Coaching can help clients manage transitions and loss including at the end of our and our loved ones’ lives. Naomi Craft and Sue Morrison report
Our colleague and former chair of the Association for Coaching (AC) UK Gill Smith talked openly and courageously about her cancer diagnosis last year in Coaching at Work and at the last AC conference: what an inspiration. How good it would be if more people had the skills and courage to have these sorts of conversations. We believe coaching can play a central role in enabling this.
We all experience loss in our lives and it comes in many forms: divorce, redundancy, loss of our health and death of friends or family members. It’s an individual experience and can be a smooth or bumpy road, sometimes both at different times and always uncertain – a rollercoaster of emotions. As was the case with ‘Jean’, (see below), many find significant loss an unsettling, frightening and solitary experience, and communication can be difficult. There is also usually an impact on our professional as well as our personal lives. This was Jean’s experience.
In our working environment many of our thoughts and feelings are likely to be hidden while we distract ourselves by ‘just getting on with work’ and we may find it too awkward or embarrassing to open up a conversation with our colleagues about it or they with us.
Of course, organisational culture is full of change and loss, but often more attention is paid to the outcome of these events rather than to the process. So, how can we support ourselves and colleagues around loss in the workplace? How can we create environments that enable us to talk about loss?
Conversations
Coaching conversations can generate an emotionally intelligent workplace that can respond to each individual’s context. We live in a society where we can talk quite easily about sex and money, but there still tends to be a shroud of secrecy and perhaps shame about ill-health, bereavement and dying. Recent reports from the British Medical Association1 and Marie Curie Foundation2 have highlighted that even healthcare professionals working in these areas need to improve their communication skills. The General Medical Council asks: “What is good communication in end of life care?”3
We both work in the healthcare sector where, amid the pursuit of health and wellness, death can be seen, consciously or unconsciously, as a ‘failure’. Anecdotally, we hear that healthcare colleagues may be more familiar with adjusting syringe drivers to administer pharmaceutical pain relief, or ensuring a safety protocol or checklist has been completed, than having a supportive, comforting conversation to relieve emotional pain.
There is good evidence that the right kind of conversation can significantly reduce the need for drugs and other interventions.4 In an increasingly secular society, there are also fewer hospital and hospice chaplains who have historically been available for conversations about serious loss and death. And of course, this difficulty in having conversations about serious loss is reflected in lay settings, too.
Jean – a case study
In Jean’s case, coaching-style conversations could have made all the difference. Her father had recently died after a long terminal illness. She hadn’t felt able to talk with her colleagues about her situation, before or after her father died. She didn’t feel able to take time off from her job and had been going to work in a robotic way.
She didn’t feel comfortable talking about her grief, worrying about other people’s reactions, as well as her own. She couldn’t process her grief properly because she was either holding back or ignoring her thoughts and feelings, getting on with her job as well as she could. However, it seemed harder and harder to concentrate, and she would find herself irritable, unable to complete tasks, ruminating and distracted. She subsequently had to take months off work. Had she had suitable coaching earlier, she could have received the support she needed at the right time.
Roger, on the other hand, did get the support he needed from coaching. Anticipating the imminent death of his wife, thanks to coaching, Roger was able to talk at length with his partners at work and plan for managing his loss in the workplace. It was then easier all round when his wife died: he had been offered six months off, but because there was no pressure to return and he was able to have honest conversations with his colleagues, he was able to return after two months.
How does it work?
Coaching for loss and end of life is a way of caring which recognises the patient/client is the expert in their own care. But it differs from life coaching and executive coaching in that there is a bigger need for a mentoring element that reassures the client about the range of ‘normal’ experience in a first serious loss. This normalisation feedback can be called Wrap Around Coaching. The grieving client needs to recover as well as discover and the coach needs to be particularly skilled in creating a safe space in which the client can tell their story.
While the traditional models of grieving tend to be linear, as in Kübler-Ross’s classic book5, grief is more often a turbulent rollercoaster of emotions, as mentioned earlier. Coaching can be a helpful approach for someone who is grieving to work through their sadness with an active mourning process. As Don Eisenhauer, an American pastor and International Coach Federation accredited Professional Certified Coach who trains and writes about Coaching at the End of Life (CEOL) in the US says, “If you want to live well, you have to mourn well.”6
We are executive coaches and GP trainers with extensive educational and coaching experience. We bring a felt personal and professional knowledge to CEOL and are committed to helping others develop skills in a coaching attitude to serious loss.
We offer training in End of Life Care, developing communication skills around grieving and dying for practitioners, patients and their families/carers and networks. The intention is to offer structured support for both the practitioner and the grieving or dying, to build resilience in both through working individually or in a group. We can also work with organisations to help them create a working culture where it is safe to talk about loss and grief.
There is much coaches can do to improve their confidence in having end of life conversations and develop increased resilience in working with loss, without having to have any previous experience of being with people who are grieving or dying.
Hopefully, more of us will follow Gill’s example.
Top Tips: Coaching around mortality and end of life
- In order to coach others, we need to feel at ease with our own mortality
- Coachees facing mortality and loss do not need to be fixed
- Grief and loss is not a linear process, rather an emotional rollercoaster
- We need to be coach-mentors, giving feedback about the range of others’ ‘normal’ experience of grief and loss
- We don’t ‘get through’ grief, we learn to live alongside it in a new ‘normal’
Find out more
For more information about Introductory days and one-day training in Coaching for Loss, Grief and Bereavement, and Coaching for End of Life and Dying, contact the authors:
- Dr Naomi Craft
naomi.craft@blueyonder.co.uk
Dr Sue Morrison
suecmorrison@btinternet.com - Website: CoachDoc.webly.com
References
1 British Medical Association, End-of-Life Care and Physician-Assisted Dying: Part 3, Reflections And Recommendations. London: BMA, 2016
2 A Long and Winding Road: Improving Communication With Patients in the NHS. London: NHS with Marie Curie, 2016
3 GMC, Talking about End of Life Care: www.gmc-uk.org/guidance/28965.asp
4 A Gawande, Being Mortal. London: Wellcome Collection with Profile Books, 2014
5 E Kübler-Ross, On Death & Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families, New York: Macmillan, 1994
6 D Eisenhauer, Coaching at End of Life – Boldly Going Where Most Don’t Want, Yet Someday All Will, Coaching at End of Life webinar 1 April 2016