Mindful Leadership Coaching

Journeys into the Interior

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137382337
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Mindful Leadership Coaching takes an in-depth look at the coaching processes. The insights provided here will help coaches and executives to use frameworks for transforming attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. It advises on how the best leadership coaches help their executive clients create significant personal and professional change.

CHAPTER 1

The Attachment Imperative: The Hedgehog’s Kiss

Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin

– Marlene Dietrich

Home’s where you go when you run out of homes

– John le Carré

One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time

– André Gide

Introduction

How do people relate to one another? How much closeness can we tolerate? Let’s look at a couple of scenarios.

First, imagine you’re a highly successful professional (you may be one, of course). You have always been effective in your work but most of your relationships are superficial and short-lived, both at the office and in your personal life. Is this “normal” or are you different from other people? You know you are uncomfortable being too close to others and have always found it difficult to give them your complete trust. And you hate being dependent on anyone. But although you never feel the need to be close to others, there are times when you ask yourself whether there’s something missing from your life. It seems impossible for you to form deep relationships. Perhaps you have shallow relationships because they are the only kind you are comfortable with. Is there something wrong with you?

Now, let’s suppose you are a different executive. One of your colleagues in the office is irritatingly clingy. Whatever you do and wherever you go, she’s always around. At first you were flattered to be the subject of so much attention but it has started to make you feel suffocated. In the nicest possible way, you have tried to tell her you need some distance but she doesn’t appear to want to hear you. Instead, she complains that her relationships with other people are no longer what they used to be, and she is clearly upset that no one apart from herself seems to be bothered about it. This makes you wonder whether her behavior is really so inappropriate. Is she being cold-shouldered? Who has the wrong attitude, she or you? Yet it doesn’t feel right to have her hanging around you all the time. It’s as if she only feels OK when she has someone she can go through life with. How much clinginess is normal?

These two examples are snapshots of the dynamics of the interpersonal field, the kind of scenarios the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used his famous parable of the hedgehogs to illustrate (see p. 15). Schopenhauer thought his hedgehogs provided a very appropriate symbol of the human condition. How close can you get to others before you start to feel uncomfortable? Some people can get very close; for others, closeness is anathema. To obtain a deeper understanding of what goes on in human encounters, we need to explore attachment behavior – how dependent we are on other people for emotional satisfaction. What is the nature of the ties that bind us to others and endure over time?

Our behavior toward others derives from the kind of attachment pattern we have learned to be comfortable with. The roots of what makes up our comfort and discomfort run very deep. The template for all our relationships is laid down at a very impressionable age, with the early “dance” between mother (caregiver) and child. Early mother-child interaction patterns determine the nature and quality of present and future attachments. New relationships will be affected by the expectations developed at this early stage of development.

“Early mother-child interaction patterns determine the nature and quality of present and future attachments”

In these early years, a blueprint is created that will influence the way we relate to others throughout our life and even across generations.¹ For example, as parents, insecurely attached adults may lack the ability to form a strong attachment to their children. They will be unable to provide the necessary attachment cues required for a child’s healthy emotional development, thereby predisposing their children to a lifetime of relationship difficulties. In this way, what was initially a dyadic issue turns into a generational issue. Attachment problems may continue from generation to generation unless an individual breaks the chain. Understanding these developments makes it even more important to know the nature of our relationship patterns.

Attachment disorders in children can usually be traced to the effects of having an emotionally unavailable caregiver, that is, a primary contact who is either withholding, inconsistent, physically absent, or frequently changing.² This scenario can be exacerbated by separation from parents, due to death or divorce, or physical or sexual abuse during childhood. Children growing up in this kind of environment will be burdened with problems of self-esteem and identity formation, and be prone to dysfunctional interpersonal relationships.

These difficulties can play themselves out very differently as children grow up. Some children may become overly clingy, always fearful that any relationship they are in will fall apart. Other children (subjected to other kinds of parental dysfunction) will develop feelings of detachment, failing to form long and lasting relationships with anyone and finding it very difficult to trust even those close to them. If not checked in good time, these patterns will continue into adulthood and predispose an individual to a lifetime of relationship difficulties that manifest themselves in the way interpersonal relationships (both at work and at home) unfold.

What is attachment?

In its simplest form, attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond established between a child and caregiver during the first years of life. The way this relationship unfolds, positively or negatively, will set the tone for all future relationships.³

In his seminal work on attachment, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby noted that children’s mental representations or working models of relationships lay the foundation for all their future relationships and experiences.⁴ According to Bowlby, attachment and separation are elemental forces that drive our behaviors and decisions and the failure to form a secure attachment with a caregiver can be linked to several types of problem behavior. The way these attachment patterns resolve themselves influences our self-efficacy (our belief in our ability to complete tasks successfully), self-confidence (our positive perceptions of our general abilities), and self-esteem (our feeling of self-worth and self-satisfaction).

“attachment and separation are elemental forces that drive our behaviors and decisions”

The ability to form attachments is biologically driven and is part of our evolutionary heritage. We are born with a repertoire of preprogrammed, instinctive, biological behaviors that help us survive as infants. Infants who seek the closeness and security of their mother (or other primary caregiver) will have an evolutionary advantage. The children of mothers who are responsive to their needs and provide security are more likely to survive and pass on their genes.⁵ Babies’ crying, smiling, grasping, and clinging are very purposeful activities. Such behavior will keep them close to their primary caregivers who will protect them from danger, feed and comfort them, and teach them what’s good and bad about the world in which they live. This intensive pas de deux is facilitated because parents also have instinctive behavior patterns, such as soothing babies when they cry, caressing them, making sounds that appeal to them, and mirroring them (i.e., playfully imitating a baby’s facial expressions), all of which enforce caring behavior. The main purpose of these processes is to maintain proximity between infant and caregiver, ensuring the infant’s safety and protection, essential factors for the continuity of the species.⁶

Based on the nature and quality of their early attachments, children develop systems of thought, memory, belief, expectation, emotions, and behavior that act as a template for the way they engage in and handle all future relationships. How these attachment patterns work themselves out in our inner theater very much depends on the nature and quality of repeated interactions with our caregivers. Depending on their responsiveness (especially in situations of stress), specific working models of relationships are constructed in our inner theater. These can be positive (i.e., people can be trusted, confided in, helpful in distress) or negative (i.e., no one can be trusted, people are not really caring, we are all alone in the world).

Although Bowlby focused primarily on understanding the nature of the infant-caregiver relationship and its implications for socio-emotional development, he also asserted that the schemas of self and others, created from the parent-child interaction, are present in other kinds of relationships: “Attachment is an important component of human experience from the cradle to the grave.”⁷ He suggested that the same motivational system that underlies infants’ attachments to their caregivers also underlies the emotional bond that develops between people later in life. These early relationship patterns will influence us throughout the course of our life.

As we mature, we transfer attachment relationship patterns from our parents to other people in our life. The quality of attachment established early in life will affect all our adult relationships, including romantic love, friendship, and workplace behavior.⁸ The way individuals talk about themselves and their feelings reveals how they have organized their attachment experiences and how they will regulate their behavior toward others. People with a secure working model will be more likely to engage in positive behavior, while the opposite will be the case for people who have an insecure working model.

Attachment scenarios

In their child observation studies, the developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues (expanding on Bowlby’s work) described a number of attachment patterns in infants that become internalized, and have an effect on mature functioning.⁹ They singled out three basic attachment styles: secure (positive), anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant (both dysfunctional).

Positive attachment patterns

Secure attachment

Parents of securely attached children react rapidly to their children’s needs and are generally responsive. They also tend to play and are involved with their children. Due to their consistent, appropriate responsiveness, a secure bond will be established between caregiver and child, resulting in the child’s openness to emotional experiences and willingness to engage in creative and productive emotional interaction. Such parents have created a “secure base” for their children, which enables them to venture successfully into the world. This secure base contributes to a child’s healthy cognitive and social development; it establishes trust and reciprocity, which becomes a pattern for all future emotional relationships.

Securely attached infants are prepared to explore their environment when the caregiver is present. Although they may display some degree of separation anxiety when a parent leaves, they are easily comforted upon their return. Drawing on their basic sense of security, they will perceive other people as dependable, caring, and trustworthy.

As time passes, secure children mature into secure adults, who expect others to be trustworthy and responsive, a Weltanschauung that reinforces their sense of inner security. These people regard themselves as wanted, worthwhile, competent, and lovable. They will form a secure sense of self, which includes a sense of competence, self-worth, and a healthy balance between dependence and autonomy. Secure attachment patterns also contribute to the development of empathy, compassion, and conscience.

Dysfunctional attachment

When attachment needs are not met, children feel insecure. They learn as infants that proximity seeking does not elicit satisfactory responses from caregivers. Children subjected to dysfunctional childrearing feel bad, unwanted, worthless, helpless, and unlovable. They perceive others as insensitive, hurtful, and untrustworthy, unresponsive to their needs. And they perceive the world as unsafe and life as painful and burdensome.

These children may resort to desperate strategies to get some kind of response from their caregivers, one of which is hyper-activation, the other deactivation – in other words, activities that focus on moving toward people or moving away from them. These strategies can be interpreted as exaggerations of the primary attachment strategy. The first (anxious-ambivalent) manifests itself through intense protest or energetic efforts to regain proximity; the second (avoidant) is characterized by the suppression or denial of attachment needs and the maintenance of distance in relationships.¹⁰ Some of these children will always be on the lookout for comfort and attention, while others – the avoidant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Attachment Imperative: The Hedgehog’s Kiss
• 2 The Art of Forgiveness: Differentiating Transformational Leaders
• 3 Are You a Victim of the Victim Syndrome?
• 4 Are You in the Rescuing Business?
• 5 The Psycho-Path to Disaster: Coping with SOB Executives
• 6 Why Coaching?
• 7 Creating Safe Places for Executive Play
• 8 Creating Tipping Points
• Conclusion
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index