Posts Tagged ‘Roadblocks To Communication’
THE PRINCIPLES AND PROCESS OF PERSONAL COACHING
By David B. Wolf
What Actually Happens In A Life Coaching Session?
Most life coaching sessions, in my experience, begin with the client expressing a life area on which they want to focus. The life coach then enters the client’s world and demonstrates understanding of the client’s perspectives, emotions, and inner conversation. Such a climate of empathy becomes the driving force for transformation and self-realization for the client, and often for the coach as well.
Self-Introspection
In this safe environment the client gets to courageously introspect, lifting the lid to parts of the self that have until that point been less than conscious. With this raised awareness, and the supportively challenging presence of the life coach, the client encounters and addresses issues, fears, inspirations, patterns and connections, and maybe self-deceptions and unacknowledged strengths. Countless times we have witnessed this process lead to clarity about identity and life purpose, as well as resolve to boldly stretch limits and move forward to create a life consistent with one’s highest vision.
Focus On Experience
Melissa opened one life coaching session stating that she wanted to examine a specific relationship in her life, and asking the life coach for feedback on how I perceive her in connection with interpersonal relations. I shared my perceptions with her, and then endeavored to understand Melissa’s situation. In this attempt my listening focused not so much on the story or external details, but rather on Melissa’s experience and feelings, and on the meaning that Melissa gave this experience. My hope and intention was that Melissa felt safe, respected and secure, to honestly explore.
Self-Reflection Leading To Insights
This self-reflection resulted in fresh insights for Melissa. These realizations were painful, though also exhilarating for her to experience. She saw that in this particular relationship she did use principles and practices, such as win/win, full personal accountability, and avoidance of common roadblocks to communication consistent with highly effective interpersonal relations, and that the other person, most of the time, didn’t evince or employ such principles. Further, Melissa realized that her frustration, hurt and resentment stemmed from disappointment that this other person was not more evolved in his way of interacting with her.
With deeper consideration Melissa recognized that accompanying these feelings of hurt and disappointment were feelings of superiority. She got to feel right, better than the other person. Subtly, Melissa was playing the same right/wrong game for which she severely judged the other person. This was quite impactful for Melissa to acknowledge, and it led to contemplation and conversation about her insecurities that fueled her need to feel superior.
Commitments
This session closed with the client committing to herself and the life coach to complete a specific exercise that would facilitate her to concretely identify self-defeating beliefs surrounding the patterns she noticed during the session, and to doing focused journaling within a day after her contacts with this other person. Every productive life coaching session contains cultivation of self-awareness, and most effective sessions also include a specific plan of action.
Where Could Life Coaching Be Beneficial?
The above example relates to life coaching around relationships. The same principles and process are naturally applied to other areas of focus, including financial management, health, and spiritual practice. I encourage you to bring to mind an issue or challenge in your life that is emotionally-charged. Consider what it would look and feel like for you to parallel Melissa’s process, of taking inventory of what’s happening in an honest yet compassionate spirit. The next step includes peeling off the layers and seeing what’s beneath, and then playfully challenging yourself with a detailed action plan. In this process, you can also reflect on where in this self-coaching process your blind spots might be, and where a transformative coach, outside yourself, might be beneficial.
MORE ON EMPATHY
Excerpt From Relationships That Work: The Power Of Conscious Living
- By David B. Wolf
Note that showing understanding is not just a matter of finding words to mechanically describe the person’s emotion and content. It also includes matching the person’s energy. When a friend is feeling sad and down, a reflective statement from my side in an excited voice won’t yield understanding, although what I said was accurate. Empathy is more likely to be conveyed if our words are accompanied by an energy that matches the feeling of the situation. A discordant mentality, even if accompanied by correct reflective statements, can be a roadblock to effective communication. In this regard it is important to recognize that reflective listening is a tool that conveys the essence of empathy. Just because I make an accurate reflective statement does not necessarily mean that I am being empathetic. Conversely, it is possible to convey empathy while using a mode of communication that is on the “potential roadblock” list, although here we are focusing on techniques such as mirroring and effective attending to communicate empathy.
To experience the benefit of empathic dialogue, engage in it with some of the people in your life. Fully enter the world of the other person for at least fifteen minutes, using empathic listening to display understanding. Maintain comfortable eye contact and open-body position during the dialogue. Avoid roadblocks to communication. Simply be a mirror for the other person and notice your experience in attentively reflecting emotion and content. You can also switch roles, having the other person enter your world and mirror for you. To gain a real feel for the effect of empathic dialogue, the speaker should preferably talk about some issue that has an emotional charge for him or her. If you would like to increase the challenge, speak about an issue with emotional substance that is a source of tension between you and the other person. This process requires an ability to listen, and a commitment to understand.
By practicing dialogue in this format our communication becomes dialogical in spirit, even if we don’t adhere to a framework of structured dialogue. In genuine dialogue I allow others to complete their communication, accepting their experience as real and valid for them. In listening I am not focusing on my next point. A dialogue is not a debate. We are actually listening to each other, not merely taking turns in not listening. Especially when discussing highly charged subjects, or when it is apparent that communication has broken down, utilizing structure for empathic conversation may be particularly valuable. Apply this in your life and notice a decrease in reactivity, increased emotional safety and deeper connection.
Creating sacred space between us entails commitment to genuine dialogue. Dialogue means that I listen with a view to understand, rather than to counter or defeat. In a consciousness of dialogue, my intention in expression and hearing is not to manipulate, invalidate or prove that I am right. With true dialogue we create a sanctified environment, unadulterated by barriers to healthy communication. It is an enlightening experience. Educator Robert Hutchins comments, “Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.”Approaching relationships with an attitude of discovery and deep listening, means that diverse viewpoints enrich relations, rather than divide them.
To effectively live the principles and communication strategies described here requires that our consciousness rests in the mode of sattva—being able to observe while suspending judgment, and being compassionate toward another being. Such compassion is the essence of empathy, and a fundamental quality of a spiritual life. There is a Vedic aphorism, atmavat sarva-bhutesu, which describes the essence of spiritual compassion as “feeling the happiness and distress of others as one’s own.”
Empathy connects us with others, emerges from and is cultivated through self-realization. Renowned management consultants Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel write: “It is widely accepted that self-awareness and the ability to regulate your own emotions are fundamental prerequisites to the practice of empathy…If you can’t tune into your own emotions, it’s going to be a stretch trying to discern those of others. And if you are overcome by your own feelings, you’ll never have the mental bandwidth to listen properly.” Empathy requires a genuine interest in others, and a sincere desire to expand our perspectives and learning.
Jacuzzi For The Mind: The Sound Of Transformative Communication
I get to chant my rounds!
The morning after a 3-day transformative communication course I conducted in Brooklyn, I encountered a woman who had just completed the seminar. She was excited and had an experience she was eager to share with me. In the spiritual community where she lived she had taken a vow to chant daily a prescribed number of mantras on beads. She exclaimed, “This morning I realized that I don’t have to chant my rounds! I don’t have to chant my rounds!” Her exhilaration filled the air with a sense of liberation. Seeing me puzzled as to why she was happy to give up her vow, she went on, “I get to chant my rounds! I get to chant my rounds!” She then explained how that morning she had begun to finger her beads and chant a few mantras. For the first time in her decades of experience tears flowed from her eyes while chanting. For the first time her attitude wasn’t “I have to chant my rounds.”
Authentic mantra chanting and high-level communication practices are two complementary vehicles through which we can utilize sound vibration to realize our spiritual identity and connect with the innermost stratum of the living soul.
A genuine mantra is a potent transformational vibration. “Mantra” means spiritual sound vibration that extricates the mind from material entanglement. Jill Bormann has conducted research on mantra meditation with various populations including military veterans. She describes meditative time with a mantra as a “Jacuzzi for the mind. It’s something you can use to focus and calm yourself at a moment’s notice, …it doesn’t require money, and it’s non-toxic… a person just needs to make it a part of their lives.” My personal favorite mantra for meditation is one of India’s most beloved, the Maha Mantra. Studies have shown that this 16-word mantra reduces stress and depression and increases qualities such as balance, fulfillment, and sense of life purpose.
In our programs we focus on transformation through communication. Awareness of how we use sound to influence our consciousness and environment is a powerful approach to personal and interpersonal development. In the beginning was the word. Just as the divine creates with sound, we can productively examine what we generate in our life with our sounds.
For example, to what extent do we build roadblocks to effective communication through responses that convey messages of invalidation, disempowerment, or self-absorption? This might take the form of unnecessarily advising or warning, shallow praise, avoidance of vital issues, or prematurely giving solutions. Effective listening is essential for the creation of the sacred space that is crucial for life-enriching relationships. Such listening focuses on what the other person is saying- not what we’re saying to ourselves about what the other is saying. In our expression we can consider the degree to which we communicate from fear, neediness, and insecurity, as opposed to purpose, joy and inspiration. Through three days of intense immersion in transformative communication the mantra yogini shifted her consciousness from “I have to…”- burdensome, obligatory, and mechanical- to “I get to…”- vibrant, inspired, and fresh.
