It is not coaching.

And it is definitely not Solution-Focused.

However, the concept of parental guidance put forward by psychologist George W. Holden in his research article Childrearing and Developmental Trajectories: Positive Pathways, Off-ramps, and Dynamic Processes does remind me of coaching.

From Physorg.com:

In his conceptual framework, Holden hypothesizes that parents guide their children’s development in four complex and dynamic ways:

• Parents initiate trajectories, sometimes trying to steer their child in a preferred developmental path based on either the parents’ preferences or their observations of the child’s characteristics and abilities, such as enrolling their child in a class, exposing them to people and places, or taking a child to practices or lessons;

• Parents also sustain their child’s progress along trajectories with encouragement and praise, by providing material assistance such as books, equipment or tutoring, and by allocating time to practice or participate in certain activities;

• Parents mediate trajectories, which influences how their child perceives and understands a trajectory, and help their child steer clear of negative trajectories by preparing the child to deal with potential problems;

• Finally, parents react to child-initiated trajectories.

Tags: coaching, George W. Holden, guidance, parenting

Since I am taking a short vacation, I will not be posting again in 2 weeks (my usual interval between posts) but in 4 weeks. To compensate for it, here is an extra-long post. Enjoy!

I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.
Continue reading…

Tags: book review, brief coaching, coaching, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Drive, epistemology, marketing, motivation, psychological bias, science, The Upside of Irrationality, training

I have always been a great fan of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the psychology of optimal performance.
His idea of flow has resonated with me ever since.

In my life I had the good luck of experiencing flow states in different occasions.
When you are “in the flow” everything disappears – including the self.
You are totally absorbed in the activity, passionately engaged in what you are doing.
Time disappears. Joy and doing are all there is.
One word follows another, one movement follows another, in an effortless flow of action and creation.
A frictionless world.

I experienced flow in writing; I experienced flow in running, sometimes with mystical over-tones; I even experienced flow while leading workshops.

But I have always wondered which form flow would take in coaching.
Not anymore.
I experienced it.

Flow in coaching is about tuning in to rhythm of the interaction rather than on the content of the conversation.

Or, as my friend Svea Van Der Hoorn put it recently during a workshop: in the discipline lies the magic.

Just like a tango dancer who is so connected with his partner and so engaged in the dance that he knows exactly when and how to lead his partner into the next step – in the same way a Solution-Focused Coach in a state of flow knows exactly when and how to lead the client into the next phase of the coaching conversation.

Flow in coaching is definitely linked with the concept of not knowing –  having no specific expertise in the clients’ field of work can be a tremendous asset.
The details of the problem the client is experiencing is noise – the signal is that little shift in the coachee’s tone of voice which tells you the client feels he or she has been heard and therefore we can move on to negotiating goals; the subtle smile which tells the coach that the coachee has found something that worked in the past and so we can start asking amplifying questions around that exception; the eyes of the coachee staring in the distance and contemplating the landscape of the Miracle – let’s leave the client there for a while; the signal is noticing the client shifting from “problem language” to “solution language”; the signal is that little key word buried there in that long sentence or that sparkling moment in that long litany of complaints.

Content changes but the process does not.

There is an opening, there is a middle and there is an end – there might be endless variations, thousands of different words and meanings, but the grammar of a Solution-Focused coaching session stays the same.

I am indebted to Coert Visser for having me reflect some more about the importance of not-knowing.

Tags: coaching, content, Flow, not-knowing, process, Solution Focused

The recent publication of the book “What Intelligence Tests Miss: the Psychology of Rational Thought” by Keith E. Stanovich had the effect of renewing interest in the concept of IQ – for example, see the New Scientist article Clever Fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean your’re smart or Coert Visser’s interesting summary of the issue.

This gives me the opportunity to share some thoughts about another “controversy” in Psychology, namely the question about the relevance of IQ and intelligence testing. I personally think it is a “nontroversy” and, like the question about the importance of inner motivation vs. external rewards, the answer is: it depends. It depends on the context, on why the question is asked, and on why we are considering testing for IQ.

I will try to clarify my thinking by using a metaphor suggested by David Perkins, introduced in the New Scientist article mentioned above as someone “who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachussets”: “A high IQ is like height in a basketball player”.

Exactly. That implies the following:

- intelligence, as measured by Intelligence tests, is something real, just like the height of a person is real. Here i quote from the excellent book “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Conceptions about Human Behavior“, p.84: “although far from perfect measures, IQ tests yields scores that are among the most valid and cost-effective predictors of academic achievement and job performance across just about every occupation studied – factory worker, waiter, secretary, police officer, electrician and so on and on”. Nothing controversial here, I think – if your kid is very tall and she asks for your advice on which sport to practice,  it makes sense for you to encourage her to try out basketball. Of course that does not imply that all tall people do well in basketball – there are excellent basketball players that do extremely well, thanks to a lot of passion, dedication and practice, despite being not that tall.
- as Steven Pinker recently pointed out, when people are assessed using a standardized test, the goal is not clairvoyance but cost-effectiveness. If I am with a group of new friends at a City Park on a Sunday, we decide to play basketball, I am chosen as team leader and I have to select the members of my team, in the absence of other information I will pick the taller guys. Of course I might be wrong and not know that shorty over there is a former college basketball star, but not having the luxury and the time of asking each and everyone to demonstrate their skills on the court, my choice of going for the taller guys is reasonable & cost-effective.
- of course a player’s fixed height does not imply that he does not need training. Not because he would grow taller, but because height is only part of the story: a player needs to practice endlessly, learn the basics, perfect his skills, learn how to read the game, learn how to read opponents, learn different game plans, learn how to decide on the spot; he needs to keep in shape and train his body to the max. No one in his right mind would suggest that because height is an important predictor of basketball success, and Mr X is very tall, then Mr X does not need to practice, to train, to improve on his game – he can just sit on a couch all day long watching TV. The same goes with IQ – yes it is there, yes it is pretty much stable, but there is a WHOLE LOT we can do to improve how we use our intelligence: learn decision-making skills, learn how to overcome our biases, learn problem-solving skills (or solution-focused skills!!), learn critical thinking, and so on and so forth. And that is what Stanovich’s book highlights.

Which reminds me that this blog is actually a website where I am also supposed to pitch my services: no matter what your intelligence “height” is, a coach can help you reach new “heights” in life!! :)

Update on the 24th of November: you can find a very interesting interview of Keith Stanovich by Coert Visser here.

Tags: coaching, controversy, intelligence, IQ, nontroversy, Pinker, what intelligence tests miss

SF therapy and coaching as I understand it is much closer to the business culture than to the lovebombing, positive thinking culture. When SF coaches give “compliments” at the end of a session, they are not complimenting anything that comes to mind. They don’t generally appreciate clients in an overdone way – they comment on what they think will increase their clients confidence that they will reach their goals. It is not even about what the coach believes: it is about stating what the client said about him- or herself in his or her own words. – Kirsten Dierolf

A while ago, a client, in response to my question: “what is better, now?“, looked at me knowingly and said: “oh, the glass half full as opposed to the glass half empy, uh?”

I knew right there and then that somewhere along the line I made a mistake.

Solution-Focused coaching is not about “being positive”.
Solution-Focused is not about denying the reality of tough situations.

Solution-Focused coaching is about noticing what works – in a fact-finding manner.
It is about helping clients observe what they are doing: what does not work (and the client is very aware of that), and what does work (here the client might need a little help: due to the Negativity Bias we are built to pay more attention to the negative – but the point is that we, as SF practitioners, do not add anything!)

It is about exploring the resources clients bring to the coaching session – without any judgement, positive or negative. We are just “resource detectives” – and because we are professional “resource detectives”, we are not planting any evidence!

Solution-Focused coaching is not about wishful thinking – hoping a problem will just go away by not focusing on it (being “solution-focused” does not mean being “problem-phobic“!).
Solution-Focused coaching is not about putting a positive spin on problems: actually, it is about putting no spin at all.

Solution-Focused coaching is about widening clients’ perspectives, so they can escape the narrow view that dealing with a problem usually entails (see Carey Glass). It is a method of helping people get unstuck, as Kirsten Dirolf writes. We can see it as a way to correct the sample bias by inviting clients to include in their reasoning more “data points” (the desired future, useful exceptions, third-party points of view…). But again, we are not interpreting data points and finding trends; and we are definitely not making up data points!

Clients often get in a positive emotional state during a SF coaching conversation – as a consequence of their own discoveries, hopefully prompted by our questions. Not because we tell them so. But because they become more realistic, because they remember what works (and as Wittgenstein said: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice somethiing – because it is always before one’s eyes). Philosophical Investigations, #129.)

It is an indirect effect of our work (see Coert Visser on the effectiveness of creating positive expectations indirectly, i.e. priming clients to notice what is working even after the session is done). It is a consequence of a sounder appraisal of the situation on the part of the client, not a distortion due to wearing rosy glasses handed out by the practitioner.

Tags: being positive, coaching, SF

Yet another great podcast from RadioLab that got me thinking.
In an interview with the famous psychologist Walter Mischel, the Marshmallow experiment is re-enacted.

In this well-known experiment, 4 year-old children were left alone in a room, sitting in front of a single marshmallow prominently displayed on a table (in other variations, Oreo cookies were used). They were told that if they could wait and not eat the marshmallow until the experimenter returned, they would get two marshmallows.

The goal of Mischel was simple: to demonstrate that 4-year olds can have self-control. That was proven. But the real surprise came further down the road. A correlation was found between the number of seconds a child can delay gratification as a 4-year-old and how they are doing later on in life. For example, years later, kids who as children waited the longest (20 minutes, the duration of the test) and therefore got the second marshmallow scored on average 210 points more on the SAT test than those kids who waited for just one minute before gobbling the marshmallow and therefore did not get the second marshmallow. The results were significant. And as these 250 kids became adults, the monitoring continued; even today, more data gathering continues. The differences between those who as children could delay gratification and those who could not are evident and impact all areas of life, from education level to Body Mass Index.

Here is the interesting twist.
If you see clips of children sitting alone in front of the treat, trying to resist the urge to eat it, you can see that they are all in agony – there is no difference here between children that can delay gratification and those who cannot. In other words, the treat is equally tempting to all–if some children can resist, it is not because they are any less attracted to the treat.

What you see is that the children who were successful just found better strategies (tricks) to distract themselves: shushing oneself, kicking the table, singing songs, counting, turning the chair and facing the wall, pretending the marshmallow was a cloud or a UFO and playing with it. They were able to turn a “hot stimulus” in a “cold stimulus”. The children who succeeded had a better bag of tricks.

And here is the best part: in a follow up experiment, Mischel tested another group of children. He then taught a trick to the children who were less successful in this task: he instructed them to put a frame around the cookie and pretend that what they were seeing was just a picture (a technique very similar to the NLP techniques I teach in my stress management workshops). It worked! All of a sudden, these children were able to delay gratification!!

And that is what happens in life, too.
My clients find themselves stuck, because they are facing a problem for which they have not yet developed a trick; or maybe they have, and they forgot; or maybe it is a situation that requires a little fine tuning of tricks they already have.
So they go for the quick solution: they eat the marshmallow–they do what they can.
Consequences will follow.

My job as a coach, then, is to help clients develop their tricks to solve their problems–
not teaching other people’s tricks, not teaching theories about human behaviors, not giving advice.
Each trick is unique, i.e., works well for a specific individual in a specific situation.
That is why I love coaching: I love to see the tricks my clients come up with!

How do I help clients come up with new tricks?
By asking solution-focused questions!
Is your preferred future to have the 2 marshmallows? What would be different from you? Have you ever been in a similar situation? How did you deal with that? Imagine a miracle happens and you complete the task successfully, getting you the second marshmallow. How would you know a miracle happened, how would you know that this time you will be successful? What’s the first little sign? What else is different? What are you doing differently?…

As Mischel puts it in the interview: it is highly likely to be like most things in life are turning out to be: yes the wiring makes a difference. Yes the experience makes a difference. And the wiring and the experience are interacting and changing each other.

My job as a coach is to make sure that my clients have the experience that makes a difference!

To listen to the whole podcast go here.
For a great and simple summary of ideas on how experience plays a role in the development of intelligence, even in adulthood, watch this video by Coert Visser.

Tags: children, coaching, development, marshmallows, Mischel, RadioLab, strategies, tricks