of the relationship of how, in coaching, the Authentic and the Mask work with one another to create an interplay and a way forward.

The Mask, as it is used in this power tool, becomes metaphor for what is hidden from plain sight, what is disguised; what, at first, may look to be in-authentic. As a verb the word ‘mask’ describes the action of masking. As a noun it becomes the mask itself, the thing that is used to disguise or hide. For this discussion it may be worth it to add, as well, that masks are used to decorate, to accentuate and to protect. Masks are used to entice and tease in a playful “game” manner. They are used to celebrate. The streets of Venice and even New Orleans are filled with masked revelers during Mardi Gras.

While the uncovering of what is hidden, the removing of masks, is largely what we, as coaches, might be occupied with in order to help our clients arrive at authentic progress and action that is, as described in definition 5 (see below), “true to one's own personality, spirit, or character”, it is just as crucial to understand the protective manner of masks. Masks are worn in toxic environments as a matter of sheer survival.

It is worthwhile to note that, while working with clients, our own coaching mask, based in true and authentic communication and a desire to assist others with their own travels toward self-realization and progress, can be useful in helping a client determine when, if and how he or she can lower their own masks. Sometimes, as clearly as a solution or way forward seems to us, it, by the very nature of its masked presence in the coaching conversation, remains masked to our client. There is a reason for this. We must respect that reason. We must be the catalyst for helping our clients decide for themselves when the “de-masking” can or should occur. We must at times mask our own knowledge and insight to help our clients find their own truths, their own way to their authentic selves.

We can help by helping them create a safe environment around themselves in their lives and in the somewhat rarified environment of our coaching relationship, but safety is key. Protective masks are there for a reason. We must respect their power and rationale.

Readiness to “de-mask” is a key element in our clients’ progress; as is conscious adoption of masks for protection and/or non-manipulative, authentic, positive, attention-creating action and strategies for healthy self-promotion.

For celebration too. Remember, in those Mardi Gras celebrations, particularly in Venice, the mask facilitates an ability to behave in new ways and try seeing new versions of oneself. With a mask one can often step out of old formulas and patterns of behavior into new perspectives. And, in that way, a good powerful question to a client seeking new, more authentic, self-expression or attainment might be “What would the mask look like that you would wear to help you try new approaches/perspectives”? -- or – “What kind of mask do you need to wear to feel the kind of courage you need to do that?”

Our skill as coaches depends on the tools and skills we use to assist our clients in their ability and facility to reveal themselves to themselves so that they can move forward in their stated goals and objectives. Our powerful questions, reflective listening, our challenges; the very reasons we are enlisted as partners for self-actualized self-awareness and actionable life improvements, are powerful! If allowed to, our compassionate and direct communication tools and coaching strategies will offer challenge enough for our clients who wish to step forward into a better way of seeing themselves and their lives, we needn’t take out the option of direct confrontation often… which can amount to a forced “de-masking”.. a rather violent act that, before readiness, can jeopardize the coaching relationship or even open up old deep wounds that we, as coaches, are not equipped to manage in a coaching framework.

I have always loved the William Stafford poem from which the epigraph at the beginning of this discussion is taken. Once I started seeing myself as a coach and started working with the ideas, tools and practices of coaching it came back to me. As I was visioning what my powertool might look like, and I settled on the word “authentic” as a core component (perhaps the core component), the poem came back to me strongly again.

I find the dictionary definition of authentic interesting in a number of surprising ways. That it has a now obsolete meaning of authoritative makes sense to me in that there remains a certain sense of authority in what is called authentic. Real, genuine, factual, reliable, true, worthy of acceptance, tested, are all words that are used in conjunction with the word authentic. Etymologically the word also carries a deep resonance of the authority of the act of genuine-ness and truth, or one who masters truth, from the Greek words for ‘master’ and ‘accomplishment’.

In order to accomplish truth, to master it and to be a master of it, we, as coaches, must appeal to our own inner authenticity with compassion and the honing of our abilities to connect to others in an accomplished, non-judgmental and empathic manner. This may require the use of masks, recognizing the masks our clients have in use, understanding in an authentic way how they are integrated in our clients’ self, in their dreams and their disappointments. We must, as well, understand and recognize how our own masks impact our ability to coach others inside, outside and beyond their own masks.

We don’t see it often now, but the masks once used in many masked balls were held to the face using a stick of one kind or another. Wearing the mask or lowering it was left to the choice of the wearer. The masks became a tool to enhance the playfulness of the event, to make the event more authentically celebratory. In this way, in the work of our lives and our clients’ self-actualized attempts to make their lives more successful, happier, more connected, and more authentic, the raising and lowering of our masks becomes a great tool, a safety net and a way to enhance our creative play: a way to guard and protect our tendernesses, a way to accentuate the real face we present to the world and a way to promote and present our inner faces, skills, gifts and dreams.


Reflections:

1. Can you describe three masks you routinely wear in public settings (work, school, social events)? Do they have positive functions? Negative functions?

2) Can you think of a situation in which a client’s mask was very apparent to you but not apparent to the client? Was it an impediment to their progress? What did you do?

3) Can you remember a time when you have forcefully confronted a person about a masked pattern of behavior that you thought was damaging their life? Did your confrontation have the desired outcome? If it did can you describe that effect? If not, can you describe how you would have dealt with the situation differently?

4) Find someone you trust and like and reveal your feelings for that person in a very authentic direct manner. Now find another person whom you care for and reveal your feelings for that person in a more playful, indirect, masked manner. Compare and contrast the two ways and the responses you received. Which did you like better? What are the pros and cons of each approach.


***


au·then·tic

Pronunciation:
\ə-ˈthen-tik, ȯ-\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English autentik, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin authenticus, from Greek authentikos, from authentēs perpetrator, master, from aut- + -hentēs (akin to Greek anyein to accomplish, Sanskrit sanoti he gains)
Date:
14th century
1 obsolete : authoritative
2 a: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact b: conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features c: made or done the same way as an original
3: not false or imitation : real, actual
4 a of a church mode : ranging upward from the keynote bof a cadence : progressing from the dominant chord to the tonic
5: true to one's own personality, spirit, or character

*

mask

NOUN:
A covering worn on the face to conceal one's identity, as:
A covering, as of cloth, that has openings for the eyes, entirely or partly conceals the face, and is worn especially at a masquerade ball.
A grotesque or comical representation of a face, worn especially to frighten or amuse, as at Halloween.
A facial covering worn for ritual.
A figure of a head worn by actors in Greek and Roman drama to identify a character or trait and to amplify the voice.

A protective covering for the face or head.
A gas mask.
A usually rubber frame forming a watertight seal around the eyes and nose and containing a transparent covering for use in seeing underwater.
A covering for the nose and mouth that is used for inhaling oxygen or an anesthetic.
A covering worn over the nose and mouth, as by a surgeon or dentist, to prevent infection.

A mold of a person's face, often made after death.
An often grotesque representation of a head and face, used for ornamentation.
The face or facial markings of certain animals, such as foxes or dogs.
A face having a blank, fixed, or enigmatic expression.
Something, often a trait, that disguises or conceals: "If ever I saw misery under a mask, it was on her face" (Erskine Childers).
A natural or artificial feature of terrain that conceals and protects military forces or installations.

An opaque border or pattern placed between a source of light and a photosensitive surface to prevent exposure of specified portions of the surface.
The translucent border framing a television picture tube and screen.
Computer Science A pattern of characters, bits, or bytes used to control the elimination or retention of another pattern of characters, bits, or bytes.
A cosmetic preparation that is applied to the face and allowed to dry before being removed, used especially for cleansing and tightening the skin.
Variant of masque.
A person wearing a mask.

VERB: masked , masking , masks VERB: tr.
To cover with a decorative or protective mask.
To make indistinct or blurred to the senses: spices that mask the strong flavor of the meat.
To cover in order to conceal, protect, or disguise. See Synonyms at disguise.
To block the view of: Undergrowth masked the entrance to the cave.
To cover (a part of a photographic film) by the application of an opaque border.
Chemistry To prevent (an atom or a group of atoms) from taking part in a normal reaction.
VERB: intr.
To put on a mask, especially for a masquerade ball.
To conceal one's real personality, character, or intentions.
ETYMOLOGY: French masque, from Italian maschera, from Medieval Latin masca, specter, witch, mask