Bruce Peltier’s eureka moment became a book that is now required reading for all executive coaches. But how did this West Point graduate become a renowned coaching psychologist?
Six years ago, as Bruce Peltier lay awake at 5am, the idea for a book on the psychology of executive coaching suddenly came to him, fully formed. “I jumped up, wrote the table of contents and knew it was publishable. I don’t normally believe in these sorts of things it was weird.” He was right, it was publishable. Today that book graces the bookshelves of most self-respecting executive coaches in the UK, and is required reading on most, if not all, coach-training programmes.
Its international success is very much down to its welcome practicality and accessibility and that’s no mean feat when you’re dealing with complex psychological theories such as existentialism.
Refreshingly, Peltier comes across as neither complacent nor arrogant about the book’s success or his renown as one of the big ‘honchos’ in coaching psychology. “I’m so pleased and pleasantly surprised,” he says. He does, however, acknowledge that everyone has specific things they are good at it’s just that his skills include teaching and writing. “I have a knack for taking complicated tasks and studying as much as I have to, then expressing them very clearly.”
Peltier is an executive coach and professor of psychology at the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry, California, where he coaches dentists in psycho-social skills, among other things. He also helps to rehabilitate doctors who have been struck off, does a lot of work around diversity and, for the past four years, has formed part of the i-coach academy’s faculty in the UK and South Africa, offering an introduction to psychological theories. As a “terrific follower, rather than a leader”, Peltier was drawn to work at the dentist school because its dean, Art Dugoni, was “the best leader I have ever encountered”. Working with Dugoni has been one of the major influences that have shaped who Peltier is and how he approaches his work.
Fit for life
Other influences include playing competitive sport; attending US military academy West Point; and his 30-year friendship with writer and mentor, John Vriend. Peltier no longer plays competitive sports, preferring to swim in the San Francisco bay a couple of times a week and take sports photos a source of great enjoyment for him. But he played baskeball for about 15 years, then golf and, like all athletes, was keen to learn how to improve. He did not encounter a good coach until late on, when he learned that “regular attention to the basics and repeated actions are the components of excellence”. Interestingly, he describes himself as a “choker”, someone who has trouble making
the big shot under pressure. He has learned first-hand the power of techniques such as positive imagery and cognitive therapy, which have served him well in tackling his nerves. “We’re talking about challenging and retraining the mind with images and words, and with the repetition of skills until they become automatic,” he says. Attending West Point, the US equivalent of Sandhurst in the UK, set Peltier off on a continuing journey of discovery into what makes good leadership. The young Peltier questioned whether the academy’s reputation as one of the great centres of leadership was merited, although he concedes it had “changed dramatically” when he revisited recently. “From the beginning, when they said they were teaching us about leadership, my impression was that they were actually training us to be obedient to be great followers, not leaders. This got me looking for the components of real leadership.”
Later, his contact with Dugoni became a major influence and “helped me sort out what makes good leadership”. Dugoni, who retired recently, was dean for 27 years and, according to Peltier, was acknowledged as one of the best leaders in the US: “Even when he was in his 70s, he would take copious notes in training sessions, trying to get even better at leadership.” Historically, Peltier explains, dentists in the US were trained in a harsh and punitive manner and not surprisingly, on graduation, they were loath to donate any money back to their training schools. Breaking the mould, Dugoni transformed this culture into one centred on a humanistic approach, in which people were treated with respect. Witnessing this transformation was powerful for Peltier. “It was a 180-degree culture change which we all got to watch. He did it by being a good role model, by repeating the message that people should treat each other with kindness and lots of respect.” Peltier’s interest in psychology had been sparked off when he was assigned by the US army to West Berlin in 1972–5 to do race relations training. For most, this would have been regarded a career killer but Peltier did not care about that. To him it seemed “terribly interesting”. For six hours a day, five days a week, over three years, he facilitated ‘encounter training’: in other words, very small groups being honest with each other. “I thought it was hard but it was actually exceptional and life-changing. It moved me down the political line from the centre to the far left and it was what first got me interested in psychology.”
This led him to take a Masters in Psychology with Wayne State Educational Psychology in Berlin. When he returned to the US, he was invited to join Wayne State University. For two years, he was involved in a project to desegregate Detroit which he admits was a “pretty big failure”. But around this time, he also met Vriend, professor of counselling at Wayne State, who became his best friend.
Peltier says that back in 1976, despite not having any background in psychology, Vriend was a pioneer, stressing the importance of what he called ‘self-talk’. “He meant the importance of what we tell ourselves. He studied writing and literature deeply, concluding that the most valid way to improve one’s life was to examine your assumptions, standards and attributions, your ‘sub-vocal speech’ as it is now known, which he just called ‘clear thinking’.” Peltier was intrigued by this clearly elucidated view. “It was totally refreshing,” he recalls. “He would banish psycho-babble which changed my view and encouraged me to become a cognitive therapist. I always chuckle when I hear about how cognitive behavioural therapy is all the rage when this guy was talking about the same thing back then, without getting any credit for it.”
The write way
Vriend encouraged Peltier to keep a daily journal and Peltier has written to Vriend most days and exchanged cassette recordings a few times a month, for the past 30 years. Sadly, these exchanges have now come to an end as Vriend is terminally ill, which Vriend describes in writerly fashion as “the circles getting tighter”. Apart from missing his friendship enormously, Peltier will miss Vriend’s high standards in writing; sloppiness is something Peltier has little tolerance for. It was with Vriend’s encouragement that Peltier studied and carried out research with Vriend’s psychologist friend John Krumboltz at Stanford University for two years, looking at how people choose their careers. He then did a post-doctoral internship in clinical psychology at the University of Southern California. Not surprisingly, Peltier believes the psychological underpinning to coaching is enormously important since “coaching is about the business of influencing and is essentially a psychological enterprise.”
He defines coaching thus: “The application in which one person with more skills and experience attempts to influence a client to enhance their future work and behaviour in their work/life.” Like the father of social psychology, Kurt Lewin, Peltier believes there is nothing as practical as a good theory: “I’m a theory guy and prefer to theorise than actually do anything. I understand that some people don’t like theory but if you don’t have structure, how do you know what to do next? I’m not a big believer in intuition.” He says he has never been much of a psychoanalyst either: “I tried and tried but I don’t think psycho-dynamically. And I think to apply psycho-dynamics to coaching is, at best, difficult although there are some important models including parallel process and defence mechanisms that are clearly valuable to coaching.”
His personal philosophy, he explains, is “existentialist, with a Buddhist flavour”. So how does this affect his coaching? “It’s like the air that I breathe. Existence precedes essence4 so that humans don’t have a fixed essence, we create essence with the next thing we do and there is no reason why we should stay the same.” “There is always the opportunity for people to change their essence as they go along and we have more freedom than we think. Coaching should be about encouraging choice, taking risks, making commitment to things we decide are important, taking responsibility for our choices and getting going, starting living and stopping just preparing for life.” There are Buddhist echoes in his world view: “You can’t expect to be happy all the time, life is full of suffering and difficulty and that’s fine.”
Peltier hopes to prepare a second edition of his book, adding a chapter on Gestalt therapy and its application to coaching. He has already been carried out much of the research for this. He would also like to add new chapters on recognising psycho-pathology and what to do about it as a coach – and another on systematically evaluating one’s work. He believes he has a good work/life balance with plenty of time to prepare sandwiches and find cell phones for his busy wife and still be able to read the newspapers and political journals avidly. Although he comments that he is “deeply distressed and disappointed” by current US politics. But while there is much he takes seriously, humour is a huge part of his life. “I don’t think anything is worth doing unless you can do it with humour. I tend to go overboard trying to do that in inappropriate ways: I’ve been told I have a strange sense of humour,” he says.
In keeping with his existentialist stance, a strong sense of the absurd is ever present: “One of your responsibilities as a human is to create meaning in your own way out of a life/condition of non-meaning, with no intrinsic meaning that anyone can discern. “I really do believe that the base of it all is that life is absurd, we didn’t ask to be born and we are going to die. It’s all pretty crazy.”
Curriculum Vitae
Bruce Peltier
Professor of psychology and ethics, University of the Pacific School of Dentistry
Management consultant/executive coach
Private-practice psychologist
Professor at the University of San Francisco
Education and training
1970 BS Engineering, US Military Academy, West Point
1974 MEd Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit
1979 PhD Counselling, Wayne State University, Detroit
1977–79 Research assistant, Stanford University
1979–80 Post-doctoral intern, University of Southern California
1994 Summer Institute, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University
1999 MBA, Eberhardt School of Business
References
- The Psychology of Executive Coaching: Theory and Application, Taylor & Francis (2000)
- Parallel process: “the notion that dynamics that occur in coaching mirror the dynamics that the executive client experiences in the regular world of work” (Peltier, B, 2000)
- “We use defence mechanisms to keep threatening feelings out of consciousness and painful thoughts out of awareness” (Peltier, B, 2000)
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1966)