|
[Frog out of the
freezer;]
I want to tell you the idea that I have held for a
long time. Whether I have been able to execute the
strategy or not, is up for debate, but here's why
I developed and taught COACH2 the way I have and
why I do what I do--It's based on Tim's note
below.
[This is timely because I'm struggling with this
now without an answer fyi.]
During the first part of my coaching career, I
noticed that I just gave advice, I was impatient
and couldn't understand why people wouldn't do
what I asked--this included my brief foray into
coaching athletes. Coming out of "mediation"
training in the 80s, for the USA Farm Program done
with the Farm Credit, we learned how to facilitate
each sides point of view <--definitely not
coaching.
EVEN Goleman writing in HBR 2000 - Leadership That
Gets Results Noted:
http://www.defence.gov.au/adc/docs/cdle2012/cdle_120329_goleman2000leadershipthatgetsresults.pdf
"...works well when employees are already aware of
their weaknesses and want to improve, but not when
they are resistant to change..." -- describing
"The Coaching Style."
This last part was clear to me by the late 90's
when I started training coaches, and in order to
"avoid resistance" to change, you have to find
where people are (in transit to where they are
going) and work with them there, or no more than
1/2 level away [Graves], this includes all:
vertical, oblique and horizontal "levels." You
have to be considerate of their KSE level as well,
if you can say level--on its side!
YET, the psychoactive elements that you could
insert into the subconscious--which btw, maybe the
only thing "listening" is a bit of a crapshoot,
but often worth making a shot at if the "opening"
occurs and connection is made.
In order to make this happen, coaches using this
model HAVE TO UNDERSTAND DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES,
which means we have to be able to have a dynamic
GPS running to gauge where the person is, where
they are likely to go, and how fast they are going
to get there.
Now, teaching this is another thing because the
mechanics in intuiting/recognizing stage and
transition within a stage to know, are they
beginning, middle or end, is a bit dicey to say
the least, it requires a much deeper understanding
of meaning making than anyone realizes--at least
to do this on the fly.
AND, you want to get some assessment data to help
out, which is why I almost insist that all the
people I work with, do some personality
assessments and the LDMA, which I have found is
easy and reliable because it relies on the same
mechanism that coaching relies on for verifying
data and that is "probing for elaboration" of the
person's meaning making, or in some cases, the
sense-making models.
Without this baseline data, it's pretty tough to
"pin the tail on the donkey" unless you have a lot
of experience and you school your intuition,
because your intuition gets fooled a lot.
In order to insert psychoactive elements into the
meaning making system, you have to provide the
person with perspective, mostly from their own
system--to avoid an immune response--and to make
it easier to fit with their system of making
meaning in time and over time. In order to do
that, you have to have an understanding of guess
what?
Yep: Capability, BIAS, Style, Level, Role, Values,
and System Dynamics.
Of course this is a pretty tall order to get
right, but here's what most people don't get and
can't grok!
WE ARE ALREADY DOING THIS ANYWAY.
Anytime you interact with another person, you are
running these dynamics and more to establish a
subconscious context for the four Fs: fight,
flight, food, or procreation...in the simplest
form, and subconsciously your 200,000 year-old
genome is busily figuring out is this friend, or
foe, should I eat it, or mate with it, should I be
on guard, or laugh...etc.
All I'm doing by naming and codifying these
dynamics is merely offering a way to understand
and "train/assess" what is already happening in
each of us already, albeit with more complexity,
and hopefully, more explanatory power.
I'm not saying everyone should learn this, but I
am saying that if it's already going on, would you
like to know how to work with it, work on it
metacognitively.
Why?
Metacognition is the key to almost all forms of
happiness and success in today's VUCA world.
Most of us are not going to be fit, nor served up
the environment on a platter, it's going to be
more and more of a "fitness project" that most
think and especially leaders who are going to have
to override a lot of instinctual behavior that is
likely going to get them into positions of
leadership.
By knowing how to begin to "know, study and learn"
about our selves and the BEHAVIORAL MetaDYNAMICS
that are running the show, we can often--as a bit
actor--swing the momentum favorably, and if not,
often know why, and keep running that play as long
as we have the ball.
While I truly believe in the power and efficacy of
Resilience and Antifragility, Metacognition is as
important and deserves to have the first spot in
any leader's toolkit.
As Tim reminded me of his own "metacognitive"
journey, and how as "Joe Black" says to Susan
Parish near the end of the movie when she asks
what to they should do..."It will come to us."
That's essentially what happens, "it comes to us."
The psychoactive nature of offering clues and
breadcrumbs for the person being coached is key
and requires a form of "detachment" from your own
S*** as well as a lack of worry about whether
"success" is achieved, which can be very hard on
your pocketbook as a coach-->"...people are
resisting change."
Almost always, when people resist change, they
have found a way to serve their values in a very
important and leveraging way, and the movement
away from that requires a huge shift often, which
is not possible in time, as the person is nodal,
rather than exiting that particular metacognitive
frame...so as I have said many times, it's like
trying to teach a pig to sing, it doesn't work,
and it ANNOYS the pig.
If you grok any of what I'm saying, you can move
away from forcing, trying to get accountability
work done, except in those areas that are
supported in the values position and look at
scaffolding in the system, the role, and other
external devices that would can get the person
through until they are less-resistant to change.
MOST OF THE TIME, people change when they have
too....
It's a fact of life. People don't really want to
or like to change (some: 1-5% run a change
program, so yea, they are the changelings).
So, understanding how to insert psychoactive
elements, usually when a person's shields are down
is the easiest way to lay the breadcrumbs in
place. Almost all of our own change happens (that
which is not traumatic) in that way developmental,
an often hiccup type movement from one place on
the developmental transit to another, fits and
starts and long periods of nodal comfort--good,
bad or ugly.
Understanding where people are in that transit
process allows you to how human dignity and also
to interact in ways that compassionate and
safe--usually--for the person being coached.
Psychoactive is
correct. Mike often talks of coaching as planting
seeds that may or may not germinate and crack the
rock, crack the block.
As I watched the video
I could glimpse the cracks when mike would ask a
question or offer a perspective that actively
opened my psyche: big eyes, wide smile and/or
vigorous head nod.
I have not watched this
video much since last years retreat. And yet as
mike often says, indeed he said it in the video,
this work is being done anyway. Stepping into the
work more consciously just may grease it more.
Also as mike wrote
below: it is not for everyone. My caveat to that
is that mike, from my own watching of him with
others in sessions like these, does not use the
same techniques with different individuals.
Perhaps the same underlying model but it manifests
or morphs to the client.
With me, in this video,
he really plays the roles of coach, consultant,
teacher and anti-mentor.
An interesting residual
to this is from the perspective of time. To watch
it from the perspective of the present, when it
happened, and to watch it from the perspective of
now, and to be struck how truth deepens. His
insights, and mine, made in video, teach and touch
deeply.
It is challenging to
hold those truths in the moment over moment,
through time. It is encouraging to revisit them
and see how, with out much effort, I am moving
toward that deeper hold on truth. Of what I am
becoming.
There is something
about this work that makes it "psychoactive"...
In the case of introversion, at least those that
are leaning into development or being dragged
along by it...there is something about this kind
of work which lends itself to being a "sliver in
the mind"...
Most people in the past have use "psychoactive
drugs" to stretch the mind, or to pierce the
current balloon of our perspective and I think
over the years, the Freudian work, and Jung, and
others have shown that "embedded" learning as this
is problem a symptom of seems to cause
psychoactive elements to "reengineer" to the
extent possible our neurosynaptical environment,
where possible...
I do think neuroplasticity is relevant, and of
course is the key in the rewiring of stage growth,
otherwise we would remain static rather than
continue to be dynamics in our developmental
processes.
More than likely "genetics" guide upper and lower
limits of development, or the range at which
development is "right" for us over the course of a
lifetime, and if you don't get what you need in
this life, you can always look forward--like my
ole ball coach used to say--keep running it until
you get it right...I think he was a ZEN COACH
because there is sure a lot of karma in making
mistakes when there are large people running
around trying to "tackle" you;)
MORE than likely, development serves some kind of
spiritual process in the world, as well as serving
many of evolution's ideas about fitness and such.
So, as we work with psychoactive processes, we
experience not only developmental growth but
spiritual redesign as well, to accommodate the new
environment of development.
While I can't promise you the experience Tim has,
we can begin to reveal tools that have the effect
of becoming psychoactive to exercise the
neuroplasticity that all of us seem to possess in
inborn degrees--the key being to not compare or
contrast, but to experience that which serves your
being, doing, having, becoming and contribution;)
These kinds of
experiences are not for everyone, but the tools we
discuss are going to be present whether you use
them, or they get used on you in this VUCA World
we have entered;)
|
