The Journey Inside. Veronica MunroЧитать онлайн книгу.
at the highest levels within organisations and within society – results that are sustainable and put you, and your clients, at the top of their game.
This is a pragmatic, practical book for all coaches and leaders who have an interest in how to facilitate change in their organisations: a book that provides some of the most advanced and unique coaching techniques from a select group of international executive coaches who support leaders to transform their businesses and their lives.
The transformational techniques shared here are ready to use for practising coaches, wherever you are on your journey. They are also great resources for anyone who wants to coach, lead and mentor, as part of their role within an organisation. Throughout the book we use the word ‘client’ as a way to refer to anyone you are coaching: an external client, colleague or member of staff.
Our aim as coaches is always to generate sustainable change for our clients, to enable new patterns of behaviour and thinking to become automatic, becoming a natural and integrated part of daily life. This kind of change can only happen when we go below the surface, to the deeper levels of their psyche, where the client can explore and rework their inner terrain.
You’ll discover in this book uniquely designed techniques at five different and deepening levels within the human psyche, to enable you to help your clients achieve this substantive and sustainable level of change.
The five levels we are working with in this book are:
1. The Conscious Mind
2. The Unconscious Mind
3. The Emotions
4. The Identity
5. The Soul.
INVITATION
We invite you to journey with us as we travel into, and through, the depths of those psyches we work with, and demonstrate how you can use these techniques with your clients and make a real and lasting difference to their lives.
Welcome along!
Veronica Munro
I
THE CONSCIOUS MIND
Covered in this section
We always meet a client where they are in their thinking by pacing their conscious understanding of the challenges they face and the outcomes they wish to achieve.
By conscious, we mean that part of the mind used for logic, processing, reasoning, structuring ideas, rationalisation and analysis. When we initially engage with clients, we are engaging at this conscious level. It is a starting point for all our interactions, though not the end point. Clients come to us with a problem, challenge, issue or outcome that they can consciously articulate, though they typically do not have an understanding of the unconscious drivers of these, or indeed how to resolve them.
Change typically begins with consciously thinking about new behaviours and regular practice of these resulting from the coaching.
In this section, there are three chapters that introduce you to a variety of ways to work powerfully with clients at this level and deepen their understanding and awareness of their challenges and the impact of these, so that they can create new plans of action to resolve them. As coaches, it is also true that whilst working at this conscious level, the deepening awareness and shifts in our clients start to occur at the unconscious level as well.
Chapter 1: Turn Your Challenge Inside OUT: The Physical Metaphor Technique
Veronica Munro and Richard Haggerty
This creative technique is used to enable clients to get outside of their heads, and their current thinking, where they often find themselves stuck. The technique, developed from the ancient practices of military war games, enables clients to externalise their challenges and outcomes, and experiment creatively using everyday objects to more freely discover different strategies, options and solutions.
Chapter 2: Take the Plunge and Dive Deeper using Transactional Analysis
Shirley Attenborough
Shirley takes us through the practical use of Transactional Analysis and related tools to encourage clients to consciously explore the deeper levels inside themselves and make more effective shifts in their behaviours to achieve the results they desire.
Chapter 3: The Transformational Impact of Active Listening
Colin D. Smith
Colin shares with us guiding principles in building the skills and awareness of Active Listening and where to focus our attention, so that we can build the level of relationships with clients that can lead to change beyond conscious levels of being.
CHAPTER 1
TURN YOUR CHALLENGE INSIDE OUT
The Physical Metaphor Technique
Veronica Munro and Richard Haggerty
A powerful and systematic hands-on technique for clients to take a challenge, externalise it, and develop new perspectives and strategies that allow them to notice opportunities so they can take concrete steps to move forward. This enables their conscious minds to access creative ideas that are outside their current awareness.
Covered in this chapter
• An engaging ‘hands-on’ process that is client-led
• How to use the physical environment to represent challenges and identify new strategies and actions
• The power of pre-framing to create full engagement from clients
• Dissociating from a challenge to get new viewpoints and solutions
• How to create a completely safe space for clients where there is no fear of failure
INTRODUCTION
Military war games started as games not dissimilar to chess in fifth-century Ancient Greece, and then later in Northern India. These evolved into battlefield simulations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and later into highly sophisticated military and economic war games across a range of organisations, industries and countries.
Conducting war games in the Napoleonic era, for instance, was a way of determining the best means to prevail given the known circumstances about an enemy location, and then look at possible options and strategies for fighting a battle. It introduced realism into the decision-making process so that when it was time to engage, the strategy which had the greatest chances of success had already been theoretically tried and tested, and could be implemented with confidence. The Physical Metaphor Technique (PMT) is a development of this tool in the context of coaching.
The purpose of the PMT is to facilitate a client to move from a challenge they have, through the use of this visual hands-on approach, to creating different scenarios and strategies, until they reach their outcome.
The PMT is designed to help your client identify new ideas, approaches, strategies and options to seemingly entrenched challenges. This can be achieved by using any immediate space in the environment around a client as a metaphor, and landscape, for the challenges, resources and potential solutions. In this way, it acts as a natural bridge to the client’s creative unconscious resources and solutions, and bypasses the sometimes more rigid limited thinking of the conscious mind. It is a powerful technique that assists the analytical part of the mind to work with much more freedom, whilst at the same time creating opportunities for clients to gain creative insights spontaneously from deeper levels of consciousness. This begins the journey within.
BENEFITS OF THE PHYSICAL METAPHOR TECHNIQUE IN COACHING
The PMT provides a safe space for clients to