Questions about Spirituality in Coaching Practice

Here are some questions I developed that relate to the integration of a spiritual perspective into a coaching practice. I developed them for a client who wishes to recognize and integrate a spiritual grounding in the coaching process, regardless of the issues being worked on, and perhaps, most specifically, to insure acknowledgement of the spiritual undercurrent that is integrated into all coaching process, even issues that may appear, on the surface, to have no spiritual underpinning at all. The assumption made, of course, is that problem solving, empathic support, and reasoning that leads to action, must be, by nature, spiritual. But how does that look? How is it practiced?

At this point I leave these questions blank, but I hope to fill in some answers over the coming weeks.

1) The assumption I make is that by using the term “spirituality” and applying it to a coaching practice, we make define-able distinctions between spirituality and religion. What do those distinctions look like to you?


2) What kind of skills do you bring into coaching practice that you feel are already well developed that would enhance your ability to bring a spiritual approach into your coaching relationships?


3) What skills do you feel you need to enhance or work to improve? How might we do that?


4) Can you describe a session you have had (as a coach or a client or both) in which, even if (or especially if) the work was definitely not spiritual in topic or nature, spirituality played a strong role in the outcome or process?

A Poem about Separation and Belonging

"What Does it Mean to Be Separate in a Quantum Universe?"

"Everyday experience thus fails to reveal how the universe really works and that's why a hundred years after Einstein, almost no one, not even professional physicists, feels relativity in their bones."
--Brian Greene,
"The Fabric of the Universe"



The poetry here is in our memory
of these journeys to a trail of moss,
where lichen drapes black spruce;
where we step
carefully up caps of old stone to view
the undulation of a very clear lake
.
on a very clear day. Each of us preserves
the moment discretely. Later we bicker
specifics: which trail took us up,
how the first tree held us or how
we held it for balance, steady
in the wind, or just

to hold a tree. I remember these spaces
at an angle independent from yours. The inlets,
down there, festooned in rock
and succulents,
draw me in. They have their
gravity, but your focus may be further

to an island with sheer cliffs,
a rookery
of helixing gulls or curls that remain,
after all, waves. Still we are both here
climbing. And this is truth,
the rooms and fields and even

the rivers we have crossed
will be reported as if from different
countries of eyes.

***

Or back even further:
a sister, a brother, recall the terror
of a cruel parent;
another sibling, even present

in the same kitchen, does not
remember. Were they looking elsewhere?
For protection? Survival
of their own desires?
Some things are too terrible or real
for two people to recall in the same way,

memories spoon and fit
but somehow never agree
and, while attempting to travel the bridges
of wounded love,
mistake the unchanging space of yesterday
with what may have never been.

***

Now

if there even is such a thing, we have grown
past all wounds in remembrances.
We travel through
the same spaces and accept
that what we see may not match.
I, on one side of the long path

closer to a complete surrender
to gravity, and you, over there, watching
a far eagle (or is it a Great Blue?)
unmoved on the unseen
sails of the air.
This is compliment, not conflict

and if at times, in the same ear,
facing the same way, you add
your stories to mine, a way forward
or not, completes.
I can stay here until the sun falls.
There is some great sway in the throbbing

sky -- lit and curtained
over loon
and cougar and a pack
of wolves that skulk together
each with its own vision
together whole, one, and fine.

How do you determine what is ethical?

According to the dictionary the definition of ethical is "having to do with what is right or wrong or what is moral". Easy enough, I suppose, but the difficulty lies in the application of, and perspective from which one comes to, "right" and "wrong".

As the world has become more and more relativist, as cultural outlooks and great historical themes are re-examined from a more global and less narrow perspective of morality, the deepest and most civilization-shaping ideals of right and wrong have come to be questioned and re-evaluated. In some ways, what has been right in times past has become wrong; and what has been wrong has become right.

I remember a good example of this from my childhood. My father worked for a major regional electricity generating company and took great pride in the signs of industrialization the power plants were a part of: the huge smoking stacks, the belching automobile plants, the smoggy air. He used to take us on Sunday drives to see the power plants. Then at one point as we grew, the culture's awareness surfaced in us as children that all this effluent pouring into the air was not a good thing but a bad thing. I remember passing over a river valley, on one of those high freeway bridges spanning the sprawl of huge automobile and power plants spread out below, chanting "pollution, pollution, pollution" with my sisters as my father drove. Suddenly these signs of industry and "progress" were no longer to be celebrated; no longer "good". This was especially difficult for my father, I think.

How does this apply to coaching? I think that taking a simplistic, unchanging view of ethics when working with people is dangerous, but at the same time one can be guided by an over-arching dedication to ethics that would allow for change when change is ethical and due.

Standards and degrees of honesty and a firm grasp on the spiritual nature of the concepts of right and wrong are perhaps the best guide posts to use when determining what is ethical. Listening to and gathering evidence, being committed to seeking an ethical approach, allowing change in one's previous stand if the evidence indicates that a change must be pursued in order to conform to one's standards of ethics, getting active support from trusted others who are similarly committed to ethical behavior, are all ways one can be sure to be following ones own ethical standards.

A New Poem That Relates to Coaching

The possibility exists

that your fear is well founded. Once
I woke up well before dawn and the moon

was so silver I was afraid I was dead there in the tent
where there were no boundaries and no wind. Still
drunk in sleep and lost in that blast of pale light

I thought I could teach ways to see this fear
as if there is any other thing to see,
a bird not wholly occupied by the flight

of the beautifully hungry: beating wings or carcass
by the side of the road. A youngster running
collapses dead in the gym, another with too much

of her own combination of anesthesia
is found without shoes as pale as the snow
where she has taken a permanent sleep. So

yes, there are reasons to be afraid. I’ve seen the shots
of legless men back from the endless wars
no one can win. I’ve sat in the vertiginous room

in the acrid fog of loss and tried to make good
the terror in a woman’s eyes when she cannot shake
the winter kudzu from her brain

and none of the drugs help, not with this terror,
and all we can do is give her a safe room
and a sofa to sit with her thin legs

folded under like a bird in winter. Even you and I
who appear to walk through our dreams unfettered
have our own ministries of fear, unrequited, a crater

in the road we’ve accustomed ourselves to
approach in low, steer around if we can, or rock through
like a boat, slow. I have no secrets, I am afraid as well.

There will always be that night, locked
in some oblivion of love or drink, even the forgetfulness
of genuine happiness or grief, when the car will bang

and the tire will smash and everything will stop
and the night will let loose a quiet so calm
even the few small flakes that fall

thunder through the inestimable dark
where something must happen and does
only because, for a while, we don’t know what to do.

The possibility exists,
just then, that we will find someone
coming toward us crunching home through the dark,

someone we have never noticed because in this world
every stranger is enemy, every face an emblem of the fear
the endless broadcasts tell us it is crucial to feel. Gradually

but quicker than we have been taught
the dark becomes ink then, a place to be together in.
How do I know this is true? In what other light

or potential for warmth or reason,
or what other story can we find to live?
Even if, then, we must find our own way home, alone.


--- Bob Vance.

Can Coaching Work with Grief, Loss, Dying and Other Catastrophic Life Change?

During a coaching class the other night, the animated and interesting conversation related to the nature of individuation in clients and the need to balance the ability to cultivate trust, understand and implement the client’s innate learning and problem-solving styles, all while helping the client reach toward and attain their stated goals. I was an active participant in this conversation and had offered that my years of experience in hospice work and grief and loss counseling had offered me a kind of gift in how it became necessary for me, in order to be successful, to integrate a coaching style and other support into each patient and family’s natural rhythms and styles of seeking, discovery and change.

I had pondered earlier in the discussion the fact that, with some people in my hospice work, my ability to stay with them through lengthy conversations that seemed to have little to do with the nature of our work in grief, loss, or anticipatory grief, determined how much progress they were able to make once the conversation turned, more directly, to one that involved setting goals and assessing and implementing coping strategies. I wondered aloud during the class discussion if, in fact, I stayed too long in the more social “pre-amble” before I got to the real work of grief. I still wonder this, though even now I can’t think of a time in which any impatience to move into more goal-centered talk in coaching/counseling related to death, grief and loss didn’t result in automatic resistance… and vice versa: any patience I took the care to observe and implement inevitably paid off with rich and productive work in that session and any forthcoming ones.

My reason to bring this up is two fold. In the first case, it has always been my desire to fit grief and loss work, and work with those anticipating their own death or the death of a loved one, into a coaching framework. I have been unsure if that combination would be a good fit, in spite of the fact that I believe my counseling technique has always leaned toward a coaching style as opposed to a more analytic expertise-based counseling or therapy style. I have always seemed to be able to narrow a client’s search for resolution that the discomfort their grief, loss and death events elicits into more concrete and actionable perspectives and behavior change. During the course of my classes with International Coach Academy I have gathered a host of reasons, both for and against, continuing to pursue, at least in part, a way to apply coaching to death, grief and loss work. This conversation in class again amplified some of my ambivalence, in that the techniques I have used through my career have been called into question (by me, mostly) in order to flesh out their worthiness in whole or in part, to see how much or what proportion of them can be transferred to a coaching practice.

I still believe that coaching and grief and loss work are natural fits. And I hope, by the end of writing this, to be able to further itemize why this is so. I think I have, in many respects, already done that for myself at least on an intuitive level. Now the job is to review, isolate, identify and improve the techniques I have used so they become more reliably accessible to me during coaching, particularly coaching those who come to me with problems related to loss or anticipated loss and major life change. Now the job is to integrate those techniques more readily and consciously into my best practice.

The second case, in the two fold reason I bring this up, also involves interactions in the class that night:

After I described some of my interactions and applications of coaching style in my grief and loss and anticipatory loss work in hospice, one of the other participants in the teleclass made the point that she thought the biggest difference between a hospice counselor’s work and a coach’s is that, in the hospice work that she did, she came into a session with an individual or a family with a set agenda that was largely hers. She felt that that may have worked in hospice work, but it is in direct opposition to what we as coaches are expected to do. In coaching, the agenda must be set by the client. I read, perhaps misread, an assumption on her part that all hospice counseling work is done in this way.

I asked myself: Was that true of my work? I was left without a response to her because I felt she might be right, or that her perspective was worth more than a passing consideration as it was exactly the kind of feedback I was interested in, in forming my own approaches and thinking about how I might, or might not, continue to seek to include grief and loss and other thanatological concerns into my coaching practice. Her comments have been very helpful in further defining my own perspectives and I am grateful to her.

That being said, however, and after some thought, I think I have to conclude that the majority of the reason I was successful in my role as a hospice counselor is largely because I went into, especially a first meeting with a family, a patient, or the grieving, with an relatively empty agenda; an empty canvass. My way was to have some questions ready, to integrate them into the initial assessment interview, and to find out what aims the patient, the family, or each individual in the family had in their search for a way to proceed through, and cope with, the devastating events in their lives that had also brought me into their lives. If I carried agenda items into a session they were gleaned from what had already occurred historically between the client and myself, and were easily set aside if more pressing matters emerged, or if the circumstances had changed significantly since my last session. I am not sure I would have had the successes I had in the field had I proceeded in any other way.

This is not to disparage the woman in the class who had good points to make about the potential differences between a counseling approach and a coaching approach. However I believe, now more than ever perhaps, that a coaching approach is particularly effective in grief and other thanatological work, and that, in fact, a counseling approach, that often assumes expertise and a presupposed “correct” way to manage such devastating life change, is contraindicated.

As in most coaching in general, the people encountered in grief work who seek a coach’s assistance are normal or high functioning people who wish to traverse a rocky and frightening… and normal… part of life. They are not often interested in what the coach or counselor thinks is normal or good or workable… they want to find that out for themselves… or already know on some level, through experience and workable coping strategies of their own.

I had, what I witnessed to be and understand even more now to have been, an unusual level of success as a Hospice counselor… and this was precisely because I left the agenda of healing and grief initiated change up to each individual. I helped them remember what their core values are and were. And if they seem to have changed due to loss, or even to be newly bereft of integrated core ways to manage life’s quandaries due to the power of grief, I helped them rekindle old values, strategies for change and coping, or build new ones. I coached them in ways to approach any changes they were forced to implement due to loss in their lives. I facilitated meaningful conversation with them using the signifiers of meaning that they, not I, brought into the relationship.

And so I believe that work in the field of grief and loss related to everything from divorce to anticipation of death, advent of life-limiting disease process, or one’s own imminent death, can perhaps best be served through a coaching approach. At least for me.

It is exciting to me to think that I will be able to continue to offer people a way to build a path through life’s most devastating times through my coaching… and perhaps with an improved perspective and techniques, tweaked and honed by what I have learned through my training through the International Coach Academy.

Some Self-Coaching Questions, Statements and Exercises

FIVE QUESTIONS TO CHANGE PERSPECTIVE:

1) Are you willing to change the way you see this situation?

2) How would you like to see this situation resolve?

3) Where in this situation do you feel you have the least power to make change?

4) Where in it do you feel you have the most power to make change?

5) How would your world look a month or two after the situation had resolved? How would it look a month or two from now if it does not resolve?


***

What are the three most powerful Perspectives from which someone could live their life?

a) You can be open to change

b) You have the ability to facilitate change

c) You can accept where you have power as well as accept where you are powerless.

***

Create A Dream Solution

Take five minutes to dream your most perfect outcome or solution.

Be as fantastic and “dreamlike” as you can be in visioning how your dream outcome comes into being.

You might want to draw the dream outcome, write a song or poem or story about it.

Perhaps you can turn yourself into a favorite animal in the dream or have a favorite “action” animal help you take action toward fulfilling the dream.

List what parts of the dream is obtainable and what is not obtainable.
How far from the dream can you reasonably expect to be able to reach?

What about you is like the animal chosen?

How can that part of you be enlisted to help you take action?

How might that animal also be a hindrance?

What five actions will take you closest to the dream outcome?

What is the first action? When can you take it?

What part of your dream outcome must you say goodbye to and allow to remain in the realm of dream?

Creative Depth Charges

Here is something from Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter, January 30, 2008. I am by nature a skeptic about such things, but Mr. Brezsny's zany-to-the-point-of-revelation take on astrology and life itself always tickles and enlightens me some. I thought I'd share these because I think they are creative and depth enhancing exercises that might even be used in a coaching session or in self-coaching to help shift perspective, and do it with a little humor, fun and "game".

Here's an excerpt from SUBTERRANEAN PRONOIA THERAPY

by Rob Brezsny

Part One: Experiments and exercises in becoming a rebelliously kind, affably unpredictable, insanely poised Master of Supernal Mischief.

1. "I have not used my darkness well," mourns poet Stanley Moss in his book Asleep in the Garden. He's right about that. His forays into the realm of shadows rarely lead to redemption. "One fine day/ I shall fall down ... in a prison of anger," he moans in one poem. "In this country I planted not one seed," he announces elsewhere. Other samples: "vomit is the speech of the soul"; "We die misinformed"; "How goes a life? Something like the ocean/ building dead coral." But enough. Let's not indulge Moss in his profligacy. Instead, we'll appoint him to be your anti-role model: an example of what you don't want to become. May he inspire you to regard your sorrows and failures as sources of disguised treasure; as raw materials that will fuel future breakthroughs. Now write a poem or story in which you use your darkness well.

2. Acquire a hand puppet, preferably a funky old-fashioned one from a thrift store, but any one will do. Give the puppet a name and wear it on your hand wherever you go for several days. In a voice different from your normal one, make this ally speak the "shadow truths" of every situation you encounter: the dicey subtexts everyone is shy about acknowledging, the layers of truth that lie beneath the surface, the agreed-upon illusions that cloud everyone's perceptual abilities.

3. All of us are eminently fallible nobodies. We're crammed with delusions and base emotions. We give ourselves more slack than we give anyone else, and we're brilliant at justifying our irrational biases with seemingly logical explanations. Yet it's equally true that every one of us is a magnificently enigmatic creation unlike any other in the history of the world. We're stars with vast potential, gods and goddesses in the making. Dramatize this paradox. Tomorrow, buy and wear ugly, threadbare clothes from the same thrift store where you got your hand puppet. Eat the cheapest junk food possible and do the most menial tasks you can find. The next day, attire yourself in your best clothes, wear a crown or diadem, and treat yourself to an expensive gourmet meal. Enjoy a massage, a pedicure, and other luxuries that require people to wait on you. On the third day, switch back and forth between the previous two days' modes every couple of hours. As you do, cultivate a passionate indifference to the question of whether you are ultimately an unimportant nobody or a captivating hero.

4. Is it possible that in trying to repress some of the things about yourself that you don't like, you have also disowned potentially strong and beautiful aspects of yourself? What are they?

5. Inventor Thomas Edison came up with a lot of ideas that went nowhere. While trying to develop the perfect battery, his unsuccessful experiments were comically legion. "I have not failed," he mused. "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." There are other ways in which he didn't match the profile we usually associate with genius. He rarely had a dramatic breakthrough out of the blue, for instance. Most often, he tinkered and fussed until he discovered some new useful thing. Of his 1,093 patents, some were inventions he purposefully set about to create, but most he simply stumbled upon. Describe an area of your life where you've discovered 10,000 ways that don't work.

6. Chantepleure is a word that means "to sing and weep simultaneously." Think of a memory that moves you to do just that.

7. For the 2001 Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, artist David Best constructed the "Mausoleum: Temple of Tears." Made from wooden pieces of dinosaur puzzles, this pagoda-like sanctuary took him weeks to perfect. Pilgrims who visited it were encouraged to write prayers on the walls, mourning dead loved ones and exorcising adversaries who had passed over. At the end of the festival, Best hosted a mass ritual of grief and burned his masterpiece to ash. Draw inspiration from Best's project. Create a talisman or ritual tool out of whimsical junk, use it a while to catalyze a catharsis, then destroy it or throw it away.