Coaching with the Brain in Mind E-Book

David Rock

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 845

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

DISCOVER THE SCIENCE BEHIND BRAIN-BASED COACHING By understanding how the brain works, coaching professionals can better tailor their language, strategies, and goals to be in alignment with an individual's "hard-wired" way of thinking. Written by two well-known coaching professionals, David Rock and Linda Page, Coaching with the Brain in Mind presents the tools and methodologies that can be employed by novice and experienced coaches alike to create an effective--and ultimately more rewarding--relationship for both coach and client. This informative guide to the neuroscience of coaching clearly demonstrates how brain-based coaching works in practice, and how the power of the mind can be harnessed to help an individual learn and grow. Illustrated with numerous case examples and stories, this book is organized for immediate use by professionals in their client work. Coverage includes: * A succinct but comprehensive overview of the major scientific and theoretical foundations for coaching and their implications for practice * How the language of coaching--setting goals, making connections, becoming more aware, seeking breakthroughs, and taking action--parallels what neuroscientists tell us about how the brain operates * Neuroscience as a natural platform for the ongoing development of coaching Building on the existing foundation of coaching by adding neuroscience as an evidence base for the profession, Coaching with the Brain in Mind shows that it is possible to become a better professional coach by understanding how the brain works. As well, the authors, through their research, present that an understanding of neuroscience research, however new and speculative, can help coaches and leaders fulfill their potential as change agents in the lives of others.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface: Who Should Read This Book?

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

About the Authors

IN THE AUTHORS’ WORDS

About This Book

Knowledge and Action, Action and Knowledge

Acknowledgements

Introduction

COACHING BEDROCK

COACHING PILLARS

NEUROSCIENCE PLATFORM

ORGANIZATION OF COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE?

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

A NOTE ABOUT THE SCIENCE OF NEUROSCIENCE

PART I - Who Are We?

CHAPTER 1 - Bedrock—Ontology

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

NEW AGE PHILOSOPHY

ANTHROPOLOGY

SOCIOLOGY

ONTOLOGY AS BEDROCK FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 2 - Pillar—Social Embeddedness

GLOBALIZATION

SYSTEMS THEORY

QUANTUM THEORY

SOCIAL EMBEDDEDNESS AS A COACHING PILLAR

CHAPTER 3 - Neuroscience Platform—Mindfulness

THE POTENTIATING BRAIN

THINKING PROCESSES

MINDFULNESS PRACTICES

PRACTICE GUIDE FOR COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND—KNOW YOURSELF

PART II - How Can We Be Healthy?

CHAPTER 4 - Bedrock—Health Practices

WESTERN MEDICINE

PHYSIOLOGY

STRESS

WELLNESS THEORY

HEALTH PRACTICES AS BEDROCK FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 5 - Pillar—Optimizing Performance

SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY

CHANGE THEORY

MODELS OF CHANGE

OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE AS A COACHING PILLAR

CHAPTER 6 - Neuroscience Platform—Neuroplasticity

DYNAMIC STABILITY

PLACEBO EFFECT

EXPERIENCE AND HARDWIRING

ATTENTION

VETO POWER

APPLYING THE SCHWARTZ-ROCK FORMULA FOR DYNAMIC STABILITY

PRACTICE GUIDE FOR COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND—LEVERAGE CHANGE

PART III - Why Do We Do What We Do?

CHAPTER 7 - Bedrock—Psychology

BEHAVIORISM

PSYCHOMETRICS

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

PSYCHOLOGY AS BEDROCK FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 8 - Pillar—Activating the Mind

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

LEARNING THEORY

ACTIVATING THE MIND AS A COACHING PILLAR

CHAPTER 9 - Neuroscience Platform—Cognition

MEMORY

AWARENESS

MAPPING AND PREDICTING

DILEMMA MODEL

PRACTICE GUIDE FOR COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND—MAKE DECISIONS AND SOLVE PROBLEMS

PART IV - How Can We Feel Better?

CHAPTER 10 - Bedrock—Psychotherapy

HUMANISTIC MOVEMENT

TRAUMA AND ITS SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS

RESEARCH REVEALING TRANSTHEORETIC COMMON FACTORS

LINKING PSYCHOTHERAPY TECHNIQUES TO COACHING

PSYCHOTHERAPY AS BEDROCK FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 11 - Pillar—Accentuate the Positive

LEARNED OPTIMISM

SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS: PLEASURE, ENGAGEMENT, AND MEANING

RESILIENCE

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE AS A PILLAR FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 12 - Neuroscience Platform—Emotions

STATE OF MIND

SCANNING FOR THREATS

STATUS AND BELONGING

EMOTION REGULATION

PRACTICE GUIDE FOR COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND—KEEP COOL UNDER PRESSURE

PART V - How Can We Get Along?

CHAPTER 13 - Bedrock—Management

MANAGEMENT THEORY

INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

META-ANALYSIS

MANAGEMENT AS BEDROCK FOR COACHING

CHAPTER 14 - Pillar—Leadership

ORGANIZATIONAL HERESIES

SOCIAL NETWORK THEORIES

FAMILY SYSTEMS THERAPIES

APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY

HUMAN CAPITAL MOVEMENT

LEADERSHIP AS A COACHING PILLAR

CHAPTER 15 - Neuroscience Platform—NeuroLeadership

COLLABORATIVE, CONTINGENT CONVERSATIONS

OUR SOCIAL BRAINS

THEORY OF MIND

REPAIRING RELATIONSHIPS-SANGE

RESOLVING CONFLICT—STOP AND GROW

CALMING THREATS—THE SCARF MODEL

PRACTICE GUIDE FOR COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND—GET ALONG WITH OTHERS

Conclusion: What Are We Doing Here?

Internet Links

References

Index

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Rock, David.

Coaching with the brain in mind : foundations for practice / by David Rock, Linda J. Page.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-50677-6

1. Employees—Coaching of. 2. Neurosciences. 3. Teaching—Psychological aspects. I. Page, Linda J. II. Title.

HF5549.5.C53R63 2009

658.3’124—dc22

2009009765

David: to Lisa, Trinity, and India Rock Linda: to Susan, Malika, and Chantal

Preface: Who Should Read This Book?

Ishi is the name given to the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe when he was “captured” outside Oroville in north-central California in the year 1911. Workers caught sight of him when they were preparing to go home after a day at the slaughterhouse just outside of town. The “wild Indian,” as he was described then, was wearing tattered remnants of clothes and seemed near starvation. Most of his fellow Yahi had been systematically exterminated over the previous five decades as a massive influx of prospectors and settlers arrived in Northern California searching for gold. Ishi was about 50 years old at the time of his capture, so he had been born around 1860. He had been living in the foothills north and east of the rich marshlands that have become Sacramento, the state capital of California. After most of his tribe had been decimated, he went into hiding with his uncle, mother, and a woman who was his wife or sister. They lived as much as possible as they had when their tribe numbered in the thousands, hunting deer and rabbits, gathering and cooking acorns, grains, and roots, and fishing in the tributaries of the Sacramento River. They also took cans of bean and flour from cabins. But they had to keep away from the invaders who had proven to be dangerous.

After the other members of Ishi’s party died, he allowed himself to be captured on a late summer’s evening. No one else in the world spoke his language. According to his people’s customs, a person did not use his own name—that was for his family to reveal. He no longer had a family. The fugitive was turned over to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who arranged for him to live in the University of California’s Anthropology Museum in San Francisco. After attempts to record and learn his language, linguists such as Edward Sapir discovered that his tribe’s word for “man” or “person” was anglicized as “Ishi.” So that became his name. Ishi was the object of great curiosity until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. His story was made popular again in 1961 when Theodora Kroeber, anthropologist Alfred’s second wife, published Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.

Ishi’s brain was removed from his body after his death in clear violation of his wishes and his people’s customs. In 2004 Orin Starn took up Ishi’s story again, tracking his brain to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But it is not just Ishi’s brain that captures our interest—it is the minds and brains of the people around him: the settlers who exterminated (their words) thousands of native people; the reporters who treated him as a curious, uncivilized “thing”; the anthropologists who, though in a very kindly way, saw him as in need of protection; and the scientists who thought they could learn something important about him from examining his disembodied brain.

Compared with people who thought of themselves as more civilized, Ishi proved to have advanced social and adaptive skills. After some time he made friends, laughed and explored, lent a helping hand around the museum and hospital, was respectful of others and adapted to his environment. He enjoyed teaching children and others the skills he knew, maintained a sense of dignity and held firm to his values. The point we are making is not to hold Ishi up as some icon, as nature’s perfect Noble Savage. Rather, he proved simply to be a human being. On the surface, he was very different from the men and women of San Francisco a century ago. Ishi’s experience shows us that the human brain, even that of a mature person who might be labeled primitive, is capable of supporting enormous changes in thinking and behavior, given the right context and relationships.

Coaching is a context that supports change across very large gaps between where a person is and where he or she wants to be. Professional coaching burst out of its start in the late 20th century (“No, not football, basketball, or athletic coaching!”) to become a valuable tool in the corporate and personal change arsenal. According to Career Partners International (2008), 40% of 400 U.S. and Canadian business leaders interviewed chose coaching as their preferred method for leadership development. Research is accumulating that shows a return-on-investment (ROI) of five to eight times the cost of coaching, or 500% to 800%. But ROI results prove only that something has changed. For coaching to become an established profession (see Grant, 2003), it is even more important to know what is working and how.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

Does Coaching Have Solid Theoretical and Conceptual Roots?

Our first goal in writing this book is to establish the deep theoretical foundations of coaching, its bedrock and the pillars that raise it above that bedrock, and to suggest that neuroscience provides a solid platform for the ongoing development of coaching.

Although research on the brain has been around much longer than professional coaching, (there is evidence of prehistoric brain surgery), new technologies have enabled phenomenal advances over the past two decades. Some unquestioned assumptions have been overturned. Neuroscience is beginning to reveal even more about the “what” and “how” of coaching and related practices such as leadership development.

How Can We Use Our Minds and Brains to Initiate and Maintain the Changes We Want to Make?

Our second goal is to demonstrate how setting goals, making connections, becoming more aware, seeking breakthroughs, and taking action—the “stuff” of coaching—parallel what neuroscientists tell us about how the brain operates. In fact, anyone who wants to harness the power of the mind to help others learn can benefit from what we are presenting here. Whether you are already a coach or not, we will show you how to become more effective in your own life, and more effective in how you help others, by understanding how the brain works. We will present examples and stories and techniques that draw on all the foundations for coaching practice.

Where are We Going?

We also wrote this book to acknowledge a revelation: We are all participating in the creation of a new brain.

Yes, this book covers decidedly contemporary fields such as coaching, the brain, and the mind, but we started it with the story about a “wild Indian” from a century ago and the questions his treatment raises about minds and brains then and now. If we pay attention to where people direct their attention, we can surmise the questions they are asking. And the questions people ask reveal their assumptions about reality. Saxton Pope, chief surgeon at the University of California hospital where Ishi died, removed Ishi’s brain despite knowing that Ishi did not wish to be dissected after death. Starn suggests that Pope went against Ishi’s wishes, despite the friendship the two men enjoyed, because he believed that Ishi’s brain was of scientific importance. In other words, Pope paid attention to the brain because he believed it would reveal more about this primitive man than their five years of personal interaction and friendship had done. In particular, he may have believed, as scientists have up until recently, that the individual, disembodied brain equals mind. In its most primitive form, this belief assumes that if you can weigh or measure or ascertain the shape of a brain, you can know something important about how that brain operates or operated—you can know the mind and the personality and its thoughts. Although this simplistic assumption was disappearing even as Ishi was chipping arrowheads from blue Milk of Magnesia bottles, it still exists in a more elaborate form today: If you can describe the working parts of the brain in enough detail, you can see thoughts.

Compare this assumption to the contemporary claim by neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel (2007a) that “mind is using the brain to create itself” (p. 32). The “brain equals mind” assumption fits an older way of looking at the world that we have labeled “mechanistic.” The “mind uses the brain” assumption fits a new approach that we label in these pages “systemic.” This is more than just words, for in the century between the removal of Ishi’s brain and its return to the descendants of a tribe that is likely related to him, science has discovered that the rules for understanding the brain are very different from the rules for understanding how things work in everyday life. If the brain and the mind are in any way related, then we need to know the new rules if we want to change our minds.

One of these new “systemic” rules is that attention changes the brain. If, as many physicists assert, the brain is a quantum environment, then asking a question and looking for an answer, or observing, has an effect on outcome. When scientists asked what Ishi’s brain would reveal about his humanity, they were not paying attention to the fact that he had become deeply connected to the modern community around him and even contributed to this new society. What else do we require as proof of humanity?

Today we can see and talk with each other without physical wires and cables to connect us. We have pictures of the whole Earth that fuel our sense of being on a giant spaceship together. Yet we still question whether some people deserve being considered human. We still react to one another and to the world based on self-fulfilling assumptions. We continue looking for answers that result in suffering and inhumanity. As we compare the questions we ask now to the questions asked by scientists a century ago, we recognize the true challenge lying before coaching:

How do we use our minds to create fully functioning, healthy human brains?

If that question interests you, please come along with us by reading this book.

About the Authors

David Rock has done over 7,000 hours of executive and business coaching and has trained over 10,000 people as coaches. He launched Results Coaching Systems in 1998 and cofounded the coaching certificate programs at New York University in 2005. As well as being chief executive officer of Results Coaching Systems, David is now on the faculty at CIMBA, an international business school based in Europe, and a guest lecturer at Oxford University’s business school. He is on the board of The Blue School, building a new approach to K-12 education. At the time of writing this book, he is completing a professional doctorate in the Neuroscience of Leadership. His approach to coaching is at the heart of wide-scale coaching programs at global organizations including EDS, Ericsson, and many others. In 2006 David coined the term “NeuroLeadership” and founded the NeuroLeadership Institute that brought together neuroscientists and global business leaders for the first NeuroLeadership Summit in May 2007, followed by further summits and a journal. His expertise lies in the science underpinning coaching and how to build coaching cultures in large organizations. He divides his time between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.

Linda Page, Ph.D., began her first career at Princeton University, where she studied sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. She later became a psychotherapist. She administered a master’s program in counseling psychology, taught social and cognitive psychology in a doctoral program in the United States, and founded a coaching school—Adler International Learning—in 1998 in Toronto, Canada. The school now has a presence in the United States and Europe. The multidisciplinary demands of coaching practice and neuroscience research and theory bring together many strands of her career and intellectual interests. Linda has been a member of the Society for Psychotherapy Research for many years. She helped organize research symposia for the International Coach Federation and now serves on the Research Advisory Board of The Foundation of Coaching. As a board member for the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations, she helped develop a series of symposia that bring together small groups of business leaders, coaches, and trainers to develop mutual understanding of the challenges facing organizations internationally. She has also served on the boards of the Association of Coach Training Organizations and the Graduate School Alliance for Executive Coaching, which is developing a graduate-level curriculum for coach education. She is a regular contributor to The Journal of Individual Psychology and serves on the editorial board of The International Journal for Coaching in Organizations.

IN THE AUTHORS’ WORDS

The two of us come from very different backgrounds and, indeed, different parts of the world. We see this as an advantage because coaches come from many different backgrounds, each with its own “bedrock” that, taken together, constitute the foundation of coaching. We intend in this book to remind us all of the foundational concepts that we are familiar with and to acquaint ourselves with other, less familiar bedrock. At the very least, we hope to participate in a dialogue that develops a common language and helps us understand one another. And we intend to help create a discipline of coaching by making sure that we acknowledge the contributions of those on whose shoulders we stand. For that reason, we have included many more references than is typical for books of this type. Further, we hope to build on the existing foundation of coaching by adding neuroscience as an evidence base for the discipline and profession of coaching.

Neither of us is a neuroscientist. Neither are we primarily scholarly theory producers, weaving together research data for academic texts and journals, although we both contribute in this way. We are both most interested in applying neuroscience discoveries to coaching and to leadership skills in general. That is, we are interpreters who hope to encourage people to make practical use of what is known about the brain. Ultimately, we have written this book because of the positive impact that understanding the brain has had on our own coaching practices as well as on our ability to train better coaches.

About This Book

This book is organized into parts and chapters. In the Introduction, we provide an overview so you may select specific parts for particular attention or chapters in a different order without missing the context of the whole. We introduce the questions whose answers reveal the emergence of coaching, neuroscience, and the potential for a new brain.

We have included a number of examples that are drawn from our experience. No names of actual persons are used, and the circumstances have been altered extensively. The types of situations are real and in some cases have been repeated many times.

Knowledge and Action, Action and Knowledge

Knowledge which is unable to support action is not genuine—and how unsure is activity without understanding!

-Rudolf Virchow

Rudolf Virchow was a 19th-century physician, anthropologist, social activist, and scientist who argued against the separation of science, or knowledge for its own sake, from practice based on that knowledge. As his quote states, “Knowledge which is unable to support action is not genuine.” We want you to be able to make use of the theories in this book as practical tools, whether you yourself are a coach, a manager or executive, another helping professional, a business owner, a parent or spouse, or anyone who wants to have a more fulfilling and productive life. Applying that knowledge is what will make it genuine knowledge.

Coaching has been criticized as a set of techniques looking for a theory. The second part of Virchow’s quote is “—and how unsure is activity without understanding!” Or, as Kurt Lewin, put it, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” It is our hope that the full impact of this book will be to help coaching, coaches, clients, leaders, and all they touch transform theory into practice and vice versa.

Acknowledgments

We both wish to thank our teachers, mentors, students, and clients who have helped us understand coaching, leadership, and their potential. This has been a four-year project, and a team effort. Many thanks to coaching students from New York University coaching programs who helped research specific topics at the start of the project, including Cindy Cornell, Sue Dorward, Don Duffy, Gwyn Osnos, and Paulette Rao. And a big thanks to Judy Crater, too.

These colleagues have read and commented on all or portions of earlier manuscripts: Laura Atwood, William Bergquist, Vikki Brock, Kevin Cashman, Jean Davies, Lorne Ellingson, Suzan Guest, Mike Jay, Richard Kopp, Jeanie Nishimura, Ruth Orenstein, Robert Potvin, Pamela Ramadei, Pam Richarde, Jeannine Sandstrom, Melinda Sinclair, Lee Smith, Irene Stein, Lew Stern, Adria Trowhill, and others. We are grateful for their generous help. At the same time, they are not responsible for any lapses in these pages.

Thank you to our supportive and patient Wiley editor, Marquita Flemming. We continue to depend on the thoughtful work and generous spirit of neuroscientists to bring brain research to our minds and society, including Amy Arnsten, Leslie Brothers, Robert Coghill, Naomi Eisenberger, Matt Lieberman, Kevin Ochsner, Jeffrey Schwartz, Dan Siegel, Henry Stapp, Yi-Yuan Tang, and many others who also deserve our respect and gratitude.

David wishes to thank all the people who dedicate their lives to painstaking research to further our understanding of human nature.

Linda could not possibly have completed this book without the support of her colleagues at Adler International Learning, her daughters and grandchildren, and, more than anything else, the practical and loving input of her spouse, Susan.

DAVID ROCK LINDA J. PAGE

INTRODUCTION

What Are the Questions?

Ishi had grown up in the wilderness, but when his companions at the anthropology museum asked him to take them back to his old haunts in 1914, he was reluctant. Perhaps he did not want to be reminded of sad memories of his family and tribe, now all dead. But just as likely, he was a different person now. He had been living in San Francisco for three years, dressing and eating as others did, walking along the streets with his new friends, working in and welcoming visitors to the museum and volunteering in the hospital next door. He had seen things, trains and cars and electricity, that he could hardly have imagined as a younger man. Ishi may have had the sense, familiar to most of us, of not being able to go back. Some experiences have profound effects that go beyond incremental improvement of fingering an instrument or wielding a wrench or a kitchen knife. Some experiences seem to create a whole new mind—or, rather, to use the more dynamic verb form, a whole new way of minding, of using our brains to experience the world. Ishi, like all migrants, may have missed his past life terribly, but Ishi the San Francisco resident was no longer that person who showed up at the Oroville slaughterhouse on an August evening in 1911. How could he not have experienced what today we would call a transformation, a personal paradigm shift?

Shifts in how we perceive the world occur because what we experience changes the questions we ask. Seeking answers to questions we have never asked before changes our brains so we can practice differently and thereby craft new experiences. This is a process that has undoubtedly gone on for many thousands of centuries, for as long as human beings have been conscious of themselves and their world. Because we now know that the brain is sensitive to experience, we can guess that Ishi’s brain changed while he was in San Francisco, although no gross mea-surement of it could possibly reveal what those changes were. His presence certainly also changed those around him, as reading about him today has the potential for changing us.

Coaching is a practice that specializes in changing awareness, action, and the world around us. In systems language, this is called “co-evolution.” People change their environment, and their different experiences in this changed environment change their brains so they can make new changes. Coaching enables us to see this process at a new level and therefore to practice it more consciously than ever before. But coaching is a relatively new practice. Where did it come from and where is it going?

This book was written to answer three basic questions:

• What is the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the practice of coaching?

• What are the more current pillars that lifted coaching above its foundational “bedrock”?

• To what extent might neuroscience provide a platform for the further development of coaching?

In this introduction, we reveal the underlying story we discovered as we sought to answer those questions: Both coaching and neuroscience are examples of a widespread shift in how people think about themselves and the world.

We tell this story and give an overview of the book under these headings:

• Coaching bedrock

• Paradigms

• Paradigm shift

• Coaching pillars

• Systemic paradigm

• What is coaching?

• Neuroscience platform

• Why neuroscience and coaching?

• Organization of Coaching with the Brain in Mind

• What do we need to know about neuroscience?

• Brain-shifting discoveries

• Energy and information

• What is a brain?

• The brain in our hand

• What is a mind?

• What do relationships have to do with it?

• Health and well-being

• What are we doing here?

• A note about the science of neuroscience

COACHING BEDROCK

HISTORICAL INTERLUDE

Coach and philosopher Julio Olalla (2008) has asked “Why coaching? Why now?” He noted that authorities in the Middle Ages, primarily church and feudal lords, enforced a knowledge chain of command. People with questions were discouraged from taking their own experience into account in order to arrive at answers. They were expected to consult a priest who consulted a book—usually the Bible or some other religious text. Galileo (1564-1642) provoked the Inquisition’s wrath not only because he asserted that Earth orbited the Sun (and not the other way around) but primarily because he bypassed the “authorities” and sought knowledge based on experiment and observation of the natural world.

The period of European “Enlightenment” followed Sir Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) discovery of the principles of motion and gravity. His empirical approach had roots in ancient Greece, a society that social psychologist Richard Nisbett (2003) suggests was unique in its celebration of personal freedom, individuality, objective thought, rhetoric, and logic. Nisbett suggested that this heritage was related to the economic individualism of herding and fishing that was characteristic of early Greek society. Yet it must be noted that ancient Greece city-states were slave-based societies and that the individual freedom of the slave owners rested on the social labor of the slaves. However, the tradition of individual truth-seeking and argument influenced scientific development in Europe more than 15 centuries later.

Newton’s discoveries revolutionized physics. Explanations in classical mechanics, as his system has been called, assume singular causes leading in one direction to later effects. This mechanistic worldview permeated scholarly and popular thought and influenced subsequent natural and social sciences as well as philosophy. Logical positivism—the perspective that ideas are true, false, or meaningless—strongly influenced 20th-century science. And the belief, inherited from Greek traditions of argument, that a conflict of ideas gives rise to higher truths was consistent with an increasingly market-dominated economy.

The view that derives from Newton’s approach is that “the truth is out there” waiting to be discerned by rational, value-free observers. Disagreements over what is true arise either because observers are biased by their subjectivity or because their measurements are inaccurate. In this paradigm, rational debate among differing observers roots out bias, and technological innovation provides more and more accurate measurement.

The replacement of medieval reliance on religious authority by Enlightenment reliance on scientific inquiry has proven tremendously successful. This is illustrated every day as we travel, work, and communicate in ways unimaginable a century ago. Over the past nearly four centuries since the Enlightenment, the adoption of the mechanistic worldview has resulted in an exponential increase in technological advances. However, by the mid-20th century, social and scientific trends began to reveal the limits of classical mechanics.

The practice of coaching can trace its foundation to several fields that developed during the centuries following the Enlightenment. Philosophy certainly existed well before the Enlightenment, but after empirical science loosened the church’s hold on truth, contributions to ontology, or the study of the nature of human nature, were sought beyond Western philosophical traditions including from new disciplines of anthropology and sociology. Advances in medicine and health practices provided part of the foundation for coaching, as did the flowering of early-20th-century psychology, especially behaviorism. Many coaching techniques can be traced to psychotherapy, an application of health practices, philosophy, and psychology. Management theory also had a significant impact on coaching. As the 20th century began, well before coaching became widely practiced, each of these fields was heavily influenced by a set of ideas that characterize the mechanistic paradigm. These ideas emphasize:

• The individual over community or context

• Dualism rather than holism

• Objectivity as more privileged than subjectivity

• Determinism and not constructivism

• Hierarchy as more effective than collaboration

Paradigms

Application of the term “paradigm” to modern scientific thought is credited to Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). According to Kuhn, a paradigm is a mental model or a set of beliefs through which we view the world. The paradigm we have referred to as “mechanistic” was employed in Western European and later in North American thinking from the time of Isaac Newton in the 17th to the mid-20th century. This paradigm is referred to in many other ways: classical or Newtonian mechanics, modern, rational, logical positivist, industrial, capitalist. In general, mechanism assumes that objective truth is the goal of inquiry, that understanding results from studying the bits and pieces that constitute phenomena, and that causes lead in only one direction to determine effects. Mechanism also assumes a universe that is rather like a clock. The existence and behavior of all its elements can be perfectly understood if only we can identify the causes that happened just before the moment we are trying to understand. And we can understand those prior causes by identifying what determined them. And on and on back to the beginning of time. Two big problems arise from this deterministic paradigm:

1. What do we do with our persistent human experience that the choices we make have some relevance to what happens in the world? Is our conscious experience of facing and making choices just some irrelevant cosmic joke?

2. Early in the 20th century, physicists discovered that observations of behavior of very small particles did not fit the predictions of classical mechanics. It took several decades for this new “quantum mechanics” to shake the Newtonian assumptions of physics. Thus, the stage was set for a “paradigm shift.”

Paradigm Shift

Kuhn (1962) also introduced the concept of the paradigm shift, a discontinuous and sometimes radical change in paradigm. Before his book appeared, scientific progress was commonly thought to consist of small discoveries accumulating to form larger, more significant explanatory theories. Kuhn disagreed that this was the only way progress happened in science. He argued that some discoveries are revolutionary and cause giant leaps forward. For example, Galileo’s claim that the Earth was round shook the very foundation of how questions are formulated and answered. This was a major paradigm shift in human history.

Most of us have experienced a personal paradigm shift. Someone—a teacher, a relative, a friend, a therapist, a mentor, a coach—has made a remark or an observation that has profoundly changed how we think, feel, and behave. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, founders of NeuroLinguistic Programming (1975, 1976), draw on Gregory Bateson’s influence in calling this “a difference that makes a difference.” It is often described by metaphors, such as “a curtain lifted” or “the light went on” or “I’m seeing with new eyes.” The biblical story of Saul on the road to Damascus is an example from religion. We suspect that Ishi’s experience with the modern world may have created a personal paradigm shift for him.

Coaches are privileged to see paradigm shifts regularly in our work. A seemingly innocuous question can elicit a new way of thinking.

Looking more broadly at society as a whole, Alvin Toffler (1984) suggested that a paradigm shift could occur if one or more basic elements are significantly altered. For a system to undergo a dramatic shift, it must be pushed beyond the state that holds it in equilibrium. Coaches apply this principle to individuals or organizations, hoping to evoke an insight that will cause the client to “see with new eyes.” When whole societies begin to see with new eyes, existing assumptions come into question, the old equilibrium breaks down, and the resulting chaos provides fertile ground for new fields and practices. This is the story of how coaching came into being.

Example: “I Couldn’t have Done it without Her”

Russell had run successful campaigns for several elected officials. He credited his coach for helping him build his reputation among his party colleagues, but when they suggested that he run for office himself, he hesitated. “How,” he wondered, “can I hide the fact that I have a coach? Won’t people dismiss me for having to rely on someone else?” He conveyed his concern to his coach, who replied, “What are you in this for?” In pondering this simple question, Russell discovered a new way of looking at himself and his situation, one that relies less on how he looks to others and more on what he feels is true for him. He shifted his stance from trying to hide his use of coaching to presenting himself as a new kind of politician—one who openly applies coaching principles to his work with colleagues and constituents. The night Russell was nominated to run for office, he proudly introduced his coach to the assembled crowd, saying, “I couldn’t have done it without her—and without every one of you.”

COACHING PILLARS

The mechanistic paradigm came into question during the later 20th century as scientific and technological advances, more global integration, and social and political conflict pushed Western societies beyond the equilibrium, however illusory, promised by scientific progress. Systems theory applied advanced mathematical concepts to help us see the order and promise in chaos and complexity. Experiments in physics accumulated to show that mechanism was a special case of quantum mechanics. Understanding the mental aspects of elite athletic performance and recognizing the elements of the change process expanded our capacity to optimize performance in many realms. Psychology and learning theory were released from their behaviorist straitjacket by the cognitive revolution that approached the mind as an active ingredient. Positive psychology and concepts related to emotional intelligence moved us beyond seeing health as merely absence of disease. And management theory embraced collaboration and leadership in order to move beyond hierarchical dead-ends. All these “pillars” reinforced community and context, holism, the importance of subjectivity, constructivism, and collaborative participation.

Systemic Paradigm

Coaching emerged as a practice in response to a rapidly changing world and a paradigm shift in a number of disciplines. Postmodernism rejects logical positivism, especially the idea that there is an objective truth that can be determined by a neutral observer. Postmodernism was influenced by social movements of the 1960s that identified dominant definitions of “reality” as themselves constituents of the social power structure. In this view, there is no such thing as a neutral observer. Postmodern inquiry uncovers (deconstructs) the assumptions in language and action that ignore subjective experience (Bergquist & Mura, 2005).

Globalization has spurred openness to diverse perspectives and the recognition that the same event may be interpreted differently by different participants.

Quantum physics proposed, and over the past century has proven, that the activity of an observer affects what we can discover about the behavior of subatomic particles. Since the brain’s neurons consist of atoms and their subatomic constituents, is it not possible that the observational attention of the mind can affect the outcome of neuronal activity? This proposition is still being hotly contested, but early applications show promising results, ones that are explaining how self-directed change happens and what each of us can do mentally to change our brains. This research is made possible by the development of machines that provide a snapshot of the inside of a brain, measure electrical activity of a brain in action, and take a moving picture of the changes in brains. Thus, the concept of volition, or the ability of the mind to affect the brain by the exertion of “willpower,” is being brought into the spotlight after spending a century in the shadow of behavioral and psychodynamic deterministic assumptions.

Although mechanistic approaches still have influence, coaches are trained to think systemically, to attend to values, to take a holistic perspective, to use a collaborative rather than a directive approach, and to focus on strengths rather than on weaknesses. Coaching applications that follow the subjective agendas of clients, that encourage their capacity to generate options and make choices, that aim for ever higher potential and treat them as whole human beings are further expressions of a new paradigm. The pillars we describe in this book provide support for coaching to promote these shifts:

• from observer to participant

• from passive to active

• from negative to positive

• from teaching to experiencing

• from telling to listening

The previous worldview took its name from discoveries in physics. We draw on the study of systems for the new name: the “systemic paradigm.”

Let us be clear: As we see it, the mechanistic paradigm is not entirely replaced by the systemic approach. Newton’s classical mechanics is not false—it is rather a special case of quantum principles. And systemic approaches in general are not new. Rather, much like classic figure-ground illustrations such as the vase and faces shown in introductory psychology classes, we can “see” the same phenomenon from different perspectives. Coaching is informed by both mechanistic and systemic paradigms. Many common coaching techniques, such as breaking large tasks into small steps, are rooted in thoroughly mechanistic radical behaviorism.

Yet if mechanistic modes of inquiry and practice had been adequate at the end of the 20th century, there would have been no need for coaching. Medical and psychological change agents tended to approach human problems separate from their social context. Individuals were divided into physical and mental, work and personal, spiritual and material, each with different professional attendants. In contrast, coaching seeks to help whole human beings balance the many different aspects of their lives and to improve their ability to function with one another, with their work, with the world, and with themselves. This is not instead of but in addition to already-existing professions.

This book contends that coaching is the most fitting application of the systemic paradigm among helping professions, arising at the turn of the 21st century because previous practices are weighed down by their Newtonian heritage.

Where a classical approach is useful, it continues to be used. Where new assumptions or techniques meet personal or organizational goals, they rightfully are pursued. This expands our global repertoire. For example, Westerners are learning Asian spiritual and health practices and Asians are learning Western industrial practices (Nisbett, 2003). The point is that we can choose which paradigm best suits our purposes. Awareness of choice is a principle that unites coaching theory and practice. Coaching arose at the end of the 20th century on pillars that showed there are more options for fulfilling human potential than mechanistic thought led us to believe. Coaching emerged as an embodiment of a new systemic paradigm.

What is Coaching?

It has been easier to say what coaching is not than to say precisely what it is—not athletic coaching (although it draws on the wisdom of the best sports coaching), not consulting, not mentoring, not psychotherapy, not counseling, not advising. . . .

Coach Mike Jay (1999) differentiates coaching from other professions such as teaching, managing, facilitating, counseling, consulting, mediating, or mentoring by how its context differs from these other activities: “The coach has no responsibility, accountability and authority [for the behavior of the client], and does not own the outcome” (p. 47).

Coaches are change agents who serve the interests of their clients. The definition of coaching by the International Coach Federation (2008) recognizes this focus on the client’s interests, or “agenda”:

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.

Many similar definitions exist among coaching and coach training organizations.

Looking beyond coaching itself, David Orlinsky brought his experience as a professor in the multidisciplinary Department of Human Development at the University of Chicago to bear on the question of where coaching fits among others that use psychological or social means to induce change. Orlinsky combined the various definitions of coaching with his knowledge of other helping professions. In Figure I.1, we present the preliminary conclusions that Orlinsky (2007) drew.

Figure I.1 Provisional Typology of Generic Psychosocial Change Agents ©2007 by David E. Orlinsky. Used with permission.

Clients come to coaches because they want help in effecting changes. These are not physical changes, such as we might go to a hairdresser or cosmetic surgeon for. So coaches fit into the general category of “psychosocial change agents.” Other nonphysical change agents, such as salespeople, want us to change our buying behavior, and lawyers or accountants advise us how to do things differently, but coaches are not in the “commercial/ expert” category like these change agents. And there are change agents such as negotiators, propagandists, and police or military interrogators who use “coercive/manipulative” means to induce change, also unlike coaches. Coaches, suggests Orlinsky, are “constructive/facilitative” change agents like therapists, counselors, social workers, clergy, and political reformers. Orlinsky further describes each of these three broad categories in terms of its governing norm, limiting condition, and counterfeit forms.

Like other constructive/facilitative change agents, for example, coaches operate under the norm of a commitment “to serving the positive interests and well-being of their clients (defined jointly by the client, the profession, society-at-large, & the change-agent’s own informed expert judgment)” (Orlinsky, 2007, p. 3). Counterfeit agents in this category are individuals whom peer and government certification and ethical codes are designed to protect clients against: quacks and confidence artists.

If indeed coaches can be considered psychosocial change agents in the same constructive/facilitative category as therapists and counselors, how do these change agents differ? Orlinsky answered that question by comparing the practices of these three professional activities, as summarized in Figure I.2.

Figure I.2 Differentiation of Psychosocial Practices in Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Coaching

©2007 by David E. Orlinsky. Used with permission.

Thus, according to Orlinsky’s survey of coaching literature as compared with his knowledge of psychotherapy and counseling, coaching is a psychosocial change intervention that optimizes “unrealized potential through development of talent & refinement of effective skills from unsatisfying, limited (‘average’) performance to enhanced or ‘outstanding’ effectiveness” (Orlinsky, 2007, p. 5). This is a definition that not only tells us what coaches do, it also differentiates coaching from two related practices.

NEUROSCIENCE PLATFORM

At the same time as coaching has emerged, and consistent with the new systemic paradigm, there has been renewed interest in the human brain and its relationship to mental and social life. Fascination with the human brain is not new. Archeologists have found evidence of brain surgery even in primitive societies. Philosophers have speculated for centuries about the brain and its relationship to human functioning. And more recently, science and medicine have made great advances in identifying how the brain does what it does (by neurons connecting with one another), mapping its functions (brain stem, limbic system, motor cortex, etc.), and understanding how it develops (interaction of genes, environment, and self-activity).

Most of these discoveries were made under quite limiting conditions: Poking around inside a brain typically ends in serious damage or death of the organism of which it is a part. Understanding how live brains function depended upon observing the consequence of head injuries or disease. These limitations have been partially overcome during the last part of the 20th century by ingenious inventions that indicate what is going on inside a live person’s skull.

The consequence has been an explosion of neuroscience research, so much so that the 1990s were declared by the United Nations to be “The Decade of the Brain.” We write this book in order to share some of the most exciting and useful applications of the discoveries resulting from these efforts.

But we do need to recognize that neuroscience is still in its beginning stages. Despite the accumulation of data, neuropsychiatrist Leslie Brothers (2001) points out that there is no central theory that brings a sense of unity to the various findings. Neuroscientist Steven Rose (2005) worries that we are still locked in a 19th-century worldview—what we call a “mechanistic paradigm”—that limits our ability to conceive of the brain’s complexity. And there is the question that has puzzled thinkers about thinking for centuries: “How is it that the physical brain gives rise to our subjective experience of mind?” This is called the “mind/ brain problem.”

Brothers (2001) laments the tendency of neuroscience to accept underlying concepts of the individual person as an entity separate from social context. She blames this largely unexamined assumption for preventing the solution of the mind/brain problem. Brothers suggests that solving this puzzle is hampered by assumptions from realms other than neuroscience itself, such as psychology’s emphasis on the individual. Brothers sees a way forward in social neuroscience, or the recognition that a major purpose of the human brain is to facilitate social communication. If neuroscientists can develop concepts and a language that is derived from brain science itself, they will be released from a major limitation on the development of the field.

Despite questions such as these, and despite how much more remains to be done, our experience indicates that there is great value in what has already been discovered about the brain. In particular, we see the resurgence of theory and research in brain science and the emergence of coaching as related: neuroscience has the potential to provide a solid platform for the practice of coaching.

Why Neuroscience and Coaching?

On the surface, a marriage between coaching and neuroscience seems incongruous. The image of the neuroscientist in a lab coat manipulating the latest imaging device is very different from that of a coach engaging with a client about how to improve relationships or performance. Yet collaboration between the two fields is expanding rapidly. The May 2007 inaugural meeting of the NeuroLeadership Summit, founded by David Rock, brought together business leaders, coaches, and neuroscientists to compare notes and plan ways to support one another. The International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations held a symposium on neuroscience and the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations published a special issue in 2006 on the subject. Presentations on neuroscience are becoming more common at coaching and business conferences, and organizations are offering training in brain-based coaching.

Not only can neuroscience support coaching, it is clear to us that our emerging profession has the potential to support the further development of neuroscience, for example in moving beyond the individualistic assumptions cited by Brothers (2001) as limiting the neuroscience perspective. It is our view that a coaching mind-set represents a shift from an individualistic to a contextual and social understanding that is part of a larger systemic paradigm shift, one that supports social cognitive neuroscience.

Furthermore, we believe that, in addition to being guided by curiosity and a desire to understand for its own sake, research in any field is also stimulated by questions that arise from the application of theories. Theories are “stories” that create coherent meaning from rigorous research. And, ultimately, theories are tested and proven useful (or not) when they are applied in the real world. By virtue of their common birth at the nexus of the mechanistic-to-systemic paradigm shift, coaching has the opportunity to apply neuroscience theories in practice and thus play its part in an application-research partnership. We believe that such a partnership has the potential to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and how we can fulfill our potential. We intend with this book to make a contribution to that inquiry.

In summary, this book claims that contemporary neuroscience is beginning to provide a scientific platform to support the practice of coaching. Coaching may be seen as one application of theory arising from neuroscience research. Both owe their current incarnations to the shift from a mechanistic to a systemic paradigm.

ORGANIZATION OF COACHING WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND

The remainder of this book explains and expands on these claims. The five major parts are each organized around a common question we human beings ask of ourselves and others:

• Who are we?

• How can we be healthy?

• Why do we do what we do?

• How can we feel better?

• How can we get along?

Within each part, answers to the question are addressed by three chapters reflecting our metaphor for the foundation of the practice of coaching:

• “Bedrock” consists of academic or professional fields in which coaching is historically embedded.

• A “pillar” is made up of current fields or practices that lift coaching above its mechanistic foundation.

• Neuroscience planks in a “platform” provide scientific and theoretical support for coaching and concludes with guides for coaches who wish to use neuroscience principles in their coaching practices.

The chapters themselves are written in response to a series of questions. Table I.1 shows the major parts, questions, and chapters.

You can read this book as it is organized, from part I through part V. Or, particularly if you are using this book in a classroom, you may want to address chapters vertically, grouping the Bedrock chapters 1, 4, 7, 10, and 13; then the Pillars chapters 2, 5, 8, 11, and 14; and finally the Neuroscience Platform chapters 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15. This is a more historical or chronological approach.

All or many of the topics in the Bedrock and Pillars chapters are likely to be familiar to coaches, some more than others: ontology, health practices, psychology, psychotherapy, and management theory as bedrock; systems theory, performance optimization, activating the mind, accentuate the positive, and leadership as pillars. For anyone who is familiar with the historical development of any of these fields, we have placed that information in identifiable sections that may be skipped or focused on. The Neuroscience Platform material—mindfulness, neuroplasticity, thinking, emotion, and NeuroLeadership—may not be so familiar to coaches.

We have set introductory stories, historical interludes, and examples in a different typeface for ease of identification.

Table 1.1 Structure and Outline of Coaching with the Brain in Mind

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE?

Modern neuroscience both depends on and transcends the worldview that held sway until the last half of the 20th century. Technological advances that enable scientists to see inside the brain—what had been considered an impenetrable “black box”—stimulated a new understanding of the brain, which is an example of a complex system. Neuroimaging devices developed during the final decades of the 20th century have allowed researchers to confirm many speculations about how the brain works and to discover things that had scarcely been imagined before.

The idea, almost a dogma as recently as a decade ago, that brain structure is fixed and unchangeable from childhood on has been replaced. “Neuroplasticity” is the term used for what is now indisputable: Many of the very structures of the brain can be modified by experience, even in adulthood. And even more astounding is “the notion that mind is using the brain to create itself” (Siegel, 2007a, p. 32). That is, we now know that how we think can modify the brain that we use to do our thinking. Coaching clients can learn to think in ways that change their capacity to feel, think, and act—and ultimately to shift who they are in the world.

When one of us (David) explained coaching to neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz (personal communication, May 2007), he responded, “Oh, I see what coaching is . . . it is a way of facilitating self-directed neuroplasticity.” The platform on which coaching rests is constructed from “planks” that illustrate why Schwartz made this statement.

Influenced by a computer analogy, late-20th-century researchers assumed the brain to be an information processor that does its work without reference to content or context. The brain was divided into sections, each with neuronal patterns that are specialized for their functions: seeing, hearing, talking, regulating bodily functions, or being the “executive” or boss of the brain.

Much of early brain research was concerned with identifying which parts of the brain control which functions and of finding “the seat of reason.” These efforts were made under technological and ethical constraints: The only way to examine the inside of a brain was after its user was dead, and scientists had to take advantage of accidents and illness to observe the effects of damage to parts of the brain in a living person. The exceptions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lobotomies are examples of questionable experiments under the guise of treatment that nonetheless provided information about brain function.

According to a strict mechanistic interpretation, the mind is determined by brain activity, in a one-way causal direction. The extreme interpretation of this view is that the mind can be pretty much ignored, for all the responsibility it has in directing behavior. Thus, mental activity is reduced to neuronal activity. If only we could observe its 100 billion neurons, each connecting to 5,000 to 10,000 others, we could understand the mind—a daunting assignment even in a Newtonian world. Despite all these limitations, the fascination with the brain by philosophical, medical, psychological, and psychiatric researchers yielded much of the bedrock upon which today’s neuroscience is founded.

Brain-shifting Discoveries

At the beginning of the 21st century, the systemic paradigm shift has combined with technological advances and interdisciplinary discoveries to create a new way of thinking about mind and brain, as stimulated by three discoveries:

1. Neuroplasticity. Discoveries based on new technology have revealed that adult brains are much more plastic—that is, capable of changing as a result of experience—than mechanistic assumptions previously allowed. These discoveries include:

a. The dependence of human brain development on attachment.

b. The capacity for adults to “earn secure attachment” even when they did not have it as children.

c. What the human brain must have, and other species do not have, in order to create, learn, and use language as we do.

d. The effects of successful psychotherapy and mindfulness practices on brain function and structure, not to mention mental and social life.

2. Brains as social organs. The idea that our thinking processes are coterminous with our own individual brains has been thoroughly criticized by Leslie Brothers (2001) and others (Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002). Brothers attributes the difficulty in solving the “mind-brain problem”—discovering the relationship between our subjective experiences (mind) and our physical bodies (brains)—to the acceptance by the public and even by neuroscientists themselves that the mind can be explained in terms of the individual brain. Brothers (1997) has contributed to new fields of social neuroscience and social cognitive neuroscience (Lieberman, 2007; Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001) that are confirming what some previously marginalized social scientists and attachment researchers have been insisting on: that we think outside our own individual brains (Page, 2006). This development is part of a systemic shift away from limiting our concept of a human being to the extreme individualism that characterizes Western culture. As Brothers (2001) puts it, our “neural machinery” “doesn’t produce mind; it enables participation” (p. 92).

3. Rediscovery of volition. Physics, the foundation of the mechanistic paradigm, has had to accept the alternative quantum “mechanics” because of the weight of scientific evidence. Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and other physicists discovered that the behavior of “stuff” at the subatomic level depended on the perspective and presence of an observer. Albert Einstein proposed a theory of relativity in which there is no such thing as absolute truth. He proved that light is both energy and matter. Mind and matter, subject and object were no longer separate.

Quantum theory is counterintuitive to the Western mind steeped in the mechanics of linear logic. How can something be true and not true, matter and not matter, at the same time? Not surprisingly, for most of the 20th century, the implications of quantum theory were largely ignored outside of physics and astronomy. Nevertheless, decades of experimentation have confirmed the predictions of quantum theorists. Physics has added its weight to the two related trends of postmodernism and globalization in bringing about a greater acceptance of systemic principles in the human sciences.

As a result of this new way of thinking about thinking, we are beginning to discover how, to paraphrase the title of Sharon Begley’s book (2007), we—with an emphasis on the social “we”—can train our minds to change our brains. Coaching emerged during the last two decades of the 20th century as the change practice that embodies this new paradigm. New discoveries reveal neuroscience more and more to be an exemplar of the systemic paradigm and an evidence base for coaching. In the Neuroscience Platform chapters, we survey the beginning of what we believe will provide that theoretical platform into the future.

Energy and Information

In order to introduce the Neuroscience Platform for coaching, let us begin by thinking of our lives as a process rather than a thing. In an abstract sense, our life is a flow of energy and information. The English language does not easily express process, given its tendency to turn ongoing, dynamic activity into a static, thing-like noun: Growing becomes growth, relating becomes relationship, exploring becomes exploration, and so on. At times in this book, we will use a more verb-like form, such as “minding” instead of “mind,” in order to remind ourselves that we are indeed talking about ongoing processes.

Like a river, our lives are continually changing. We are dynamic, always adjusting according to the demands of the social and physical environment, doing more or doing less, guided by the sense we make of our life, a “flowing” rather than a “flow.”

What do we mean by energy? This is a term that we use every day, yet defining what all the uses have in common is not easy. In simple terms like those our children learn in fourth-grade science class, energy is what makes things or processes active. As energy changes, something happens or ceases to happen. As our energy wanes, we get sleepy, and as we are refreshed, we become awake and active and get things done.

Energy is related to power, though it is not the same. As a simple example, if we think of energy as the amount of water in a bottle, power is how quickly it is poured out. Energy is what enables our activity; power is how effectively we use that activity.

What is information