How do you coach to the positive in extreme negative situations? Eric Foley and Richard E Boyatzis help two defectors from North Korea make sense of their past, and their future.
| Mr Bae, a North Korean, sat in jail for 13 months, without charge, as a possible traitor, while the North Korean authorities investigated him. As a free man, Mr Bae’s flashbacks became less frequent, but were always unnerving. Typically, he would be walking down the street or reading, when suddenly he would be back in cell 436, wondering if he would ever see his wife and daughter again. Fortunately, his story checked out and he was released. But when his wife first saw him at the police station, she said he looked “like an old pumpkin – bruised and beaten”. He shared how people had starved to death in the station. They had all been made to sit on a cold floor in one position all day long, from morning until 10pm. However, the couple were to learn that, once free, the life of the defector does not get any easier. Mr and Mrs Bae’s families had migrated to China from North Korea, then fled back there in At the time of Mr Bae’s release, their daughter had begun to manifest skills in healing. Even though she did not study formally, she was able to heal through traditional medicine. It wasn’t possible for her to become a doctor in North Korea, so the family decided to leave. After a harrowing defection across China to a Korean embassy in Southeast Asia, they flew to South Korea. Mr Bae is now 52 and his wife 50. He works at a car wash. They are regularly asked by the South Korean government’s Ministry of Unification to speak to South Korean churches and civic groups about the repression they experienced in North Korea as underground Christians. As part of their socialisation, they receive coaching as well as intense efforts to address the basic needs of food, housing and education. But freedom has its price. In North Korea, the couple had government-provided housing, jobs and healthcare. And, oddly enough, much better air quality than in South Korea. The coaching When the Baes came to us, they were weary. Within five minutes of our meeting, they had described Mr Bae’s haemorrhoids and Mrs Bae’s stomach ailments and eye surgery. They lamented that they had to spend the equivalent of $100 a day on special herbal treatments for their health. It was as if they were nostalgic about North Korea. They were not only escaping from what we call the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA), yet spent much of every day living in it, but part of their work was to get others into the NEA too. This may have been why they sat up abruptly when I began by asking them a question they later told me they had never been asked before: “Tell me about happy memories from your time in both North Korea and South Korea.” They exchanged puzzled glances and the briefest of cautious smiles, before turning back to me with poker faces. It was as if I had asked them to share some delicious secret and that, just by asking, I had revealed my membership of a tiny fraternity: those who were willing to believe that North Korea was capable of producing moments of happiness, even among its most oppressed. They began to share with me, at first with great hesitation and guarded body language, but gradually with increasing ease, including more and more effusive gestures, about moments of happiness that might confuse, rather than delight, Westerners. Mr Bae talked about becoming a member of the Communist Party in his youth, how hard it was given his family’s background, and how excited he was to be inducted since this meant he could marry well and provide a better life for his children. Mrs Bae spoke with great animation about how she was teaching high school literature about the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. She would write letters of recommendation for young male students from poor families to help them get selected to serve in North Korea’s elite military troops. Soon they were flying along in the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) with bright smiles, broad gestures, laughter and by finishing each other’s sentences. If anyone was slipping into the NEA, it was me. How could their happiest memories be ones in passionate support of the state that had imprisoned him and deceived Mrs Bae into teaching nonsense to a generation of youth? This is an example of coaching with compassion – coaching to the PEA. In contrast, coaches and managers still often coach for compliance – to the NEA. When coaching to the PEA, you focus on the person’s dreams, values, gratitude, even playfulness. It has the effect of activating neural circuits and endocrines that invoke a cognitive, perceptual and emotional openness. The person being coached is physiologically and then psychologically prepared to consider new ideas. We know that giving someone ideas as to what they ‘should’ do and how they should ‘change’ to be more effective, often has the opposite effect, arousing defensiveness and closing down the person. Marital tag team Mr and Mrs Bae insisted on being coached together. It provided an opportunity for positive emotional contagion to work in favour of a more inspirational session. Of course, it could have gone the other way. Though I would direct a question to one or the other, they would look at each other before answering, and decide who would start the response. They were cautious, having lived for so long in a repressive, political state. A point would come, in almost every response, when the person responding would falter, drift into sadness, or simply stop, as if reaching an emotional traffic light. At that point the other would pick up the narrative seamlessly, typically making physical, but not visual contact – a hand squeeze, a pat on the shoulder – before continuing, with positive emotion, often with a tease. Once, when his wife began to struggle as she shared a story about a young man who had stolen her socks, but whom she still chose to help, Mr Bae said, “Meeting me was her happiest moment!” Later, Mrs Bae said, “Everyone knew he was a good man,” as her husband’s voice cracked when he mentioned his 13 months in prison. Once they were guided into PEA through that initial question, they sustained each other. The ‘ideal self’ The ravages of Mr Bae’s time in jail and Mrs Bae’s defection are apparent in their bodies. Mr Bae has had multiple surgeries to manage his haemorrhoids so he can continue to work at the car wash to save for his daughter’s education. Mrs Bae’s speaking engagements drain her for weeks – a bodily consequence, perhaps, of publicly reliving NEA. They learned recently that the North Korean authorities had executed Mr Bae’s parents. Despite these seemingly insurmountable daily obstacles, they press on towards their dream of putting their daughter through medical school and building a clinic for her practice. A personal vision (articulated Ideal Self) gains power and momentum when a couple share their vision. Mr Bae’s parents sensed their time was short, and that their son and his family had to defect to protect the family’s next-generation gift. In this sense, they did not so much escape from North Korea as they were drawn to South Korea by the realisation that that was where they needed to go for their vision to become reality. A concluding thought “I have this mind that what happened in my life was not easy and could not happen without God, so I keep thanking God for what he has done in my life. And because he is with us in my life, I believe our dream will come true,” said Mrs Bae, when I asked her how she felt about the coaching. She saw our session as another of God’s myriad ways of refocusing them – away from the smog, the bodily aches and pains, and the cost of medicine – back to the dream. As our session progressed, Mr and Mrs Bae’s dream moved me back into PEA too. I began to understand that they experienced with happiness Mr Bae’s entry into the Communist Party and Mrs Bae’s preparation of soldiers for Kim Il-sung, not in spite of the difficulties they had faced, but because this was their life, and all of it had been required to lead them to the dream. Coaching with compassion made it possible for me to enter into their PEA as a guest, even if they had somehow needed the nudge of my questions to remind them that it was still there. n |
© Eric Foley and Richard E Boyatzis