Conference roundup – British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy Coaching Division inaugural conference, London, 17 June
By Jane Campion
Coaches will have no credence in the next 10 to 15 years unless they have real knowledge about how the brain works, warned Paul Brown.
Brown, visiting professor, organisational neuroscience, at London South Bank University UK, said: “We are at an extraordinary, profoundly important turning point in history, in a profession where the excitement should be as high as in Newton’s day, when the world was changing and we could think about the future in a new way.”
Brown pointed out that no professional group has yet claimed neuroscience as their base, but that coaching “gets it”.
“Coaching has an understanding of the person. The coaching relationship is now a known, key mechanism in impacting people’s neuroplasticity.”
We need to help companies understand how coaching changes behaviour via the relationship with the coach, by establishing limbic resonance through trust, which allows the amygdala to quieten. New pathways and connections are created, which emerge as new behaviour, he said.
Performance anxiety is so terrible because of the huge demands organisations make on people to perform, while keeping them under high levels of stress, he explained.
“It’s like trying to race while keeping a foot on the brake, revving and braking at the same time, which will burn the engine out. Meanwhile, the one thing that can make us secure – relationship – has been recreated as a source of stress.
“In our schools, teachers are no longer allowed to comfort distressed children. The natural human processes designed to build resilience in us are being outlawed. In the workplace, we have created legislation to force people to be scared of relationships. Our anxiety has pathologised and elevated people’s mistakes into formal complaints. So we can’t repair ourselves in the normal way.
“Our challenge as coaches is how to get energy and joy flowing in a way that serves. It’s also a leader’s challenge to be reciprocally engaged with people, so they can communicate into the system, so that people feel them and follow them. In the short term, they can shout, but this isn’t sustainable except in the Alan Sugar view of the universe,” he said.
He distilled leadership as follows: “Connect; be courageous; be clever enough; walk your own talk; inspire others into action and be worth following so that other people’s limbic systems say you are worth trusting.”
Brown’s model for brain-based coaching focuses on: biography; relationship with the coach; applying models that help people change habits in corporate and daily life; integration of differentiated parts to prevent chaos or rigidity, and new discoveries “working with” complexity.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 5