Transformational coaching
Transformational coaching goes deep to unblock historically-formed obstacles and to unleash your potential.
We are all products of our history. The latest neuroscientific research is starting to show how we are affected in the womb by our mother’s physiology, particularly her stress responses. Before we’re born, we’re starting to learn what feels safe and what feels like a threat.
Humans have basic needs for safety and connection with others - as children, it’s what keeps us alive. Research shows that affection and a consistent, reliable relationship between care-giver and child is just as important as the nurturing of our physical needs. We learn how to ‘please’ our care-givers and to stay safe in their presence, which creates unconscious patterns in us that repeat throughout our lives - unless we become aware of them, and realise that, as adults, we have the power to choose, and the power to change.
The challenges of leadership include making decisions that affect people’s lives, negotiating organisational politics and change, understanding group dynamics, coping with ambiguity, uncertainty and no right answer, learning to influence where there is no consensus, and leading people whose work you don’t necessarily understand. This means negotiating with other people. Arguably, this is what an organisation is - a series of interactions between people where each is seeking to address their own needs in the context of the organisation’s overall goals. This is the healthy version of organisational politics. The unhealthy version is where individuals put their own needs higher up the agenda than those of the rest of their team, or the organisation as a whole.
Negotiating our way through this territory brings our historical conditioning to the fore. We want to be liked. We want to win. We are fighters - or conflict avoiders. We can have difficult conversations because we believe in our positive intentions - or we can’t because we worry about upsetting people or being disliked. We want to prove ourselves. We want to show up - or we want to hide. We learnt most of these strategies while we were still very young. They made sense in our family/childhood context - but they don’t necessarily make sense now, at work, amongst other adults with their own psychological complexities.
Transformational coaching helps you identify your learnt patterns and works with you to let go of habits that are no longer of benefit, replacing them with more appropriate behaviours, attitudes and emotions. And don’t let anyone tell you emotions have no place at work. We might not like to acknowledge it, but organisations, like humans, are an unavoidable swirl of emotions and we ignore them at our peril.
Transformation coaching is…
psychological - it assumes that what is happening inside us is as important as what shows up on the outside. It looks at beliefs, values, expectations, assumptions and psychological patterns.
humanistic - that we are whole, unbroken beings who have the intrinsic resources we need to get our needs met and to ‘heal’ and make improvements.
integrative - it draws from a wide range of schools of thought. In my case, it includes positive psychology, complexity theory, somatics, cognitive behavioural therapy, family dynamics and attachment theory, executive and life coaching, and theories of adult learning and change.
holistic - it embraces the cognitive, emotional, physical, relational and behavioural aspects of the human experience.