One of the most read guest posts from last year was by successful coach Chris Morris (You can read his first guest post here )

This week Chris returns with a post sharing more valuable thoughts from his coaching experience and approach.

Defence is the first act of war

By Chris Morris

When I trained to be a coach, my first few teachers hammered home the idea that we weren’t supposed to offer our own opinions or advice; we were only supposed to be like robots, basically, using a toolset to tweak the client’s configuration until they began operating at their peak performance. At that point we’d then recommend a maintenance regime, install anti-virus, metabolism boosts and so on. Does that evocation of coaching feel cold and robotic to you? It felt cold and robotic to me. But when I looked around the training room I noticed a lot of enthusiastic nodding. Was it possible that a room of thoughtful people had all aligned on this issue? From my position, all I’d seen was the trainers building a dodgy link between “imposing your map of the world onto others” and “thinking you’re better than others”, and then associating feelings of arrogance, pomposity, vanity with “thinking you’re better than others”. It was hypno-speak at its sloppiest. But many people from that training didn’t question it – they’d moved away from “imposing your map of the world onto others” and nodded forward into a vacuum.

I was reflecting on this today and a weird thought smacked me on the nose. Not only do I always impose my map on my clients’ – that’s pretty much all I do. So here I am writing something that’s supposed to be for the benefit of coaches and I realise I need a nice picture to distract you.

This is my dog, Barnaby. He’s wonderfully sprightly for an eleven-year-old of his breed – the only sign of age we’ve noticed is his (partial) deafness.

As with most deaf creatures, Barnaby (Dr Barn to his friends) can still hear some things. It affects us differently when our keys jingle or when a deep baseline thumps out a repetitive rhythm. We have a range of sounds we can hear and a wider range that affects us in other ways, and my sense is we sometimes forget to keep extending those ranges through choice. We express ourselves through sound. Persona means through sound and I think most of us filter our sense of self through the experiences we have with sound, both verbally and non-verbally, consciously and unconsciously.

It’s been interesting to see how friends and family have responded to Dr Barn’s deafly behaviour – many accusing him of “selective deafness”. “Oh, he still hears when you’re putting his food out” jokes Marjorie, (metal food bowl = clink clink, high pitch). “He doesn’t hear me when I tell him to move out the way”, booms Michael (deeeep resonant voice). “I had an aunt like that once”, said my cousin. “She had everyone running around after her.”

It seems a wonderfully human idea to model a dog as if it’s a human. We watch someone and ask ourselves “what would have to be true for me to behave like that?”. Since most of us aren’t keen on changing, everyone else in the world immediately starts at a disadvantage. Then we bewilder ourselves by applying lightning-fast logical thinking to fleeting sensory experiences, and we boil it up by somehow believing our own thoughts are real while other people’s aren’t so much. “We have made a god that likes to be worshipped on a Sunday and they’ve made one that likes it on Tuesdays. Should we convert them or kill them?”

“Depends. What type of hat do they wear while they pray?”

My intention isn’t to impose my map onto my client’s world but instead to super-impose my map over their map, reflecting a way of being in their map that they experience as different.

That makes one big assumption, and it’s also why I love my job. Experiencing my world through a map that largely reflects a map of another map – and holding that at the level of deep assumptions, 4th and 5th order presuppositions, verbally and non-verbally, because that’s the only way to make it instantly accessible as unconscious competence – is the most fun I’ve had with my clothes on. Holding it for an hour or more is an amazing feeling. So I know it sounds wacky to many people but I love that experience of seeing someone start to see what they’ve always seen but in a new way, and that’s why I love transformative coaching. The only way I know to be positively involved in that dynamic is to be cleanly in my own space of undefended being – no role, no mask – and I think that’s a wonderful pre-condition of being a good transformative coach. We have to be our own best clients. We have to love ourselves first. And what a wonderful job it is when our job is to be truly, wonderfully, authentically ourselves, whatever context or map we find ourselves experiencing.

About the Author/Further Resources

Chris Morris is a coach, psychotherapist and the creator of a process called Be Brighter.