Association for Coaching UK annual conference, Edinburgh, 22 june, 2012
The only way we can bring about change in a client is by engaging with their brain – so we might as well do this on purpose, said clinical and organisational psychologist Professor Paul Brown.
“Everything that happens has a neurochemical basis to it … Every time we engage with a client we engage with their brain, it’s the only way we can effect change. If that’s true, why don’t we do it deliberately? This extraordinary thing we call the self is modified,” he said.
Brown said coaches don’t need to know everything about the brain to start using what they do know. He suggested starting with a “biographical enquiry”, developing an “understanding of a client’s early emotional patterning and the way that has played out through life”.
He said once you know the client’s history and the events attached to their emotional life, you can “hook (into) something” to get them on the right track.
“The brain does the work for you. You can’t get anything out of the brain that isn’t already in there… you grow the present from the past.”
He gave the example of a client who wanted to take more risk. This client didn’t have risk-taking in his system so Brown encouraged him to learn to fly.
He said the brain has no original templates, only possibilities, and ‘brain-based’ coach needs to help create a shift in possibilities. “Shifting to possibility, the brain can do anything.”
He said we might like the idea of change, but the brain hates it.
“Change is very hard because it equals danger; if it’s unknown it’s unsafe. He said relationship is the “key carrier signal between the coach and client for effecting any change or development”.
Brown prefers to talk about ‘intelligent emotion’ rather than ‘emotional intelligence’.
“Emotional intelligence can become a quantitative notion, whereas intelligent emotion is more dynamic.”
He said the common denominator is trust, on the same continuum as love.
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 5