Breakthrough Conversations for Coaches, Consultants and Leaders

Graham Lee

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430516
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psicologia
• Sous-sujet: Psicologia in industrie e organizzazioni

Conversational effectiveness is a barometer of human thriving and facilitating insightful conversations is a powerful method for accelerating psychological change and collaboration. This ground-breaking professional book provides a map of Breakthrough Conversations together with a practical toolkit for enhancing awareness, emotional resilience and creativity.

Neuroscience, mindfulness and psychological research shows that awareness is pivotal to skilful conversations. By supporting clients to observe and manage their own body-brain states during conversation, they can learn to switch on the physiological systems that support more authentic, agile, and attuned interactions. Three body-brain states, reactive, habitual and reflective – characterised as Red, Amber and Green (RAG) - are differentiated in terms of body-sensations and behaviours, and these correspond to predictable interactive patterns. Facilitated to experience more emotionally resilient conversations, clients access their natural capacities for collaboration, compassion and shared creativity. This journey, through the five stages of Breakthrough Conversations, drawing on the RAG frame and a number of other practical models, is richly illustrated with case studies from working one-to-one and with pairs.

Coming to see conversations as a dance driven by the interactions of underlying needs and emotions frees clients to make paradigm shifts in their self-awareness and interpersonal effectiveness. This book, and the approach it outlines, will be essential reading for coaches, consultants, leaders and all professionals seeking to choreograph more insightful conversations.

Chapter 1

The power of conversations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054542-1

The power of conversations is evidenced by their consequences. Great conversations lead to profound insights, deeper trust, collaboration and creative breakthroughs. Reactive conversations lead to hurt, confusion, distrust and relational breakdowns. Conversations are the medium through which we shape our lives. If we facilitate effective conversation, our approach can be pivotal to the lives of others. By evoking hope, containing fear, and deepening inquiry, we have the means for fostering paradigm shifts in how people understand themselves and their choices. By choreographing their interactions with others, we can elevate mutual understanding, open hearts and create the conditions for startling breakthroughs. In this book I share many case studies of Breakthrough Conversations: Rosa uncovering the fear beneath her controlling style, and opening the door to new innovations with her colleague Neil; Julia supporting Lucy and Amir to resolve long-held frustrations; Kulinder finding the confidence to assert himself, and leading a game-changing initiative with Mike. In these and many other examples, I show how facilitating conversations has the power to deepen awareness and bring about significant shifts in personal and interpersonal insight.

If we want to be effective facilitators of change through conversation, we need to know what we are aiming to do. I like to think of our role like that of a wilderness guide. Our goal is to take people on a journey of discovery, to traverse challenging territory, to access hitherto unrealized potential, and assist people to arrive at their destination with an enlarged view of themselves and their place in the world. In what follows I share a Map of Breakthrough Conversations, describing the key stages of exploration and challenge that we need to pass through in order to deepen awareness and realise significant change. And like the wilderness guide who not only needs a map but also a good set of equipment, I also share a toolkit of frameworks for supporting people on their sense-making journey.

The approach I share in this book is intended for those facilitating change through conversation, and so is primarily focused on the application of these ideas to supporting others. But, as Gandhi is often quoted as saying, we need to be the change we want to see in the world. The depth and richness of the conversational journey we can facilitate will be commensurate with our own willingness and experience of negotiating the complex array of conversations in our own lives. So, as you engage with these ideas, I invite you to explore them and apply them as much in your own life as in your potential use of them with others. I will begin by elaborating what I mean by Breakthrough Conversations.

Breakthrough conversations

In this book I present an approach to facilitating Breakthrough Conversations – conversations that are designed to support others to deepen their awareness, to gain insights, to strengthen their connection to others and to find creative solutions to challenges. Breakthrough Conversations enable us to shift our perspective and to see the world through new eyes. We confront a limiting mindset and step towards more enabling viewpoints; we own our vulnerabilities and foster deeper intimacy; we build on ideas with others and co-create new possibilities.

Implicit in what I have said already is the idea that we all have a view. We see the world through a particular lens, based on our blend of genetics and experience. When we examine our beliefs, say about politics or the environment, and discuss these with another, we discover areas of similarity and difference. Our implicit assumptions are brought out into the open. If we don’t become defensive, our assumptions will be available for examination, challenge, and possibly a change in view. Conversation can literally change our minds. This book is concerned with techniques for supporting others to make explicit their implicit views – to discern if their ways of thinking and relating are serving their deeper intentions, and to support them in finding ways of relating most skilfully. Breakthrough Conversations are a journey and a destination; a journey in the sense that it is through shared exploration that previously uninterrupted aspects of experience are brought into awareness – buried emotions, unacknowledged needs, limiting beliefs – and understood at a personal and interpersonal level; a destination in the sense that they yield tangible outcomes – sustainable shifts in how we relate to ourselves and others, a deepening of trust and collaboration, and practical results in terms of creative ideas and shared solutions. In Breakthrough Conversations there is a co-arising of personal and interpersonal insight, a revealing of relational dynamics, a disrupting of personal mindsets and a stretching of personal paradigms beyond self-limiting boundaries by the challenge of being relational.

We might think the task of having productive, insightful conversations to be simple. After all, it only requires people to listen to each other, to express their views openly and through discussion to find common ground. That doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? And yet if it were that easy, we would not have wars. The need for Breakthrough Conversations is evidenced by the many conversations that are either unproductive or even destructive. Although conversations are ripe with creative potential, they can also evoke hurt, pain and division. The course of our lives depends on the quality of our conversations and supporting others to have skilful conversations is a conduit for enabling them to live happier, more productive lives.

In distinguishing Breakthrough Conversations from less productive interactions, I will introduce a simple classification that I will subsequently build on throughout the rest of the book. Using the metaphor of traffic lights, conversations can be classified as RED, AMBER or GREEN (RAG), corresponding to what I describe as reactive, habitual and reflective conversations. Most of our conversations are AMBER or habitual, and some of them are RED or reactive. GREEN, or reflective conversations are the ones where potential for breakthrough is found. As we shall see later, RED, AMBER and GREEN conversations are underpinned by corresponding RED, AMBER and GREEN body-brain states and interactive behaviours, and it is by identifying and managing these states that we have the potential to cultivate GREEN states. For now, I want to be explicit about what I mean by Breakthrough Conversations by drawing out the difference between RED, AMBER and GREEN conversations.

RED conversations

RED, or reactive conversations, refer to those that are governed by emotional reactivity – emotions such as anger, fear, hurt and shame. When reactive emotions are to the fore, conversational behaviours are usually unskilful. We might become more forceful and controlling, or in contrast become more appeasing and compliant. Or we may move between these extremes depending on the context or the person; sometimes being more demanding and confronting, and sometimes being more distant and avoidant. You will readily recognise RED states in yourself when for example you feel your body tense, notice your tone of voice change, and recognise a shift in your choice of words. Similarly, with clients we can see a change perhaps in their body posture, facial expressions, gestures and language, and we may notice a tension in our own bodies in response to what we are picking up from them.

RED conversations are rarely a source of breakthrough. Instead, RED conversations tend to undermine safety and trust, increase the need for people to protect themselves and reduce the potential for awareness, insight and creativity. When clients complain about friends, partners or colleagues, they may seem possessed by their exasperation. When clients are swamped by the volume of their work, they seem caught by their stress and anxiety. When clients describe a loss, they seem to be overwhelmed by grief. These are natural emotional responses, and in working with ourselves, or clients, we need to tune into these emotions to acknowledge them and to find ways to shift or accept them. So, we are not in any sense wanting to deny or dismiss such emotions, but we need to recognise that psychological change is unlikely to occur when we or our clients are in RED states, and breakthrough is unlikely to result from RED conversations.

AMBER conversations

Our routine day-to-day conversations are usually conducted on automatic pilot. We greet others, we interact with people in shops or restaurants, we converse with colleagues and we talk with family or friends. Most of our conversational patterns are usefully habitual, enabling us to converse fluently and effectively with others without having to reflect consciously about the process of conversation. AMBER/habitual conversations result from our unconscious competence, programmes embedded into our implicit, mental operating systems, optimising our effectiveness in routine situations. However, AMBER conversations become limited when we are addressing new situations that require more reflection. Perhaps a partner is confronting us about something, or a challenge at work needs a different solution from those that have been successful in the past. Perhaps a conversational habit that was effective in prior contexts or relationships is now out-of-date and is no longer leading to positive outcomes. AMBER conversations limit the effectiveness of interactions that require a more reflective exploration, and over time, ineffective AMBER conversations can trigger emotional reactivity and RED conversations.

AMBER conversations are more difficult to recognise than RED conversations because the emotional and behavioural markers are less distinct and universal. Each person’s conversational habits are subtly different from another person’s, and for example, an abrupt style may be the result of reactivity or the result of a learned habit that is effective in many situations. But we can come to learn about habitual styles, our own and those of others, by noticing patterns of interactions that repeat over time. We can also gather feedback from colleagues or use psychometric measures of personality. We may discover that one person is habitually more friendly and warm, while another is habitually more direct and business-like. Those tendencies in either direction may be effective in some conversations, but we are also interested to notice if and when either of those habitual tendencies is less effective.

Like RED conversations, AMBER conversations are unlikely to be a source of breakthrough. Their automatic nature means they operate beneath reflective awareness and so are not accessible to the shifts in perspective and insight characteristic of breakthrough.

GREEN conversations

When we are able to pause and observe the process of conversation, we can use that awareness to inform how we then engage with others. A GREEN/reflective conversation is characterised by reflective awareness. We might experience GREEN states as a sense of ease and flow, or as a quality of presence. It is as though a part of our minds can observe our experience, without being overly identified with that experience. Being in a GREEN state does not mean that we won’t experience RED emotions or AMBER tendencies. Habit and reactivity are intrinsic and essential parts of the human experience. However, in GREEN conversations there is access to a capacity for reflective awareness, which allows RED or AMBER tendencies to be seen and identified, so that the resulting conversational behaviour can be governed by conscious choice. For example, we may notice we have been triggered, perhaps by being aware of tension in some part of the body, or by noticing our eagerness to interrupt a person who is speaking. When this experience arises in a GREEN state, we have the capacity to notice the signals indicating that we have been triggered, and so make a conscious choice to manage our emotional state before responding. We might think of the GREEN state as transcending and encompassing RED or AMBER states. By bringing the observational stance of our GREEN state to bear, we can convert a potentially RED or AMBER conversation to a GREEN conversation.

The key point to make at this stage is that GREEN conversations are the ones most likely to give rise to breakthrough. GREEN states support conscious reflection, and so underpin the attunement, listening, self-expression and mutual exploration essential to Breakthrough Conversations. With these distinctions between RED, AMBER and GREEN conversations in view, I now consider the purpose of conversations and the potential targets for breakthrough.

Breakthrough in relation to four conversational purposes

Conversations have many different purposes: some aim for practical outcomes and others for personal connection, some are superficial without obvious purpose, while some others seek much needed discoveries or solutions. In talking about the concept of breakthrough we need to understand which conversations are our potential targets. To do this I will introduce a further distinction, this time between four types of conversational purpose. Conversations can be distinguished in terms of the degree to which they are ‘results-focused’ or ‘relationship focused’. A results-focused conversation is one where the primary concern is about achieving an outcome. A relationship-focused conversation is one where the primary concern is about achieving connection. Considering if a conversation is high or low on each of these dimensions gives rise to four types of conversation (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Four Purposes of Conversation.

I have found this model to be a very useful starting place for introducing clients to a conversational approach to coaching because it is a relatively safe place to start, and because it provides a container for our initial, diagnostic inquiry. I describe the model to clients, usually showing them a version of Figure 1.1, and then ask them to identify conversations in their own lives that fit into each of the four domains. I then ask them to consider which of these interactions are most or least effective, and to consider the behaviours they use that are enabling or limiting in each of these contexts. This exploration draws out the areas, and the specific relationships, where clients are most motivated to develop their conversational effectiveness. Worksheet 1 at the end of this chapter describes this process, and the checklist below provides a basis for assessing enabling and limiting conversational behaviours (Table 1.1). I will describe each of these domains of purpose, and as you will see, argue that all of them can be considered to be a potential domain for breakthrough.

Table 1.1 Limiting and Enabling Conversational Behaviours

Limiting Behaviours	Enabling Behaviours
Not listening/monologues/telling Opting out/withdrawal Low inquiry Passivity or silence Imbalance of speaking and listening Sarcasm/humour used inappropriately Ignoring emotional agendas Approval seeking/appeasing Seeing views as right/wrong Avoiding feedback Blaming or scapegoating Attacking, threatening, shouting, accusing Cynicism/scepticism Win-lose debating Ma...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Case Studies
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The power of conversations
• 2 Developing a breakthrough body–brain
• 3 Awareness is the key to breakthrough
• 4 A Map of Breakthrough Conversations
• 5 Preparing the ground
• 6 Managing emotional states
• 7 Loosening habit and reactivity
• 8 Seeing the dance from the balcony
• 9 Harnessing Expanded Perspectives
• Index