The 7Cs of Coaching

A Personal Journey Through the World of NLP and Coaching Psychology

Bruce Grimley

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351233019
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Industrial & Organizational Psychology

In The 7Cs of Coaching, Bruce Grimley expertly explains neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to the advanced coach and counsellor by asking a simple question: 'What is NLP?'. Inviting us on his personal journey, he provides the reader in this book with an insight as to how he coaches using his own NLP model as well as exploring the complexity of NLP as a practice and why it tends to polarise opinion in today's coaching landscape.

Grimley insists that if the NLP paradigm is to find credible traction in the modern world, it needs to test its claims in the same way as other academic disciplines; based on his own research, this book does just that. Incorporating contemporary psychological understanding and neuroscientific research throughout, it provides a complete NLP model, outlining specific steps for the reader to follow in order to achieve excellence in coaching. It includes case studies, exercises and reflective questions which will encourage both novice and advanced coaches to explore the benefits of NLP, understanding and taking into account emotions and the unconscious mind in their practice. By analysing the NLP landscape, this book also addresses many issues which are shared by the broader coaching community such as differentiation from counselling, professional status and lack of a reliable empirical evidence base.

Ground-breaking and thought-provoking, this book offers a modern examination of NLP. Highlighting why NLP is still useful and popular, and exploring why it fills a gap in the market place for effective coaching, this book will be essential reading for all coaches in practice and training, coach supervisors and counsellors with an interest in coaching techniques.

Part 1

Chapter 1

What is coaching?

Coaching, counselling and psychotherapy are all the same thing. It is about people relating to each other with the intended outcome of improving the quality of life at an individual and possibly a group level.

“I would like to begin by inviting the reader to consider for herself the difference between psychotherapy, counselling and coaching.”

This book is about coaching. It is also about a very specific type of coaching which is informed by a popular psychology having at its heart the methodology of modelling. This approach is called neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP for short.

Interestingly, the exemplars for the first NLP models were psychotherapists and not coaches, so I would like to begin by inviting the reader to consider for herself the difference between psychotherapy, counselling and coaching. If we are messy about this at the very beginning, then it is possible we might be messy about other things in the book too and that is not my intention.

Associate Professor John Grinder took a lot of persuading by Richard Bandler in the spring of 1970 to take a look at a Gestalt group he and Frank Pucelik were conducting at the highly experimental Kresge College in Santa Cruz, California. One of the main reasons given by Grinder for initially refusing to look at this Gestalt work was the consequence of therapy in his opinion was to adjust people to a social, economic and political context in which they were being exploited. Helping people adjust to a system that exploited them reduced their revolutionary potential and was therefore at heart unethical. One can see the parallel to Laing (1967) here, and even though Laing did not like the term anti-psychiatry, anti-psychology has been one of the historical characteristics of NLP throughout the previous 40 years, and this is something that will be explored in depth throughout this book.

In a similar political and social vein, the constructionist school of psychology has the idea of dark and light constructionism. For light constructionism, tolerance is the order of the day as there are certain moral demands embedded in the very nature of discourse because people construct their lives through discourse. Therefore, removing threats to the multiplicity and openness of discourse is regarded as life enhancing and therefore ethical as exemplified by Kurt Danziger (1997, p. 410) who suggests ‘A thousand flowers may bloom, provided none of them is of a type that threatens to take over the entire field if left unchecked’. However, dark constructionism, with Foucault often being quoted, suggests that our conversations are inevitably embedded in relations of power and they are dependent on current patterns of rigid power structures established in the past and protected from changing by many institutionalised practices and social conventions.

So it can be seen as soon as we begin to consider the topic of coaching, counselling or psychotherapy, the semantics become complicated depending upon which frame we use. Also irrespective of which frame we use, it will always widen from consideration of the individual to consideration of an ever-widening context through both space and time. For some, severe depression or schizophrenia could be seen as an understandable and congruent response to a broken world. For others, they will be listed as chronic clinical conditions suggestive of an inability to adapt to modern times and develop the appropriate skills to thrive in an ever-changing environment.

“Coaching, counselling and psychotherapy have more in common than that which differentiates them.”

If the reader thinks I am being overly academic here and not living in the real world, just take a look at homosexuality in the context of modern politics and psychiatry/psychology. Before the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, homosexuality was a criminal offence in the United Kingdom, and it was only after the American Psychiatric Society (APA) announced the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-3 (DSM-3) in 1974 that in the eyes of formal psychiatry and clinical psychology it ceased to be a mental disorder. Paula Caplan, a former consultant to the DSM, makes the point that these labels of identity are constructed by a small clique in the psychiatric establishment, dominated by conservative white males. Many of these labels are just common life problems or the effects of social injustice. Even the previously pejorative label of homosexuality did not go down without a fight. Even though the vote was 5854 supporting removal versus 3810 opposing removal, in DSM-3 it was still there, but under the guise of ‘ego dystonic homosexuality’, which is essentially being homosexual but not feeling comfortable about it. The reader might obtain a sense of where all this goes when she realises in DSM-5 we now have oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). This is defined as a pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behaviour or vindictiveness lasting at least six months. I think all of us have suffered from this at some stage of our life and many of us would regard such argumentation or defiance as perfectly normal, healthy and representative of intelligent freethinking people in a modern liberal democratic society. More of this topic will be discussed in Chapter 8 where we discuss the politics of coaching; however, I would like to argue that as the title of this chapter suggests coaching, counselling and psychotherapy have more in common than that which differentiates them. It is as much to do with politics and a social perspective as it is to do with psychology and a technical perspective.

Origins of coaching, counselling and psychotherapy

Of course one could go back to the beginning of time if we take the very broad definition of one-to-one work at the beginning of this chapter. If we imagine someone who is agreeable, extraverted, conscientious, open to experience and stable, we might imagine someone who will by default wish to engage in conversations with others, having as an outcome something that would be beneficial to both. Bayne (2004) tells us in a sample of 123 experienced counsellors there were many more intuitive and feeling types (55%) compared with the general UK population (14%). So while there have been humans communicating with each other, it is feasible that a percentage of that population were regarded as natural counsellors or coaches.

So when coaching and counselling actually began again depends upon the frame. One can go back to around 4,000 BC as Ellenberger (1994) does and talk of temple medicine. When talking about the ancestry of dynamic psychotherapy, he cites exorcism being an example of the best efforts of a community to systematically shift a person from their present state to a desired state in a sustainable way. We could of course fast forward to the time when medicine made the observation through autopsy that some who deviated from what was regarded as normal functioning was due to observable differences in the brain, for example dementia or Broca’s aphasia. Later many other distinctions such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Pick’s and Huntington’s followed on. During this era this state of affairs was contrasted with those who had displayed psychoses, manias, phobias, melancholia, obsessions and hysteria to name but a few yet on autopsy their brains were totally normal. Thus, the separate professions of neurology and psychiatry (medical treatment of the soul) were born.

Arguably Anton Mesmer in the 1770s could be regarded as the first psychiatrist to provide a ‘scientific’ explanation for these psychological anomalies and one of the characteristics of his system called animal magnetism was that of the rapport, which even to this day is regarded as one of the five predictors of success in counselling psychology (Horvath & Symonds, 1991). During the late 18th century, a contemporary of Mesmer and somebody regarded as the greatest exorcist ever also recognised the distinction between neurology and psychiatry, a man called Johann Joseph Gassner. Unfortunately for him his rise to fame came at the time of the Enlightenment when religion was going out of favour and the age of reason was taking favour. Even though the Church still had a grip on the middle and lower classes the aristocracy was looking to more enlightened ways of explaining maladies of the soul so to speak. Mesmer with his ‘scientific’ animal magnetism could perform the same miracles as Gassner and so quickly obtained favour. This is often regarded as the foundation of modern hypnotherapy. Mesmer gave recognition to Gassner, but suggested that he was in fact engaging in animal magnetism without realising it. For Ellenberger (1994), this is the turning point from exorcism to dynamic psychotherapy pointing out that for some Mesmer has the same status as Columbus in terms of discovering new worlds.

Of course to date we have been talking about psychotherapy and the general consensus is that this is different from counselling as the therapeutic intervention usually takes longer to achieve benefits, the therapist takes longer to qualify and is qualified to at least master’s degree level and has significant amounts of personal therapy and supervision. Also therapy is believed to traditionally deal with more deep-seated psychodynamic issues that have built up and have been sustained over a period of time. So the more we move towards the coaching end of the scale and encounter counselling in the middle of the scale the more difficult it is to make a qualitative difference between coaching and counselling (Figure 1.1). Both counselling and coaching in contrast with psychotherapy are seen as brief interventions that deal more with problem solving, challenging limiting beliefs, support, tasking and role playing different ways of using language and behaviour in relating to others and discovering what difference that makes.

We probably do not need to go back to the 4,000 BC to discover the origins of counselling, because if we accept the brief and general differentiation between psychotherapy and counselling in the previous paragraph we can see in quite modern times the word counsellor is used interchangeably with guidance as in the case of Frank Parsons (1909), or helping as in the case of Gerard Egan (2010). Also it is quite in character to have financial or career counsellors. My own discipline of work psychology, which can trace its roots back to the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, thrived and developed rapidly during the First World War. In the USA, psychologists were asked to develop programmes for psychological evaluation of recruits as well as a means for selecting personnel for specific jobs within the military. As can be appreciated a lot of what could be regarded as counselling, guidance or helping was needed in assisting a very ‘normal’ population of people.

Figure 1.1 The psychotherapy coaching continuum.

In psychology Carl Rogers with his humanistic approach is regarded as the grandfather of counselling; however, Nelson-Jones in Basic Counselling Skills (2008) gives us six examples of three types of counselling, each with their own founders. He lists the following.

Psychodynamic school

Classical psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Analytical therapy: Carl Jung (1875–1961)

Humanistic school

Person-centred therapy: Carl Rogers (1902–1987)

Gestalt therapy: Fritz Perls (1893–1970)

Cognitive-behavioural school

Rational emotive behaviour therapy: Albert Ellis (1913–2007)

Cognitive therapy: Aaron Beck (1921–)

What is interesting in looking at the above lis...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Appendix 1
• Index