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?
