Coaching reaches parts of the brain other approaches don't

During these past three months, I’ve resumed my Masters studies in coaching – which partly accounts for the lack of posts here.  Aside from earning a living and maintaining family life, most of my spare capacity has been absorbed by keeping across the reading.  So it’s high time to put the studies aside and renew my acquaintance with my blog.

One of the things that strikes me is how my attitude to coaching has subtly shifted since I was last here.  I’ve always paid a lot of attention in coaching to my clients’ conscious sense of self.  I often tend to explore people’s values and aspirations, and what it would take to achieve better alignment with one’s values.  What this often flushes out is that we tend to hold a range of values that may contradict each other – such as the perennial tension between work and personal life.

Sometimes people are barely conscious of contradictions in their values and, when challenged to prioritise them, find it hard to do so.  We hold in mind at any one time only a small part of our sense of self.  The rest tends to be filed away or even difficult to reach.  The person we are tends to be different according to context and the expectations people have of us in each context – at work, at home, with friends, and so on.  Even within a context, we play different roles: at work, for instance, how we are depends on whether we are dealing with our boss, our colleagues or people we lead.

Coaching can help people achieve better integration of these diverse aspects of ourselves.  But my view about how this is achieved is changing.  In the past, I would put a greater emphasis on rational analysis, setting a personal strategy and striving for it.  Now, I tend to allow things to emerge much more organically.  I see coaching as providing a space in which people can luxuriate in reflection, and become more aware of the person they are.  It is a shift in emphasis from doing to being.

Now here’s the strange thing.  Most clients seek coaching because they want to change something with which they are not comfortable and you would assume that you achieve that through diagnosing the problem and setting a plan of action.  But more lasting and deeper rooted change flows from taking one’s attention off the objective and agenda for action and looking instead at where one stands and one’s orientation to the challenges life throws up.   We can try to behave differently to achieve our hopes and aspirations, but this is more likely to yield results if we are comfortable first of all with who we are, what matters to us and why.  And if we do this work first, we may find that the hopes and aspirations which were originally causing some unease were actually misconstrued and if anything needs to change that may be quite different from what we originally envisaged.

So much did I learn from my practice as a coach.  What I have been learning through my academic studies is there’s a sound reason why this should be the case.  From a neuroscientific perspective, there seems little ground for maintaining a belief in a conscious, rational self that gives us a sense of agency in life.  Consciousness is an artefact of evolution, and a somewhat over-developed one at that.  Much of our mental processing happens beneath the level of consciousness and our self takes credit for it retrospectively.  There’s a whole spectrum of physical, emotional and intellectual activity which governs how we respond to situations.

We literally embody the wisdom of our diverse selves in different contexts.  The challenge is to bring a greater part of this embodied wisdom to bear across the range of contexts in which we operate.  This is what I think of as achieving a better sense of personal integration.  It comes through surfacing associations between these different versions of “me”.   And this is best done tangentially than through head-on rational discourse.   Commonly used triggers to these kinds of associations include drawings, mindmaps, role models and simple questions such as “What does this remind you of?”   These are routes to informing ourselves by a broader and richer awareness than we routinely draw upon.

But I’m increasingly interested in pushing this further through approaches to coaching which, on the face of it, seem beside the point: learning through art, working in nature, developing stories.  It seems to me that one of the gifts that coaching can offer is not so much the opportunity to think in depth about something that is on your mind, but the chance to think about something else – the more off-topic, the better.  And from there, work back to the things that you’re grappling with.

By locating ourselves in our responses to things that mobilise our our other selves, that generate a rounded sense of who we are, we understand better what we bring to the things that are predominantly on our mind.

Image courtesy Liz Henry

West End Lane, NW6 - home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

Camden’s proposal loses sight of local councils’mission in providing public libraries.  Their role is as custodian of a value: of access to knowledge, embodied not just in the provision of books and reference facilities but in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to engaging intelligently with them.  If councils are concerned about falling attendances, they might consider a remedy which is aligned with the public value of libraries rather than capitulation to the coffee shop.  This would entail improving the intrinsic appeal of library collections and promoting respect for them.

Victoria Coren – a columnist at The Observer – is a  fellow Camden resident who is also alarmed by the council’s proposal.  She links it to a more general shift in policy in Whitehall.  Only two years ago, the Culture Minister, David Lammy, was telling us “Books are fundamentally important to what libraries are about.”  Now the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, insists that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase”.  Coren believes the contrary:

Burnham says that more library funding would ‘not be realistic in the current climate’. Cobblers. In ‘the current climate’, people need, more than ever, to know about the world. To think laterally and have ideas. To develop an internal life, as an alternative to clubbing and jet-setting. To study history and learn how we’ve got out of trouble before.

The man who thinks that books are a luxury to be cut back in times of recession is a man who doesn’t understand that knowledge is the key to everything and must be at the centre of everything.

Burnham’s approach is in line with a prevailing view that libraries are no longer relevant to the era of Amazon and Google – a view well-expressed by Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph:

People no longer want, or need, to borrow books. Public libraries were invented for the benefit of an aspirational working class – for autodidacts who could not afford the books they craved, at a time when books were really the only source of information.

Many is the clever child who clambered his way out of poverty with the help of a library card. But these days, as the Kaiser Chiefs sing, “it’s cool to know nothing”. Brave indeed is the child at a sink estate school who follows his inner swot. And if the urge to learn proves irresistible, he is probably better off on the internet, where nobody need know that he isn’t surfing porn.

This strikes me as a view which is wholly rooted in a culture – of affluent and ignorant consumerism – which is disintegrating more rapidly than we can comprehend.  As we’re all forced to review our spending, many will be delighted to find that libraries are more than equipped to meet the same need as impulse orders on Amazon address – but at a fraction of the cost.

Victoria Coren is surely right to suggest that libraries could find a new relevance in the impending period of austerity.  Could it be that preserving a space which exemplifies the ethos of concentration might serve young people better than pandering to an assumption that everything must defer to a culture of instant gratification?