Stuck
Executive coaching for me is about learning, realising and/or gaining insights, converting that learning into development, and converting the development into change that lasts. Clients who work with me want to change something about their own thinking and behaviours (and therefore the results they create), and / or they want something in their roles, careers or leadership to change. Sometimes, as much as they want to change – and are sometimes desperate for change – they remain stuck in their existing patterns.
Whatever it is that’s attractive enough to hold on to could be, amongst other things, about a quest (conscious or unconscious) for vindication or justification by staying in the same place, a holding on to a sense of identity, a de-energising inertia, an attachment to one or more unquestioned assumptions, and / or fear, whether of the known or the unknown. People may not even see themselves as stuck: it just feels familiar, whether comfortably familiar or uncomfortably familiar.
For people in this position, the discomfort, or even chaos, of what’s known or familiar, is more attractive than the uncertainty of what’s new and different and unknown – and inevitably uncertain (thank you, Carole Osterweil, for summing that up so succinctly in our recent conversation).
There is a variety of approaches that a coach might use to facilitate people to move through their stuckness. Amongst the best known is Immunity to Change, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey , which offers a means of change by stepping back to take a more objective view of one’s own mental operating model, and to perceive more easily what it is about the living of that model that sustains the stuckness – and particularly the tensions that inhibit change happening in practice.
I also like the Gestalt approach and its paradoxical theory of change: the idea that change will happen when we most fully inhabit the facts and reality of where we are now. It does sound paradoxical – but it works. It rests on becoming more acutely aware of what is happening in the present moment, in terms of thinking, physical sensations, impulses to move and direction of energy, emotions.
These, and other approaches can be effective in facilitating people to enact and implement the changes they want.
I’m interested too in the processes that may be going on while an individual is experiencing stuckness and is aware that they aren’t much nearer the change they want and are aiming for: what effect does the emotional experience of the stuckness have, for them, at the same time as they are aware of, and perhaps even working on, change?
My experience of clients in this position includes some who become frustrated, lose confidence in themselves, or despair of being able to change in the ways they want. Others (a smaller group) become more determined, step back, take a fresh perspective and build motivation. A third group, perhaps most fruitfully of all, becomes more curious about what’s going on in their emotional, somatic and cognitive experience of not changing. I’ve witnessed that curiosity alone seeding change: the client gives themselves the freedom to explore more fully, and importantly, doesn’t get attached to any particular path or any particular possible way forward.
The freedom they allow themselves maximises the opportunity to diminish judgment, expectation, pressure or panic. I see people who are curious engaging with uncertainty with what seems like greater courage, more clarity, and certainly greater confidence. They let go of the fear of nothing changing as well as the fear of something (perhaps as yet unknown) changing. They become untangled from over-thinking, and unstuck and released from a sense of going round in useless and tiring circles. It’s a joy to witness: like a new leaf unfurling and growing.
Photo by Simon Gibson on Unsplash
