Abstract
Coaching is about fostering personal freedom and in what way can the freedom of others be promoted. Coaching has been and continues to be an answer to this question. Those who dedicate many hours to explaining and teaching freedom, may find in it a way to help people learn how to live it. The objective of this work is to focus on the essential principles of coaching by showing how they foster the development of the human person. To do so this work underlines the next three items: (1) To explain what coaching is through what I hold to be its essential principles and elements; (2) To underscore some psychological roots; (3) To outline the anthropological elements that are at its foundation, on the basis of the aforementioned perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of these principles and criteria are shared by the major coaching associations at the global level. Besides the ICF I can mention the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC); International Association of Coaching (IAC); Worldwide Association of Business Coaches (WABC).
- 2.
I will not enter here into the specific distinctions between coaching, counseling, and mentoring.
- 3.
Here is meant the emotional and volitional dimension of the subject.
- 4.
In the same book, p. 6: “When great athletes were asked what they were thinking during their best performance, they universally declared that they weren’t thinking very much at all. They reported that their minds were quiet and focused. If they thought about their performance at all, it was before or after the activity itself. This was also true in my own experience as a tennis player. When I was playing at my best I was not trying to control my shots with self-instruction and evaluation. It was a much simpler process than that. I saw the ball clearly, chose where I wanted to hit it, and I let it happen.” p. 43: “If there is one thing that excellence in sports and excellence in work have in common, it can be summed up in a single phrase: focus of attention. Focus is the quintessential component of superior performance in every activity, no matter what the level of skill or the age of the performer.”
- 5.
In p. 5: “Change is viewed as a movement from bad to good, defined and initiated by someone other than the one who is making the change. It is done in a judgmental context that usually brings with it resistance, doubt, and fear of failure on the part of the student. Neither student nor teacher is likely to be aware that this approach to change undermines the student’s innate eagerness and responsibility for learning.”
- 6.
This implies that the other has confidence in himself, in his capacity to learn, and awareness of a multiplicity of ways to achieve the same end. Then he will be able to follow Gallwey’s instruction to use external models without being used by them.
- 7.
Polo underlines the importance of this immanence, highlighted by Aristotle as proper to every living being, with the exclusive specifities of the human being. Botturi explains the subject within the contemporary crisis of experience.
- 8.
In coaching, many tools are used, which will vary according to the skills and creativity of each coach; those that are outlined here are only those tools that are part of the essence of coaching itself and that all coaches, to be such, must put in place.
- 9.
The dialogical narrative element is central although I will not examine this point in this discussion.
- 10.
A key competency of the ICF is the ability to ask powerful questions. A question is powerful when it leads the client to clarity, to discovering new possibilities; when it opens horizons, helps him explore himself more, and challenge himself. It comes from active listening, from attention to the client’s whole person, not only to what he says but also what he reveals in his attitude, what is implicit in his statements.
- 11.
Active listening is a constant element throughout the coaching relationship; it is a capacity that requires much exercise and persistence and is an essential guarantee of the journey’s success. It is closely related to empathy, which will be treated further on.
- 12.
In fact, the coach can be challenging and demanding in helping the client achieve his goals precisely by virtue of his being in a relationship of empathy and trust.
- 13.
Le Doux acknowledges Rogers as a precursor of the contemporary psychology of self. The references to this book of Rogers are taken from the paragraphs of an ebook edition.
- 14.
Rogers writes: “The parent who is able (1) genuinely to accept these feelings of satisfaction experienced by the child, and (2) fully to accept the child who experiences them, and (3) at the same time to accept his or her own feeling that such behavior is unacceptable in the family […] The child in this relationship experiences no threat to his concept of himself as a loved person. He can experience fully and accept within himself and as a part of the himself his aggressive feelings towards his baby brother. He can experience fully the perception that his hitting behavior is not liked by the person who loves him. What he then does depends upon his conscious balancing of the elements in the situation—the strength of his feeling of aggression, the satisfactions he would gain from hitting the baby, the satisfactions he would gain from pleasing his parent.” (9334–48).
- 15.
E.g. the possibility that a parent, while accepting the sentiments of the child’s aggressiveness also has the ability to help the little one react to the cry of his little brother by helping to console him reconciling him with his little brother whom he is hurting; in this way, he offers the child greater reality and, precisely, the reality that causes his action in the other.
- 16.
The amygdala is a type of archive for emotional memory. The research of LeDoux and other neuroscientists seems now to indicate that the hippocampus, long considered the key structure of the limbic system, is involved in the registration and understanding of patterns of perception more than in emotional reactions. The main function of the hippocampus is to provide a detailed recollection of context, vital for emotional significance; it is the hippocampus that recognizes the different meaning of a bear seen at the zoo or in the yard at home. While the hippocampus recalls the bare facts, the amygdala retains the emotional savor, so to speak. The hippocampus is essential to recognize the face of one’s cousin, but it is the amygdala that will add the fact that she is nice. Without going into the details of neural explanations of how the brain works, and in particular, the amygdala, it suffices to report here that our brain has two mnemonic systems, one for ordinary facts, and the other for those that have an emotional value. The activation of the amygdala seems to more strongly impress upon the memory the majority of moments characterized by emotional awakening; the more intense the awakening of the amygdala, the stronger the impression of the memory; life experiences that wound or frighten us most are destined to become our most indelible memories. Now, the amygdala works by association; it analyzes the experience, comparing what is happening in the present with what has already happened in the past. Its method of comparison is associative: when the present and past situations have a similar key element, the amygdala identifies it as an association. That is why this circuit is sloppy; it acts without a full confirmation. It hastily commands us to react to a present situation according to procedures laid down a very long time ago, with thoughts, emotions, and reactions learned in response to perhaps only vaguely similar events—and yet similar enough to alarm the amygdala. The amygdala matures very quickly in a child’s brain and at birth is much closer to complete development than other structures. LeDoux appeals to the role of the amygdala in childhood to confirm the fundamental psychological principle referred to above, namely, that the interactions experienced in the earliest years of life would give a series of emotional lessons based on the harmony and contrasts between the child and his caregiver. He believes that these lessons are very powerful and, at the same time, so difficult to understand from the perspective of an adult, because they have been archived in the amygdala as programs of emotional life that are still unrefined and nonverbal. Since these earliest emotional memories are fixed in the memory at a time in which children do not yet have words to describe their experiences, when they are recalled later in the future, it is not possible to associate any set of articulated thoughts about the response that prevails. Therefore, one of the reasons that explain why we are so disconcerted by our emotional outbursts is that they often have their roots in a very early period of our lives, when things astounded us but we did not yet have words to describe them.
- 17.
The work offers a closer examination of what follows.
- 18.
As Damasio has explained, feelings are essential in the decision-making processes of the rational mind; they guide us in the right direction, where pure logic then proves extremely useful. Reality often presents us with a range of very difficult choices (how to invest, whom to marry); in these cases the emotional lessons given by life send signals that restrict the range of decisions, eliminating some options and highlighting others from the beginning. In this way, according to Damasio, the emotional brain is involved in reasoning precisely as the thinking brain. Emotions thus have an important role for the purposes of rationality. At the same time, the emotion that guides and weighs on the choice is nevertheless made aware and dominated intellectually; emotion does not have an upper hand over choice, otherwise it would not be free. The case of Elliot, studied by Antonio Damasio, is an interesting example of how without feelings and the awareness of them, the subject is incapable of choices, even the most trivial ones. When Damasio tried to choose a day and time for his next appointment, the result was a chaos of indecision: Elliot found arguments for and against every time and date that Damasio proposed without being able to decide. On a rational level there were perfectly valid reasons to accept or reject whichever time. But Elliot did not have the perception of his feelings with regard to them; and lacking that awareness, he was incapable of self-determination. Decisions cannot be made from plain rationality; they also require the contribution of gut feelings and that emotional wisdom that arises from past experiences. Formal logic alone can never serve as a basis for deciding whom to marry, whom to trust, nor even what job to choose; these are fields in which reason, if not assisted by feeling, is blind. In these moments, the intuitive signals that guide us come in the form of impulses from deep within and are regulated by the limbic system: Damasio calls them somatic markers; a somatic marker is a type of automatic alarm, which usually attracts attention to a potential danger of an action that is in progress. Very often these markers distract us from a choice that is discouraged by experience, but they can also alert us in the face of a golden opportunity. Usually in that moment we do not recall what specific experience has generated a negative feeling in us; all we need is a signal that a certain course of action could prove to be disastrous. Every time a gut feeling appears, we can immediately abandon a certain path or continue on it with greater security by reducing the range of available choices to a more manageable one. The key to probing our personal decision-making processes is therefore being in tune with our own feelings.
- 19.
The existence of triangular desire as a natural and proper part of human existence was discovered by Girard in the observation of some almost pathological deviations of this desire. He primarily begins to show, in the literary texts of great authors, a singular dynamic of rivalry present in the characters that favors the development of the stories told, and from there he arrives at the understanding of the existence of a triangular desire which is the same structure of every human desire. The proposed summary of Girard’s concept of mimetic desire is the final result he has of this concept, such as we find in his more mature works.
- 20.
Without going into the theme specifically here, it suffices to point out the article of Garrels. This work offers an interesting summary of the most recent studies on mirror neurons and on developments of the theory of mind in relation to the findings of Girard.
- 21.
Even culture is transmitted due to the imitative desire that is, in some way, as has been said, trust-related, and in this positive sense. We trust that the other will seize the good in reality.
- 22.
Recall Aquinas’ conception according to which man per se always tends to the good.
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Bergamino, F. (2018). Coaching for the Development of the Human Person: History and Anthropological Foundations. In: Mercado, J. (eds) Personal Flourishing in Organizations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57702-9_8
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