photo credit: sbblackley

The title for today’s post honors the recent death of Richard Wright, founding member of the legendary rock band Pink Floyd. In my work with clients, we often focus on creating the ‘container’ in which they can feel safe enough to openly and honestly engage in the stories they’ve long told themselves. It is from this place that they can be courageous enough to explore what else is possible. It is as if they are asked to make new choices about whether they want to add the next ‘brick’ (a story about an experience) to an existing wall or to a new path (the larger narratives we tell and live).

Are you a security guard or a seeker?

One is about security and one is about seeking. While both are important at the right time in coaching and in life, the former is often informed by our fears while the latter is generally informed by our hopes. As Ira Chernus recently wrote, “Whenever people shelter behind walls for protection, they reinforce the fears that sent them behind those walls in the first place.” While the recent economic events in the U.S. have caused many people, myself included, to pay a new kind of attention to issues of real security, I can’t help but see a need to retain our commitment to seek new paths from this place we are in.

Which story are you going to reinforce?

Narrative coaches help their clients to increase their ability to notice the “brick” in their hand and be mindful and courageous about the chocies they make in the moment as to which story they are going to reinforce. This image fits well with what we know neurologically in terms of how habits are formed through the reinforcement of certain neural constellations.

There are certainly times when we all need a healthy and reassuring dose of stability and security, particularly in times of duress and change. However, there is a great need in these times of extraordinary flux to equip clients to fully step onto the pathes in front of them—even those that are not fully formed yet.

Where are you putting your “bricks” today as you think about your most significant experiences and contacts? Are you adding to the walls around yourself and/or others — or are you using them to extend the paths toward what is possible?

My wife recently returned from a fascinating workshop with Brad Keeney, psychologist and expert on traditional healing. Take a look at this clip from a Canadian documentary as it shows Brad’s work with what he calls “shaking medicine”. There seems to me to be a growing confluence of what we are learning from the neurosciences and what many have known for centuries about the true nature of healing. If this is so, what does this mean for coaching?

Are there ways in which coaching, when its based in assumptions about linearity, causality, and rationality, misses out on some of the processes by which people actually develop? In my work with people’s stories in coaching and in teaching coaching skills, I increasingly see the ways in which development is nonlinear, noncausal, and nonrational. As I have deepened my explicit and tacit knowledge of the way stories play out in coaching, I find myself being more compassionate and courageous in working with a person’s narrative material.

In doing so, I marvel at the mystery of human nature and growth based in millennia of genetic programming and embeddedness in natural systems. As a result, I wonder sometimes if those of us (at least in the West) over-emphasize the cognitive and linguistic domains in working with our clients. It is as if we carry a belief that higher order brain functions will be able to triumph over ancient patterns if only we work hard enough. While we certainly have sufficient anecdotal experience of this in our own lives, I wonder sometimes what we are missing as coaches by not working with these ancient patterns—instead of against them. Our stories are not just in our head.

It is as if coaches become split between the face we wear in the daytime to fit into an evidence-based, market-driven world and the face we wear in nighttime to engage with other worlds we believe in our heart may actually be closer to the truth of what works. As I’ve written about in recent articles, it is the path of the craftsperson, the artisan who diligently develops the science and skills of the practice while all the while dancing with his/her muse and the mysteries of the art.

Where are you stretching yourself today in terms of how you think about and practice your craft?