October 13th, 2021
- notes re Coherence Coaching
- my own motivation mostly around being a good person in my personal relationships
- Elise > so much of coaching training about
- how to get people to commit harder
- how to reframe things to trust more
- Y > my experience of coherence is less formal, more mystical
- in therapy/coaching, very easy to focus on changes you think will happen as a result of something, vs being in touch with whatever change is actually happening
- “Coherence empathy for samsara”
- M > I had an idea: what if we have one of the learners try to explain each slide, and Elise clarifies or fills in what she sees as missing?
- Y > really good way of suggesting your idea, in a way that showed the enthusiasm behind it, without suffering the awkwardness one might in proposing such things
- excellent tone control and sincerity and invitational tone
- Y > calling it Active differential learning in my notes
- (only works when the learners already have a lot of context)
- Emotional Learnings
- "Anything learned in the presence of strong emotion"
- thinking about emotional schemas as like ASICs, vs software
- so they're faster & more efficient but can't be reprogrammed directly
- (ASIC = "application-specific integrated circuit", ie a circuit that just does one thing, like you'd have in a microwave or whatever)
- Eric > my main nitpick being that you can't reprogram an ASIC at all
- "unlocking the emotional brain" = "reverse-engineering the system into software, then reprogramming, so you can make a new ASIC" (?)
- Elise > as coaches, we just don't know, we have no idea what's underneath things for our clients
- (I think I hadn't fully internalized this actually)
- the coach is responsible for the process, but the coach has no idea about the content (what makes this symptom necessary to have)
- only the client knows that, and only unconsciously at first
- sometimes my familiarity with the client allows me to have a sense of reading between the lines
- but I don't just tell them
- I offer an experiment
- #toask how does this sort of thing work?
- M > "respecting that your mind is a sensemaking system, that it can't do anything other than make sense"
- Elise > "old neural circuits" but they're alive and active today
- Elise > "symptom" vs "target of change"
- flowchart:
- "what is the problem as you experience it" (to hint at this being experiential)
- listen for 2 things
- strong emotions
- ontological statements
- rules, black & white statements about self, world, necessities, shoulds
- "obviously"
- let the client tell you as much as feels important to say about the potent example
- would like to practice overt statements
- because they're a really powerful way of holding onto whatever has come up
- ("pitching a tent")
- deepening the experience
- instead of "but", say "and, at the same time"
- don't have to ask, can just say "correct me if I'm not understanding, and what I'm hearing is..."
- "a part of you wants X, and at the same time, a part of you wants Y"
- article re frame battle by Duncan Sabien that I haven't read but I'm sure it's useful even if I disagree
- comment by me re frame override
- > Groups extremely incentivised for belief conformity and actively selecting new members based on predicted ability to brainwash
- I'll point out that without knowing much about how things were framed in this specific situation, it's not necessarily nearly as obvious when you're inside the frame of the group as it reads in Zoe's post. A group can have these property in a way that looks totally reasonable from the inside:
- - "actively selecting new members based on predicted ability to brainwash" might be framed as "our sort of person" with a "culture fit" who has "strong growth potential" (which is the sort of thing most companies say)
- - "incentivised for belief conformity" might be framed as "the importance of group cohesion" or "the necessity of shared models" or simply "truth-seeking"
- The power of frames can be hard to fathom; from within a frame some things obviously make sense and from outside the frame those things obviously make no sense at all.