Susan Wright

Susan Wright

Integrating Mind/Heart/Body/Spirit

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By Carol MacKinnon, TCP Associate

I’d like to talk about a fundamental form of integration – a quaternity or four-part harmony, one that is essential for Leader Coaches to integrate in coaching, in leading, in living. That is the quaternity of Mind, Heart, Body and Spirit. I bought a little bracelet in Lima, a simple string on which were four little wooden beads on each side of a carved X and I’ve worn it on my right wrist to remind myself of the importance of this quaternity in my coaching and living.
 
How does the integration of this quaternity express itself in our Leader Coaching? Let’s look at how an increased awareness of and facility in harmonizing these four elements can influence our coaching. And as we do so, let’s remember that this quaternity is at play for both the Leader Coach and the coachee, simultaneously and diversely, in any coaching conversation and in the ongoing coaching relationship. It’s at play in all of us, all the time, though we are often not completely present to that reality.
 
MIND

Perhaps the most commonly understood and most frequently accessed aspect of the quaternity is the mind. We use language which reflects our mental models to describe where we are now, where we’d like to be, what might be getting in our way and causing our resistance. Our minds have frequently been the key driver in our success in the early years of our career as we’ve developed our technical competencies. Most leaders are highly skilled in problem solving, priority setting, process planning, and have more than enough intellectual capacity for the job.[i] There comes a time in your development as a leader, however, where the Mind alone is not enough. We realize we are not accessing all of who we are and could be, in our coaching conversations. So what else do we include?
 
HEART

In training Leader Coaches, we often find some degree of discomfort with including a second aspect of the quaternity, the Heart, the emotional centre, the place of feelings. Some would claim that feelings have no role in the workplace or that true leaders needs to harness or ignore their feelings in service of personal and organizational goals. We know now about the harmonizing power of the Heart, the capacity of the heart to hold paradox, ambiguity, and the very things that seem to overwhelm and paralyze us when we try to grow and learn in the Mind alone. As we reference in our book, Leadership Alchemy: The Magic of the Leader Coach[ii], Cynthia Bourgeault reminds us: “when properly attuned, the emotional center’s most striking capacity, lacking in the mind alone, is the ability to comprehend the language of paradox.  Logical inconsistencies which the mind must reduce into a simple ‘either/or’ can be held by the heart in ‘both/and’ – and more importantly – felt that way, without the need to resolve, to close down, or protect oneself from the pain that ambiguity always brings.[iii]

John Kotter’s research into organizational change reflects the same Heart perspective: he found after studying hundreds of cases of organizational change, “people change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.[iv]
Thus it is essential that Leader Coaches master their own emotional language to be in best service to their clients and colleagues in helping them grapple with the intensely complex changes that are continually required of all of us. We might have been encouraged to believe that we should leave our emotions “at the door” when we come to work but we know in fact that’s impossible, and trying to pretend none of us has emotions will only make them more difficult to work with and potentially distracting and possibly even destructive. Getting comfortable with the truth of our feelings, being able to access them and name or identify them, may be the first step in our personal change process. If you or your coachee is having trouble identifying what feeling is present, remember the simple list: at its most basic, a feeling is likely one of ‘sad, mad, glad, or scared’.  And that when we find ourselves saying “I feel that –” we know we’ve actually moved out of our heart and back into our minds. We’re really saying “I think that –” It can take significant discipline to stay with our feelings if this is unfamiliar territory. And the payoff can be enormous.
 
BODY

The Heart may be uncommon ground for Leader Coaches in their conversations; so too are the remaining two aspects of the quaternity we’re exploring here, the Body and the Spirit. I have lots of personal experience and my experience resonates with many other leaders, that as we grew in our careers we grew more and more separated from our bodies. Our bodies tell us what is healthy, what is necessary for vitality, what is endangering our abilities to stay centered and nurture these precious vessels we’ve been given. If we ignore our bodies’ whispers, they shout!

Richard Strozzi Heckler talks of the importance of “embodied or somatic leadership”[v], meaning that leaders must not merely espouse values, they must live them, they must embody them. We’ve begun to see a fundamental shift with the increased presence of new generations in the workforce, to challenge the stereotypical workaholic norms of the Baby Boomers. They can be great mentors to those of us who need a new model for how to live and work. The Body can be a great guide and help in a coaching conversation. Sometimes, it’s as simple as shifting the environment for the conversation from an office to a walk in the park. Sometimes the body can be, as Martha Beck[vi]  suggests, a compass needle helping us to tap into our intuition. Where does that tension about that change express itself in my body? What is my body telling me when I get sore shoulders or a tight stomach or sore legs? What can I learn if I truly listen to my body’s wisdom? Learning to listen to our own body’s messages may well be another important role that Leader Coaches can play in guiding the members of their teams and their organizations to do the same.

SPIRIT

As Leader Coaches, we’ve moved out from the safe territory of the Mind to the more controversial venues of the Heart and Body. But perhaps the most challenging of the four aspects of the quaternity is Spirit. The sceptics might react, “what business is it of yours to inquire into the terrain of my spirit, my sense of wonder, my connection to all things?” And yet, to bring ALL of who we are to what we do, to how we lead, we need to include our connection to the Divine, however we define it.

Our difficulties around Spirit may have to do with our experiences with organized religion. Or it may be that we see through human history the tragedies and traumas that have been wrought on the world in the name of religion. It might be tempting to duck out of the conversation rather than move into it. As you might have guessed, however, we’d suggest you DO move into it with courage and compassion. So what is this notion of Spirit and how does it manifest itself in our coaching conversation? Why should we care about it? My sense is that just as embodied leadership requires that we LIVE our values, BE our values, so spirit-filled leadership requires that we embrace and celebrate the mystery, the presence of that aspect of ourselves not found in Mind, Heart or Body – that ineffable ember that is found deep within that shines through all we are, all we do, all we say. It is our deepest essence, our connection to all things.

It may be helpful to listen, here, to two writers coming from quite different traditions: Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast and Ken Wilber who is a practicing Buddhist. They suggest that while we might struggle with definitions and role models of spirituality, “it nonetheless shows up in everyone’s life – in every act of kindness, compassion, and empathy, in every quiet feeling of gratitude, in every heartfelt ‘thank you’ and in every intimate connection we have ever felt with each other and with the world. {These}feelings of gratitude and thankfulness are universal – so universal, in fact, that they form the living bedrock of all the world’s great spiritual traditions, from the beginning of the world until the end of time. As Martin Buber reminds us once again, in the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, God is not some sort of ultimate ‘Thou’ at the end of the universe, but the hyphen that connects you with everyone and everything in creation.” [vii] And how might this express itself in our coaching conversations? Perhaps the most tangible way is to be constantly vigilant, to ensure that we are coaching and being coached, embedded in the principle of Unconditional Positive Regard, the embodiment of Namaste: the divine in me salutes, recognizes, and embraces the divine in you.

I suppose the ultimate integration would be to be continuously aware of the interplay and interdependence of these four aspects of our self, which I’ve described separately here. They are interconnected and their interaction can be alchemic and transformative in our lives. When we engage our entire quaternity in coaching another, we are bringing our whole selves in service to that other person’s whole self and the riches that connection will engender are without limit! So I wear my little bracelet as a visual reminder. It catches my eye and that catches my awareness, to include all aspects of the quaternity whenever I can. It’s working! I’m sure that both my coaching and my living are more complete now, with its reminder.  
 
[i] See Lominger Inc. research on which leadership competencies occur most frequently across a large body of surveyed, successful leaders. www.lominger.com for more information.
[ii] Wright, Susan and MacKinnon Carol, Leadership Alchemy: The Magic of the Leader Coach. West Group Publishing, Egan, MN. 2003.  
[iii] Bourgeault, Cynthia, Telephone, Texas. A Short Course on Wisdom, Praxis, 2002.
[iv] Kotter, John: The Heart of Change.  p. 1. HBS Press, 2002.
[v] See www.strozziinstitute.com for more information.
[vi] Beck, Martha: Finding your own North Star: Claiming the life you were meant to live, p. 106. Three Rivers Press, New York, 2001.
[vii] Integral Naked newsletter, August 18, 2008.

Positivity: The Power of Positive Intention

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By Susan Wright, TCP President

There is a lot of focus on intention these days as a concept and practice. New science has shown that what we think about actually creates physical matter. For example, the structure and activity of the brain can change in response to experience, an ability called neuroplasticity. We have known that we construct our reality through our own perceptions and beliefs for a long time but now we know that we also construct the actual physical world around us through our thoughts. For example, Darrell Daybre writes in his book, “The Greatest Secret”:

“Creation of anything in the physical universe is determined by what kind of attention you place on it. In other words, what you think about the most, you bring about. What you focus on, good or bad, you begin to create.”

This has tremendous implication for coaches. We are after all in the intention business. We work with our clients to clarify what they want and then help them to work through their resistance, be it doubt or fear, to focus their intention and action on achieving their goals. In short, we work with the client’s intention to be all that they can be. And we as coaches work from our own intention to bring all that we are to our clients. This article explores both sides of this coin of intention and how our effectiveness in supporting our clients depends on our ability to create and sustain “positivity”.

Positivity in the Client Relationship

So what is positivity? Well, to begin, it is the opposite of negativity. We all have tapes running in our heads all the time. These inner ‘voices’ are sometimes called gremlins or judges or nay-sayers. Whatever your name for them, they are the negative self-talk that keeps us from living at our full potential. They are the self-limiting beliefs that we play over and over in our thoughts. “I can’t do that – I’m not smart enough.” “If I do what I want, others will suffer.” “If I take that job, I’ll fail.” We all have times in our lives when this negative self-talk gets the better of us. The role of a coach is to help us work through it to create a more positive vision of a different future. As coaches, we know that helping clients get their self-limiting beliefs, their negativity, out in the open so they can examine their sources and work on reframing the gremlins into self-fulfilling beliefs is the hard work of transformation. It is changing the client’s story from what Hargrove calls “rut stories” into “river stories”. Rut stories are the negative stuck positions where there appears to be no way out; river stories on the other hand flow from our intentions to our reality – virtually anything is possible.

Positivity is also critical because, as Daybre says, we attract what we focus on, good or bad. I have a colleague who spent two years focusing her intention on being “debt free”. The more she focused on it, the more debt she attracted to herself. Finally, when she realized she had been focused on a negative intention and reframed it to “living in abundance”, she immediately began to attract the kind of work and income that she desired. So part of our role as coaches, as we focus client’s intentions, is to ensure that they are positive and will attract the kind of energy the individual desires.

Positivity is the power that comes from positive thinking, from positive intention. I often tell clients to take 5 minutes at the beginning of each day to set their intentions for the day. How do they intend to behave positively in that important meeting to establish a collaborative climate for negotiation? What positive intention do they have for that difficult conversation with an underperforming employee? It is amazing how setting the intention creates the desired outcome. At the end of the day, I suggest they take another 5 minutes to reflect on their behavior – did they achieve their intention, if not, why not and what do they intend to do differently tomorrow? This simple technique can help clients to begin to change their outlook, to transform their stories from failure, or fear of it, to success in whatever areas they want to address. I also know a coach who calls his clients every morning for a month to set their intentions – only 2 minutes a day helps to change the pattern.

Positivity in the Coach

Positivity is, then, what coaches create in their clients as a transformative agent of change. And it is also the stance that coaches themselves take with their clients. It is the ‘can do’ attitude that helps someone who is stuck to get moving, to see the possibilities, to be excited about a better alternative. Coaches are role models of positivity – they bring their positive energy and intention to the coaching relationship and hold out the possibility for their clients by living a positive life themselves. It is in fact the ability of the coach to embody positivity that allows clients to trust that they too can achieve their best potential.

When working with our clients, we use the term “unconditional positive regard”, a phrase coined by Carl Rogers, one of the grandfathers of the human potential movement. “UPR” is the way the coach shows up for the client, ready to listen, not to judge, to be unconditional in support of the client’s story. It is the intention of the coach to hold the client in unconditional positive regard that gives clients the safety, the trust, to confront the problems or issues they face. The coach does not have to accept or agree with everything in the client’s story – in fact, it is important that the coach be able to see the discontinuities in the story and challenge the client at the appropriate time. The critical point is that the coach is able, despite resistance and setbacks, to consistently hold this appreciative perspective throughout the relationship, and to repair and rebuild it if it is temporarily lost.

Here is a brief exercise in intention you can use with your clients, or by yourself, to reframe your negativity into positivity.

1. Surface the negative voices – get those gremlins out into the open by saying them out loud. Hear how they sound and feel how they make you feel. You may feel defeated, sad or angry at the statements when you say them aloud.

2. Reframe the voices – now take each negative statement in turn and reframe it positively. If you’re the coach, say the negative statement to the client using exactly the same tone of voice. Then ask the client to turn it around and say it positively aloud. Hear how the positive voice sounds and feel the difference in how it makes you feel. You may want to sing it, or dance it, or shout it – be expressive!

3. Make a commitment – to reframing the negative voices each time you hear them into the positive statements you have just made. Monitor your thoughts and know that your positive intentions will attract what you want to you, just as your negative gremlins will keep you stuck in unwanted patterns. And remember, as a coach you can only work with healthy, self-responsible adults. If your clients cannot imagine themselves out of their rut, they may be candidates for therapy instead of or in addition to coaching.

Although the word positivity may be new, the concept is as old as time. As coaches, we can take advantage of this ancient wisdom as well as the new science to support our clients in achieving their dreams, and to live ourselves as models of positive intention.

Begley, S. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Power to Transform Ourselves. Ballantine, 2007.

Daybre, D. The Greatest Secret: The Secret to having all you’ve ever wanted. The Center for Extraordinary Living, 2004.

Hargrove, R. Masterful Coaching. Pfeiffer, 1995.

Rogers, C. On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Breakfast Seminar: Senior Leaders Discuss Critical Issues

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For each of the four critical issues we present a brief statement of the challenge, a summary of the need and a description of offerings – processes and programs – from The Coaching Project. Finally, we conclude with excerpts from our table conversations with leaders; they describe their current experience of each of the issues and their views on how they are or could be responding.

  • The Challenge of Employee Engagement
  • The Bursting Boomer Bubble
  • Creating Social Action Linkages
  • The Necessity of Nurturing The Global Mosaic