Tatiana Bachkirova presents on developmental coaching at the British Psychological Society’s Second European Coaching Psychology Conference.
By Jennifer Liston-Smith
Oxford Brookes University’s Tatiana Bachkirova embraced the wish to clarify and the need to allow complexity in developmental coaching. Presenting at the British Psychological Society’s Second European Coaching Psychology Conference in December, Bachkirova shared a framework to allow developmental coaches to work with sweeping ideas but maintain “a grain of mystery.
According to Bachkirova, development is “a combination of changes in the organism manifested in a sustained increased capacity to engage with and influence environment and to look after internal needs and aspirations”.
To support such change, Bachkirova proposed that developmental coaches focus on enhancing the client’s quality of perception both internally and externally; deal with the unconscious, automatic, emotional mind and the body, and deal with the multiplicity of mini-selves.
She proposed that focusing on enhancing the quality of perception both internally and externally would enable the client to notice more in themselves and their environment, including their conditioning and self-deception.
The best way to help the client work with the unconscious, automatic, emotional mind and the body is to support their “self-system” in dealing with this creatively, including not controlling or submitting to it completely. As a way to understand this, Bachkirova shared Jonathan Hadit’s (2006) analogy of the small rider sitting on top of an elephant, able to steer it only when its own needs don’t get there first.
She said that the third area of focus, dealing with the multiplicity of mini-selves that are the reality of how human beings manifest across settings and moment by moment, is also about “helping the coachee’s self-system (narrator) to create a better synthesis of mini-selves.”
Given these, she said the task of the coach is to engage with whatever theme is presented, which may follow a fourfold pattern:
- Coaching towards a healthy ego
- Coaching the ego
- Coaching beyond the ego
- Coaching the soul
Further reading and resources
- For more BPS SGCP stories, see http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2010/02/28/how-do-we-coach-life-transitions/
- For more on Bachkirova’s work, see “Riding the elephant”, Coaching at Work at http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/12/09/riding-the-elephant/
- Bachkirova, T. (2009), “The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Coaching”, in Cox, Bachkirova & Clutterbuck (Eds.) The Complete Handbook of Coaching, London: Sage Haidt, J. (2006), The Happiness Hypothesis, London: Arrow Books