A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Coaching

Speaker A I come from a counseling and psychotherapy background and practice and I discovered Elliot many years ago, back in the late actually at that time another incarnation. I was an in house psychologist with a big mining and smelting company doing all sorts of green OD stuff, great team building. But once I discovered Elliott, I just couldn't do it anymore. And I was unsuccessful at reprogramming the executives at the company. So I shifted outside and set up a counseling practice and provided EAP services to that big organization. They contracted with me immediately. My manager's statement was, you're making an offer we can't refuse. This was just the early days of EAP stuff. And so I knew the company, I knew the community, and I was going to be outside so at arm's length to them. So this sort of fit with that model perfectly. And then mental health contracted with me. I was very active in the community. So it was sort of an ideal, in a way, opportunity to work with the principles of Stratified systems theory in a very broad sense, not just within organizations, but also within families and with people in other institutions, sort of of all sorts. And to really see in a person's life how often their problems are due to not being able to function at their appropriate capacity and not being able to integrate that across the different levels of their thinking. And with that sort of background, I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of people who thought they were having emotional problems due to their own personal historical things, when in fact it was issues related to the lack of requisiteness in their their companies. And usually I'd sort of go back and forth between these two things and able to really, in my mind, be doing a social experiment on my own of sort of validating and testing the Ro principles and their actual. Validity and the from a therapy point of view, what I found was that to the degree that an institution workplace is nonrequisite, a person is being triggered continually to, in a sense, re experience the lack of requisiteness. If we will in their families where the parents didn't actually parent adequately and the various roles that children had to adopt to play their part and often fill the void that the parent wasn't playing. So we have the child parenting the parent. We have the eldest child developing this tremendous ability to be responsible when they're quite young, but they really aren't old enough yet to fill the void that's being left by the parent, not parent adequately. So we get this and I'm just picking on this for the moment as illustration, the eldest child grows up and we often look to our eldest children to be the leaders and various things. They sort of naturally do it. They get themselves in a nonrequisite situation and sure enough they find themselves trying to fill a void of a manager that's supposed to be at a higher stratum that really isn't. They again, almost naturally gravitate to that family, recreating the family situation where they're in a Stratum Two job and they've got a Stratum Two manager and they're up there trying to do the Stratum Three work because there's a void there, even though well, and often they do have the capacity to do it. But they've got themselves locked into a Stratum Two job, defined the Stratum two. They're trying to fill the role of the other, and hence they find themselves being triggered to have the same emotional experiences that they had in their childhood. Again, they feel abandoned and alone and frustrated and have to be bossy and tough or whatever they had to do in childhood to survive. They find themselves doing it again in their adult work situation which is from a therapeutic sense. What we tend to do in this almost magical way is we recreate in our adulthood situations that are repetitions of our childhood. Sort of the basic psychoelectric principle, really, I found, by working with people to get them to realize that they've done that. And now this supposed manager that they're having all this trouble with is actually a representative of their childhood parent or parental situation that with that awareness and the working through of the childhood situation that suddenly what seemed to be a great problem at work just dissolves. And often sort of seemingly in the cases I've been working with, the situation may not actually be changed in the company. And since I haven't been in a position to be doing that, of working with the companies, just by a person understanding that, seeing the perspective of it, often the tension goes away and they're able to function much more fully and often able to let themselves leave that situation and find a more appropriate workplace. Which probably fits in closer to what I think from what I've read and heard, a lot of more formal coaching things are done where a person is guided and almost sort of encouraged and motivated to get out of a situation that might not be appropriate for them. And I think what I've been doing is having that same kind of effect happening but more simply from the simply not so simply from the awareness of the person's own survival patterns, from their basically they're therapeutic as they work through their childhood difficulties. So just how that fits in with what other people are doing as coaching, I'm curious sort of that's my interest right now is to sort of get that interface. And I think a lot of people doing coaching have come from a psychotherapy background and often have sort of shifted themselves out of their formal psychotherapeutic roles and are moving into the coaching role. And just where that interface is, is something I'm very interested in finding out and I'm looking forward to finding some of that out from these other two gentlemen. That I think. And I don't know yet because I don't know them very well. Haven't heard from them, but they're more formally involved and get involved on a contractual basis with companies to provide coaching for a certain period of time and sort of as Michelle was talking about. Because, again, my work has not been on a contractual basis with companies. It's been with people referred by the companies or just from other people that know me. Self referrals, coming for counseling for personal problems. It's quite delightful at times in my article and in the book, if you happen to read it, I give you one illustration of a Stratum Four engineer, very bright, very creative, very academic, stuck in a work situation where he was development engineer, assigned to a plant in a mining and smelting company. And he was expected to function consensually with Stratum Three plant superintendent, Stratum Two foreman, and have regular Monday morning meetings. And the group of them discuss everything and meet minds and agree. And this guy had some brilliant ideas about changing process, very appropriate Stratum Four stuff. And the other guys were always mad with him, Adam, because he wouldn't focus on their operational issues, they considered him not a team player, et cetera. And he started getting quotes in the psychological jargon, depressed and found his way to me. And once I was able to just illustrate this and lay it all out, boom, boom, boom, the lights went on. Then he could go to his meetings, not try to convince, pass down his ideas to the other people in the meetings and also and not feel guilty that he wasn't. And within a few weeks, the meetings just sort of dissipated the emotional intensity that seemed to be what was holding the meetings together almost wasn't there anymore. And then the superintendent just sort of didn't get a meeting called and within a few weeks they weren't having the meetings. And the next thing, lo and behold, this guy is connected with the university and he's off on a special project. And they've got a university prof in working with them, and they're doing some high level developmental work. Genuinely. On the process. It so that's sort of an illustration that was sort of a really peachy case that sort of illustrates how these sort of two things can go back and forth together.