Many companies know the true value of a healthy working environment. Coaches can help achieve it by being good listeners and by encouraging clients to trust their intuition in the workplace
By John Reynard
As coaches our role can include helping improve a company’s work environment, and/or helping individuals find work that fulfils them. Both of these goals – and others too – can be helped by creating a positive and creative culture at work.
Signs of a healthy culture
Positive cultures can be identified when:
- Problems get solved in surprisingly simple and practical ways
- Staff enjoy being at work, feel respected, honoured and stay longer in the company
- Managers are available to work strategically on the business
- Creativity is ignited and entirely new ideas emerge
However, such a culture can only exist when people genuinely feel they trust one another. If trust is low, then just as soon as anything untoward happens the negative ego, that part of us that is rooted in unresolved past hurt, takes charge. Misunderstandings occur, fear, short-sightedness and selfishness take the place of reason and poor decisions get made.
So how can you use your role as a coach to go about building trust and creating a positive culture at work?
Make it work
Attentive listening and ‘pacing’
As coaches and/or mentors, we’re trained to be good listeners and able to spontaneously feed back what we are hearing to clients. As we know, such ‘pacing’ or repeating back what has been heard is excellent practice because when people feel they have been listened to, they lay down their defences and open up to new ways of seeing things. In the work environment trust can be much enhanced by coaching our clients to build their capacity to listen attentively, and coaching them in ‘pacing’.
An example might be:
“Joe – I’d really like to understand you. Can I repeat back what I think you are saying and you can tell me whether or not I have got it right, and if not where I’m going wrong?”
Pacing calms down situations and brings deeper understanding. It is a listening exercise: you are not agreeing to whatever the other is
saying, but you are seeking to understand their situation.
Pacing is also a useful tool in the work environment with those who tend to be ‘Ah-But-ers’ – change-averse people who automatically object to new thinking. They are the ones who, just as soon as anything innovative is suggested, come up with a theory as to why it cannot work. Such people are, on some level, living in fear. When we make ourselves fully present and listen to them in an open way, they feel heard and supported and they begin to let down their barriers.
The effect can be so freeing and uplifting that they relax their resistance sufficiently to give the new idea a proper try. I have even seen cases where people have completely turned around and become strong advocates for whatever it was they were previously set against.
Trust our intuition
As coaches, we tend to have deep trust in our intuition and take heed of what it tells us. We can do a huge service to our clients when we coach them to nurture and follow their own.
Intuition enables us to make useful predictions in spite of incomplete information – and when do we ever have all the information, and make original decisions that bring about win-win solutions?
Unfortunately however, pressures at work, being hunched over a computer all day, not taking proper breaks and stress all dull down our intuition.
Coaches need to effectively convey that when we consciously decide to recognise and trust our intuition, it willingly and increasingly communicates to us and by allowing it space and giving it focus, we strengthen it. We nurture our intuition by regularly absorbing ourselves in activities that take us away from our routine thinking, out of our heads and into our bodies. This might be through walking in open country, running, horse riding, yoga or dancing to music – whatever works best.
The main criterion is that it be pleasurable and regular. It is when we get back to our true selves and feel relaxed and centred that we allow space for our intuition to come through.
Fatal flaws
Blaming outer circumstances
Blaming outside circumstances, such as a recession, government policy or cancelled orders disempowers us. We give away our potential to adapt and close ourselves off from seeing new opportunities. This happens at a subtle level, but the results are real. Instead, suggest your client or mentee asks themselves:
“With regard to [name the challenge] what do I need to learn from this situation?”
We may have to do this several times, but such self-enquiry helps release us from the prison in which we incarcerate ourselves when we blame outer circumstances. The answers may not in themselves be the ‘big idea’ we need to break through, but they will nudge us towards it.
Judging and criticising others
Projection is the involuntary reaction we experience when faced with something within ourselves that we don’t want to recognise. It is a remarkably subtle and involuntary ego defence mechanism. Its purpose is to avoid the fearful thoughts and feelings the conscious mind believes it cannot deal with. Rather than face what we perceive to be our negative traits, we blame them on others.
Projection comes into play when someone either says or does something that stirs up a lot of emotion within us. For example, if I get excessively upset by someone I judge to be arrogant, what is actually being brought to my attention is my discomfort around my own arrogance.
Maybe I’m uncomfortable at putting myself forward and always let others take centre stage. If this is the case when I meet someone who demonstrates arrogance I get upset because I’m being reminded of something within me I have yet to resolve.
We expend lots of energy in suppressing the aspects of ourselves we reject, but what we resist always persists. Far better, when we notice ourselves doing it, to check our thinking and ask ourselves:
“What is [name the person] reminding me of that is actually an aspect of my own personality I do not like?”
Again, we may have to do this several times, but the advantages are that we release ourselves from the projection and begin to see the other person in a new and positive light.
Attentive listening, trusting intuition, and resisting blaming external factors and judging others make all the difference in fostering a healthy positive culture at work. As coaches we are perfectly placed to help develop these capacities.
- John Reynard is a business coach, successful entrepreneur, author of The Spiritual Route to Entrepreneurial Success and founder of the School of Spiritual Entrepreneurship.
www.spiritedentrepreneur.com