Working with the Grey Thinking tool to support a Cognitive Behavioural Coaching approach. Claudia Day reports
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Cognitive Behavioural Coaching teach that certain thoughts can be unhelpful and can lead to stress, anxiety, and sadness, as well as to unhelpful behaviours.
A series of common thinking errors have been identified where common patterns of unhelpful thinking occur. Given what we know about the connection between thoughts, emotions, and behaviour, and that changing negative thought patterns can lead to improvements in mental health, it can be helpful in coaching to seek to address these mental traps. It also means that the client can make a conscious decision about the behaviour they want to follow (Branch & Willson, 2016).
One example of these thinking errors is ‘mind reading’, where a person jumps to conclusions without having all the information. For example, assuming a person wasn’t interested in a presentation because they were looking at their phone, when in fact, they were simply searching for the definition of a word they didn’t understand.
Another example is ‘all-or-nothing thinking’, where a person assumes an extreme. The coach can identify this by listening for cues such as: ‘awful’, ’excellent’, ‘always’, ‘all’, ‘none’, and ‘never’. Other thinking traps include: ‘blame’, ‘personalisation’, ‘fortune-telling’, ‘emotional reasoning’, ‘minimisation’, ‘magnification’, ‘labelling’, ‘low frustration tolerance’, and ‘phoneyism’ or ‘Imposter’ (Palmer & Szymanska, 2019).
The Grey Thinking tool (Day, in Passmore et al, 2022) outlined below can help coaches work with clients on their cognitive distortions.
The Grey Thinking tool
During coaching sessions, clients would say things that indicated a thinking error. When exploring this, I found that the easiest way to challenge this, was to ask them what could be the other extreme, this would shift the perspective. Once they were viewing it from the other extreme, the options in the middle, which are the most likely to be true, would start coming into the picture.
When a coach encounters client thinking errors during a session, they can make note of these, and when appropriate, bring them up with the client. The coach and client can then work together to visualise a range of possibilities that the client might not be considering. The process starts by identifying the client’s current thought and marking it as one extreme. The client can then come up with the other extreme, followed by the options that are in-between.
This exercise can lead to a discussion about how different ways of thinking would trigger different behaviours. By exploring both extremes, the client can find a middle ground that they feel is optimal based on the emotions and behaviours that are more beneficial to them, and make an informed decision about how they want to respond.
Writing these thoughts down in a table can be helpful, but of course the best method will depend on the client’s preference. After the exercise, the client can rank their thoughts based on which impact them the most.
This tool also provides the client with the opportunity to evaluate their thinking and determine the accuracy of the extremes. This can be done between sessions. For example, if the client felt that their presentation was poor, they can review feedback that was provided by participants after the session, and they can talk to others to gain insights on areas for improvement, and gauge people’s reactions to it.
An example of this is provided in the table below.
Table 1: Example with another client returning from maternity and finding her way with her team
After this exercise, the coach can wrap up as usual by encouraging the client to reflect on their next steps. To facilitate this process, the coach can ask questions such as: ‘What is your plan for moving forward?’ ‘When do you plan to take your first step?’ ‘What potential obstacles do you anticipate?’ ‘How do you think you will feel after taking this step?’ ‘What resources or support systems can you utilise to help you succeed?’
The client’s perspective
Claudia and I had worked together for some time when she pointed out that in my thinking there was a grey area I could explore. To say that I resisted this is an understatement. What I recognised was that when agitated I felt more attached to binary points, like yes/no, right/wrong, x/y and I really, really struggled to stay off these points. They affected everything around me and all decisions I made. I justified poor decisions because I felt I was right, because these binary positions felt familiar and a place from which I could move on from any uncomfortable situation quite quickly … because a decision/viewpoint ha d been achieved and what else was there to discuss?
If necessary, I could actually spend a long time justifying my position, so I was really surprised when, for the first time in my life, someone took time and a patient approach, in encouraging me to look at the grey thinking I was missing.
Respecting my coach really helped, if it had been anyone else I would have found a way to shut down this nonsense quickly with just a few words. But this was Claudia and she is a kindred spirit in wanting the best outcome of any situation – so she wasn’t easily intimidated by my clever words.
“Let’s talk more about the grey space,” she said again and again and finally some realisation came to me.
“I don’t do grey” I said, “grey is death, its nothingness, it’s pointless”, and we began to understand that semantics was getting in the way. “Call it what you want … what would you call all the thinking between two points that we need to explore?”
And it took another couple of weeks for me to think about this … and I was able to get back to Claudia and say “Rainbow Space is what it is for me” – because it was pretty much a limitless space of colour and opportunity and I took the biggest of breaths as I started to get the point of the exercise.
Other terms flooded my mind, like “place of curiosity”, “space of stillness”, “place of flow”, as I started to have a visceral feeling of what it could be like to not take an immediate strong stance.
It was very uncomfortable. I realised I was conditioned, like most of us, to prize a particular position. “She’s so bold!”, “She knows what she wants!”, “She’s definite in her view!” These were attributes I had believed to be important and the flip side to the reflective leadership style I normally take.
It took a while to absorb that clinging to one viewpoint was getting me twisted into knots at times, but this was an important piece of information. Feeling safe in my new Rainbow Space, was uncomfortable but each time I went there I took a breath and surrendered to it. I felt more and more at ease and more able to see all the aspects and colours I’d been missing.
Fifty-five years of conditioning is hard to unravel, but it became really important to see Claudia regularly embed this new practice and talk through the many hiccups as well as celebrate the successes.
In time I began to feel more congruent as an individual, to be reflective with myself, as I am with all those around me. To hear in those close to me, where they may be missing the joys of the Rainbow Space at times when they were attached to just one point of view. This helped me immensely to learn more about myself and how, at times, I needed to grab on to the binary point for a time before being able to relax into the space of opportunity.
I still grab, but find, on the whole, I can unclench my fingers for long enough to let go – with some breath work and a reminder of recent successes. I physically feel my shoulders relax and have a sense of knowing all will be well. A hurdle is to remember this new way of internal processing and practice has been the only way of sustainably moving forward.
It’s not taken me long to reflect and share my thoughts on Grey Thinking, but the depth of impact of something so simple and obvious is immeasurable. What a gift – even if the wording was all wrong to start with!
- Benaifer Bhandari is a director in pure homeopathy and CEO at Hopscotch Women’s Centre. Hopscotch uplifts and empowers marginalised and racialised women in Camden and across London.
Additional thoughts
This tool can be compared to removing the blinkers from a horse’s eyes on a carriage, allowing the client to see the entire peripheral view and make informed decisions. In other forms of therapy, such as positive psychology, the concept of cognitive distortions or unhelpful thinking patterns may be referred to by different names. However, many of the same concepts and patterns of thinking are still addressed. For example, in positive psychology, the concept of ‘all-or-nothing thinking’ may be referred to as ‘black-and-white thinking’.
Conclusion
This tool is designed to help clients identify and address cognitive distortions by focusing on the extremes first, and then seeing what lies in the middle. The tool allows clients to test their thinking and move towards a more balanced perspective. The process allows the client to explore different behaviours that could arise from each thought.
An example is provided in the form of a table and a client’s personal experience is provided to illustrate the tool. The client’s story highlights the significance of establishing a strong coach-client relationship based on trust before utilising the tool, and the importance of adapting the tool to the client.
About the author
Claudia Day is co-founder of The Growing Coaches, a company focused on supporting coaches with their first 100 hours. For her coaching practice, she focuses on transitions coaching, specifically back-to-work. Prior to launching these companies, Claudia spent 15 years starting a family and working in multiple roles and industries across the globe. Claudia’s training includes an MSc in Coaching and Behavioural Change at Henley Business School and an MBA from MIT Sloan. She is accredited by the EMCC, and currently is part of the AC UK Leadership Team and on the advisory board of Vertinetik. She is also an editor of and contributor to WeCoach – a collaborative project with the Henley coaching community.
References and further information
- S Palmer and K Szymanska, ‘Cognitive Behavioural Coaching: An integrative approach’, in S Palmer and A Whybrow (eds.), Handbook of Coaching Psychology: A Guide for Practitioners (2nd ed). London: Routledge 2019
- R Branch and R Willson, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, 2016
- J Passmore, C Day, J Flower, M Grieve, and J Moon, Coaching tools: 101 Coaching tools and, techniques for executive, team coaches, mentors and supervisors: We Coach Volume 2. Libri Press, 2022