My Integral Coaching for Whom?

While engaging in Integral Coaching, I just came to think: “For whom do I provide this coaching?” Needless to say, I do it for my clients. That’s right, but my coaching offers tremendous benefits for my growth and development as a human being (I don’t like the word “benefit,” but I can’t find a more appropriate word…perhaps, welfare, well-being…I don’t know.). It is true that I “give” something to my clients as a coach, but at the same time, I obviously “take” or “learn” something important from my wonderful clients.

My coaching is full of agony and joy. In each coaching session, epitome of our life manifest in that moment. I suppose so. I live my life, but I sometimes seem to live others’ life…For whom does my coaching exist in this real world? For me? For my clients? For the universe?

“The Developing Mind”: The Locus of Our Emotion in Our Brain

In this book, the author articulates our emotions like this: “[E]motion is at the core of internal and interpersonal processes that create our subjective experience of the self” (p. 155). To tell you the truth, I have one coaching client right now, who wants to control emotions, so I’ve kept my antenna fully spread out toward “human emotions (trigger, process, mechanism, types of emotions, etc.).” 

This is my assumption, but there seems to be two types of emotions within us: The first is personal emotions, and the second is interpersonal emotions. The former emotions are for example joy, sadness, happiness, and so on. These emotions can be happened without others. On the other hand, the latter emotions are for instance anger, empathy, jealousy, love, and so forth. Generally speaking, these emotions arise from the relationship with others (in a word, these emotions are like psychological projections). Then I came up with the following questions. “Do both types of emotions happen in the same process in our brain? Do they activate the same parts in our brain? Why do we have different types of emotions?; some of them are not toward others, but some of them are toward others.” I’m still searching and thinking about this topic.   

Reference

The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience

Philosophy in the Flesh [The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought]: Our Body and Conceptual Systems

This book is really insightful, but I had some questions in this book. Below is one of my questions about the author's explanation between our body and conceptual systems.

I found an interesting sentence in this book: “Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies” (p. 111). In this book, the author emphasizes the importance of the “body” in our conceptual systems. Regarding this point, the author articulates how our body works for our conceptual systems in the following way. 

Our rational mind (reason) arises from the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we live in. This implies that reason doesn’t transcend our body. Of course, this is a part of his explanations, but if the author’s above explanation is true, our conceptual systems seem to be emanated from our body, and the meaning is embedded in our bodies at first glance. However, I don’t still make sense of the commonalities of these three factors: body, brain, and environment. What are the commonalities between them? Also, the author tries to explain our subjective experience (mind or reason) from objective things (body, brain, and environment), but I suppose this approach seems a categorical mistake between UL and UR quadrant.

The Darts We Throw Ourselves: Reaction Mechanism

In this chapter, the author explains that an inevitable physical or mental discomfort (e.g. when you hit your foot on the corner of a door, you feel a pain and unpleasant.) is the “first dart.” In addition to the first dart, we always add some reactions to the first dart. These reactions are called “second darts.” In my experience, I sometimes added negative emotions or feelings to the first dart, but I think that I can manage the second dart comparatively well. However, I know there are a lot of people who respond negatively to the first dart. So, I was thinking what I could offer a good solution or advice to them: “If my client suffers from the negative second dart, how can I help him or her?” The solution with which I came up is to change his or her response or interpretation to the first dart. I think this is the popular way in terms of cognitive or behavioral therapy, but I suppose that it is a little bit a “quick-fix” solution. In my view, unless we change the response-generating mechanism, we continue to suffer from the second darts forever. I have still some questions about this mechanism. Why do we tend to add suffering to the first dart? Where does the second dart come from in our brain? How do we prevent the second dart from showing up?

Reference

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Integral Coaching: The Importance of “Looking As” the Client

It is often said that to Look As a client is more challenging than Look At the client, but I really feel so through my coaching journey. Both of them require a different kind of ability of a coach.  In a word, the ability to Look At the client calls for a high cognitive development to see the client from multi-perspectives. On the other hand, the ability to Look As the client entails not only cognitive development but also various lines’ development (emotional, somatic, interpersonal, spiritual, moral, etc.). That’s why I need to make strenuous efforts to develop whole capacities as a coach, as a human through integral life practices. 

My Integral Coaching and the Wisdom of Behaviorism

              I believe that the insights of the psychotherapeutic schools associated with behaviorism might be helpful for my coaching clients. Now, I engage in Integral Coaching activity, which is based on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and Robert Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory. In each coaching case, I always need to assess client’s behavioral aspects. For example, in every coaching session, I make sure that I ask my clients about questions related to individual objective things (e.g., action, respond, behavior, energy flow, etc.). Furthermore, I pay attention to my behavior during coaching session, for instance, my posture, gesture, facial expression, energy state, and breathing rhythm.  

In addition to the assessment, I sometimes offer some developmental exercises for my clients to create a new way of being, considering my client’s past behavioral patterns. When I think about the best exercise for my clients, I’d like to refer to psychotherapeutic techniques more. Especially, I think that Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy will be helpful to modify clients’ behavioral patterns, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is also useful to make clients’ life rich and meaningful. In a word, the wisdom of behaviorism is indispensable in my coaching in order to assess and transform my clients.   

Subjectivity and Objectivity

At first, when I was thinking of behaviorism, I felt as if I had been a “machine” and all my acts, behaviors, and movements had been predetermined by outside force. Literally, I was not a human being but a machine without mind during the imagination. However, my perception came to change gradually. I was able to appreciate the both subjective and objective aspects in reality, though behaviorism is apt to emphasize objectivity in human beings. In other words, by virtue of the wisdom of behaviorism, I came to perceive vividly both subjective and objective realms in this world.