Psychosynthesis Leadership Coaching

A Psychology of Being for a Time of Crisis

Aubyn Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351006446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Psychosynthesis Leadership Coaching responds to the call of coaches who want to be able to work with the whole person, with the inner as well as the outer worlds, and not just at rational and behavioural levels but at emotional and spiritual levels as well.

Psychosynthesis is unique amongst psychologies in the emphasis it places on self and will at the centre of human psychological functioning. This holistic and integrative psychology provides the foundations for working with leaders in ways that respond to today's emergent crises.

Psychosynthesis coaching is an increasingly popular approach that is finding its way into the mainstream as a response to the needs of coaching to engage at depth with emotional content and in the transpersonal realm of meaning, purpose and values. This book introduces psychosynthesis coaching to a wider audience and provides a comprehensive guide to this approach for both coaches and leaders.

This book provides the context, models, methods, skills and techniques for coaches to engage with their clients within the larger context of Self and Will, alongside working on inner and outer agendas and goals of any description. For coaches, leaders and organisational practitioners alike, this approach is also about coaching our inner leader – knowing that this work always starts with ourselves.

Chapter 1

Context is all

What is coaching? What is psychosynthesis coaching? How is it different from other coaching approaches?

The coaching context

Coaching is a fast-growing and increasingly widely accepted professional activity, both within organisations – as executive, leadership or management coaching – and within society in general, as life coaching. Yet coaching is still in the early stages of development as a professional practice and discipline, without well-defined boundaries and with an immature knowledge base. Coaching is currently many different things to different people, and the scope of what we call psychosynthesis coaching is a relatively niche and undiscovered part of this.

As with any growing profession, there is naturally an ongoing battle for the high ground in terms of defining, developing and governing the profession, with different national and international bodies offering accreditation standards and structures for coaches. There are already thousands of books about coaching, with Amazon listing 2,214 books in its Coaching and Mentoring category at the time of writing. There are now many forms of coach training and educational programmes on offer to both new and experienced coaches, with at least several dozen within the UK alone. In addition, there are many national and international bodies and associations (including ICF, AC, EMCC and APECS) helping to establish and regulate the profession through accreditation, certification and standard setting. Indeed, there is something of a battle going on for the body and soul of coaching, for the high ground and the common ground, for the mainstream of practice and the niche positions. Everyone with an interest in the subject will tend to give their own definition of coaching and their view of what constitutes good professional practice.

The ICF (the most widespread international coaching body) emphasises process in their definition: ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential (ICF website, 2018).

The EMCC emphasises the purpose of the coaching relationship in terms of improving performance or personal development that involves applying one or more relevant methods according to standards and ethical principles… (Gray, Garvey, Lane 2016 p302).

For the purposes of this book, I will define the scope of what I mean by coaching by highlighting these key principles.

Coaching:

•Is a supportive, enabling and empowering professional relationship and activity that honours the autonomy, resourcefulness, creativity and responsibility of the client

•is goal-, future- or outcome-oriented in purpose, and yet can include working with the client in the domains of past, present or future

•is usually a one-to-one relationship and activity between a coach and a coaching client, which takes place within a context of confidentiality and trust, although team coaching is also becoming more prevalent

•is appropriate for anyone who is what the psychological profession calls a healthy neurotic and can function in the world

•can encompass the inner and outer dimensions of peoples’ lives and work; personal and practical aspects; psychological and behavioural perspectives; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels of the client’s experience

In a later section, I will add to this definition in terms of what is meant more specifically by leadership and life coaching.

Gray, Garvey and Lane in A Critical Introduction to Coaching and Mentoring (2016, p16) make no attempt to define coaching, and instead trace its emergence from a variety of social contexts and its spread by social means, making it a strongly social activity that draws from broad intellectual frameworks. They go on to say that ‘modern coaching practices are dynamic and contextual’ with roots ‘in education, sport, psychology and psychotherapy’. This describes the complexity and ambiguity of coaching well and calls for a dynamic framework which can be used to contextualise different coaching approaches and practices.

I recently developed such a Dynamic Practitioner Framework (Howard (2017b) that (i) identifies differences within coaching practice as well as between coaching and other professional relationships and (ii) helps coaches think critically about how they frame the work they do and reflect upon their practice. In my teaching I also refer to this as the 4Cs:

•Context – what is the context of the relationship? How has it come about? What is the wider systemic context? Are other parties involved?

•Contract – what formal or informal goals or outcomes are the focus of the work? How is the relationship structured and what agreements are made? What is the understanding between practitioner and client?

•Client – what needs, issues and agendas are they bringing? What is their ego strength and stability? What is their level and depth of personal development, self-awareness and self-responsibility?

•Capability (or Coach) – what is the coach’s level of education and training, their professional and personal development? What is their experience and level of confidence of working in different domains or dimensions or with different types of client?

This framework further breaks into two parts:

Part One: Context and Contract determine the nature of the professional relationship or the container – whether counselling or coaching, or what kind of coaching, for example life coaching within an individual or personal context or leadership coaching within an organisational context, along with a more complex multi-party contract.

Context and contracting are all-important in any practitioner relationship. We are not just saying that different types of coaching will have different contexts, but that the practitioner (i) needs to be aware and able to hold the context of the relationship and (ii) needs the skills to contract with the client (or client system) in a way that is congruent with the context. This doesn’t mean that everything should be written down and formally agreed, but the practitioner and client relationship does require a level of clarity or problems may occur. Having established these principles, a distinction can be made as to how the context and contract might differ between coaching and counselling, with the coaching context being framed as forward-looking and outcome-oriented, although this can involve working across temporal dimensions, past, present and future.

I like to hold Sir John Whitmore’s (2017) principles of awareness and responsibility as part of my coaching context with clients. There is something of a paradox here in that the coach can take responsibility for holding the context while the client is responsible for their own process, actions and outcomes. One thing we stress as a possible difference from counselling is that the coach doesn’t need to diagnose the client’s issues; rather they are helping the client reach an understanding or diagnosis for themselves with a view to finding solutions or taking actions. As psychosynthesis coaches our focus is on Self (who is this Being most essentially, and what is emergent for them?) and finding available Will – what small steps or actions will take the client forwards and release more will? Something we notice with counsellors making the transition to coaching is the tendency to over-psychologise and want to fully diagnose the client’s issues for themselves (and therefore spend too long in sessions working on their understanding rather than that of the coachee). This doesn’t mean the coach shouldn’t be curious or formulate hypotheses but that they hold these lightly and leave the primary responsibility for understanding with the client.

Contracting is a major topic in itself and Peter Bluckert’s Psychological Dimensions of Executive Coaching (2006) is a good place to start. Most coaching contracts involve regular monthly or bi-monthly meetings and work with repeatable contractual cycles (e.g. of six sessions or three months), but leadership coaching can also allow for ad-hoc meetings or calls in response to emergent situations or crises. Counselling contracts tend to involve more frequent meetings (e.g. weekly) at the practitioner’s premises and be open-ended in terms of duration. But again, there are no hard and fast rules providing there is congruence across the four Cs.

Part Two: Client and Capability define the scope and nature of the work that can potentially take place within the professional relationship, the contents – as determined by the openness, development and availability of the client as well as the nature of the needs and issues they bring, coupled with the professional capability and personal capacity of the coach. Different coaches can work at a greater or lesser level of depth involving emotional, personal and psychological ground, depending upon their training, skills and experience.

The key boundary concerning the Client that we hold in coaching is that we only work with functioning people with sufficient ego strength. Another way of saying this is that we work with healthy neurotics who are able to function in the world (i.e. get to work, hold down relationships, pay their bills) although it is quite possible that successful leaders are suffering psychological problems or pathologies – increasingly our leader clients bring issues and crises of anxiety, stress, addiction or depression alongside their leadership development and organisational agendas. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work with them or we should pack them off to a therapist as soon as one of these issues emerges. Nor does it mean that we will work with them as a therapist would in the area of past traumas and unresolved history. The coach can help clients become aware of how past trauma and mirrors of the past are influencing or impeding their objectives and help them take responsibility for healing or resolving these. The key here is that the coach is helping the client find their own strategy and way forward to dealing with their past at the level of the pre-personal unconscious (or psychodynamic). Sometimes this can involve referral to a counsellor or therapist for specific work alongside the coaching; sometimes it involves the client working with the coach in a boundaried context (if the coach has the experience and training), as well as engagement with all manner of other personal development and therapeutic resources or solutions (e.g. group work, somatic work, systemic work, healing, retreats, etc.).

I draw from Julia Vaughan Smith’s APECS paper What has trauma got to do with coaching? Or coaching to do with trauma? (2015, p10) to add insight into how the coach can work in relationship to past trauma:

Coaches with understanding and experience of this field (trauma and personality splits) can bring something additional to the coaching work, a greater transitional space between the inner and outer worlds, which allows for deep transformation without working directly with the traumatised self or with the past. It needs a slightly different tool kit, perhaps, particularly for those clients who are clearly under the control of their survival strategies, if they wish to address some underlying issues within the boundaries of the coaching relationship and contract.

Key distinctions in coaching

As we started out this chapter by saying, every author, professional body and training organisation offers their own definition of what coaching is, what it’s for and how it should work. However, amongst all this, there does now seem to be convergence and agreement on several key distinctions.

Our primary distinction is between coaching that takes place within an organisational context (variously called executive, leadership or management coaching) and coaching within a private or individual context, usual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and overview
• Chapter 1 Context is all
• Chapter 2 Origins, elders and developments
• Chapter 3 Personal and professional: Part 1
• Chapter 4 The leadership challenge and the call to coaching
• Chapter 5 Coaching psychology
• Chapter 6 Psychosynthesis as a coaching psychology
• Chapter 7 Personal and professional: Part 2
• Chapter 8 The full model of psychosynthesis coaching
• Chapter 9 Boundaries, ambiguities and contexts
• Chapter 10 Personal and professional: Part 3
• Chapter 11 Leadership development
• Chapter 12 Organisational systems and the systemic perspective
• Chapter 13 The developmental perspective
• Chapter 14 The somatic perspective
• Chapter 15 Coaching leaders in change, in crisis and towards synthesis
• Chapter 16 Coaching the Will
• Chapter 17 Psychosynthesis techniques
• Chapter 18 Insights from neuropsychology and the implications for psychosynthesis coaches
• Chapter 19 A new synthesis and the future of psychosynthesis coaching
• Afterword
• References and bibliography
• About the author
• Index