Making the coachee happier

Helping the individual look beyond specific, immediate problems, and to focus on things they can do something about, will give the coachee a greater feeling of well-being. The more active they can be, the more likely they are to change the circumstances that reduce their sense of happiness. Spending too much time commiserating with the coachee or mentee may actually make things worse!

Help your coachee consider the following:

• How can you put your current concerns into context within the bigger picture?
• What are you doing in the rest of your life that compensates or could compensate for the problems you are experiencing in this area?
• How could you improve your physical well-being to increase your capacity to cope?
• What would be the right balance of pessimism/optimism for you at this time?
• What goals could you set that would make you feel better about yourself and your circumstances?

The thinking/feeling matrix

The matrix in Table 8.2 provides a way of structuring where the coachee and hence the conversation is positioned in terms of emotional and rational thinking.

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Table 8.2 Thinking/feeling matrix

Thinking about thinking relates to how the coachee structures information. Is there a logical, step-by-step process to move from one conclusion to the next? Woolly thinking is one of the most common issues coaches encounter in their coachees. Helping them develop more structured, disciplined approaches can be a valuable legacy of the coaching intervention.

Thinking about feeling relates to the degree of conscious awareness the coachee has about how their emotions (their values, beliefs, fears and so on) are influencing how they draw conclusions. The illusion of rationality behind decision making is just that – most decisions are made emotionally and rationalised later. Building awareness in the coachee of how this process happens for them gives them opportunities to be more critical of their thinking, leading to more effective decision making. Given time, the coach can help the coachee recognise patterns of emotional –rational interaction.

Feeling about thinking relates to the way in which emotions may block or permit us to bring issues into conscious reflection. From a psychodynamic perspective, they are exhibiting resistance. When coachees say ‘It’s too painful to think about’ or seem to be avoiding an issue, this is essentially an admission that their emotions are preventing them from making progress on it. Here, the coach can help by creating a safe space in which to begin addressing the issue. Emotional release may be an important part of this process and coaches need to be sufficiently emotionally mature in themselves to accept and work with it.

Feeling about feelings concerns the coachee’s ability to give expression to their emotions and to bring unconscious emotions to the surface, through language, posture or other means. So often, coachees attempt to avoid the expression of emotion, seeing it as a weakness. Again, the coach can create a safe space in which these barriers can be lowered. In time, the coachee may learn to become comfortable with greater emotional openness with other people as well.

Coaches need to take stock from time to time of the coachee’s mental state and how it is affecting the quality and outcomes of the learning conversation. Identifying which of the four perspectives the coachee needs help with – and which they are ready to be helped with – can result in radically different, more helpful dialogue.

Reframing

This is a standard coaching technique that (should be) included in all basic coach training. We include it for completeness. 

• Take a negative word that is inhibiting positive feeling states.
• Attach a less negative meaning to it in order to free you to alter behaviour and make it possible to bring about changes.

Coping imagery to deal with negative emotions

When a client habitually responds to a stimulus with a negative emotion, in order to change they may need to learn better coping strategies. To help them do so, the coach can focus them first on less difficult situations, gradually building their capacity and confidence to respond differently.

The coach takes the coachee through the following process:

• Ask the coachee to write out a problem list of various people, places and situations that they feel uncomfortable with or in.
• Use a 0–10 scale as a way of rating the degree of discomfort felt in each of the aspects listed (0 = no discomfort and 10 = maximum discomfort).
• Choose one aspect with a rating of no more than 5 (choosing a higher rating would be akin to attempting to tackle the most difficult situation first, and a lower rating would not be challenging enough, thus not providing enough learning).
• Ask them to close their eyes and imagine being at the beginning of the task. Use all their senses to imagine the sights, the sounds and the smells associated with the situation.
• Whilst imagining the situation, they can use a range of coping strategies such as breathing exercises and different ways they could reframe the situation.
• Visualise the situation two or three times, each time seeing them cope with the situation in a progressively more effective way.

Naming an emotion

Recent research at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere into how we perceive emotions reveals that having a name for an emotion is important in both how we experience it and how we cope with it. Academic Tiffany Watt Smith at Queen Mary University in London explains that ‘putting a name to a feeling can soothe us, bringing coherence to internal turbulence… [but may also] play an even deeper role in our emotional lives , not only helping us manage feelings, but actually bringing them into being in the first place’.

Different languages have words that describe and evoke emotions outside the normal Anglo-Saxon lexicon. Writing in New Scientist, Watts explains that German has two separate words to describe different kinds of disgust. The Pintupi of Western Australia recognise 15 types of fear, each with a different emotional and hence physiological response.  Thais have an emotion called ‘greng jai’, reluctance to accept an offer of help, because of the bother it would cause the other person.  Japanese has an emotional construct called ‘amae’, which happens when we are able to be comforted by another in a loving manner that creates no obligation to be grateful in return. The Baining tribe in Papua New Guinea feel deeply when a visitor departs – a kind of heaviness, a mixture of sorrow to see them go and relief to be able to get back to normal. The Inuit, by contrast, use the word ‘Iktsuarpok’ to describe the anticipation of an awaited visitor arriving. Our favourite is ‘rawa-dawa’, which comes from the Mundari language of the Indian subcontinent and means ‘the moment of suddenly realising you can do something reprehensible and no one is there to witness it’.

For the coach or mentor, a useful lesson from these insights is that we can better help coachees understand and manage their emotions if they have the words to access them.

When a coachee is struggling to define an emotion:

• Ask them to tell a short story about it.
• When they have done so, ask them to create a word for it.
• This becomes part of your shared vocabulary and provides a short-cut to exploring this emotion, whenever it recurs.

Working with shame

Shame is a universal experience of mentally healthy people. Defined as ‘a feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour’, shame tends to have the negative impact that it inhibits learning. Whenever people feel shame, they tend to avoid discussing it with other people and they also try not to think about what lessons they could learn, because revisiting the experience is too painful. Whenever we feel that we have let ourselves or other people down, we feel diminished.

In the context of coaching and mentoring, shame might mean that, for example:

• A mentee doesn’t tell his or her mentor about something silly that they did, for fear it will diminish the mentor’s respect for them.
• A direct report will cover up mistakes they have made, because they fear their boss will see them as incompetent.
• People avoid certain tasks or places, because they don’t want to be reminded of the embarrassment they felt on a previous occasion.

Overcoming shame requires an ‘honest conversation with oneself’.

1. Invite the coachee to picture their ideal self – the person they are, when they live up to their personal ideals and values.
2. Explain that no one is their ideal self more than part of the time.
3. Ask: ‘What would it be helpful for your ideal self to forgive you for, when you do not behave or perform at your best?’ This partial distancing of the issue makes it safer to engage with the idea of learning from the shame-inducing experience.

One of the good things about this approach is that you don’t have to identify the existence of shame in the coachee, or even assume it might be present.

Coping with blame

Coaching and mentoring conversations frequently run into the brick wall of blame, most often in one of two common forms: self-blame (assuming responsibility for one’s own or other people’s misfortunes) or other-blame (protecting one’s own self-image and reputation by blaming others). Both forms block the coachee’s ability to be authentic and to make progress.

The limited research on blame offers some insights into what happens. Politicians, it seems

are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid blame for unpopular actions rather than by seeking to claim credit for popular ones. This results from voters' ‘negativity bias’: their tendency to be more sensitive to real or potential losses than they are to gains. Incentives to avoid blame lead politicians to adopt a distinctive set of political strategies, including agenda limitation, scapegoating, ‘passing the buck’ and defection (‘jumping on the bandwagon’) that are different than those they would follow if they were primarily interested in pursuing good policy or maximizing credit-claiming opportunities.

(Weaver, 1986)

Blame arises from an instinctive need to attribute causation to a negative event – with the underlying assumption that assigning culpability will reduce our anxiety. Frequently, this means shifting causation from ourselves to another identifiable source. It is, in essence, about creating some comforting certainty amidst the discomfort of a negative event that causes strong negative emotions. (These may include disgust, fear, despair and so on.) Blame is also closely associated to the way we make moral judgements. So, for example, Victorian society created a distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, not recognising – or more accurately, not choosing to recognise – that behaviours that made people ‘undeserving’ (such as alcohol addiction or prostitution) were often caused by poverty, rather than vice versa. Culpability implies deliberate choices on the part of the person blamed (negligence being the choice to ignore something). Yet few situations are that clear cut and it is hard to distinguish between the influence of choices of individuals or groups and the systems that they are a part of.

As a coach or mentor, we can help the coachee step back from this instinctive response and take a more rational, more constructive perspective on events and causation. The clues to self-blame and other-blame are often quite obvious. For example:

• The language used – ‘I’ versus ‘they’; ‘it’s not my fault’.
• Body posture – submissive or defiant (looking down versus staring ahead).
• Extreme positions – ‘They always’, ‘I never’.
• Seeing the situation only from their own perspective.

To bring the conversation into a more rational space, from which more positive and more helpful emotions can arise, the coach or mentor can ask the coachee to consider what has happened from a systems perspective. The basic starting question is often: ‘What else is happening here that we might want to take note of?’ The antidote to blame is curiosity.

Exploring the system can be undertaken in a variety of ways, but one of the simplest involves:

• Defining who and what is involved. The coachee may perceive only themselves and the immediate protagonists, but a systems perspective identifies other players, who may exert an influence on how each party behaves. Sometimes the players are not people at all, but cultures and processes.
• Exploring the assumptions, expectations and aspirations of each of the players – where they align, clash and are tangential.
• What happens within this system that made the negative event more or less likely to occur?
• Based on this understanding, to what extent was the negative event an outcome of an action (or inaction) by one party, or an outcome of the system?
• How does this change our perception of what happened and/or where blame lies?
• What happens if we replace the desire to assign blame with the desire to learn?
• What responsibilities would it be helpful for you and other parties in the system to assume, to prevent future negative events?
• Can you now let go of the need to blame?

Most people, even those who are naturally more judgemental than others, can emerge from this process with a clearer sense of their personal responsibilities and with greatly reduced self-defensiveness.