insight dialogue – Vogel Wakefield

On getting it wrong

At its edges, the world of coaching is influenced by memes that originate in new age thinking. This isn’t entirely to be deprecated. Coaching’s porousness to diverse influences helps make it adaptive and less susceptible to the orthodoxy that eventually stifles professions. But occasionally an idea threatens to break through that needs to be stamped on if we are to maintain rigorous foundations for our work.

One such that I have encountered this year is the comforting notion that “you can’t get it wrong”. I think this translates as: “Don’t worry about messing up – there’s no single right way to do something, so just go ahead and imagine that the way you are doing it will meet the exigencies of the situation.”

I have come across this in relation to the practice of mindfulness and with respect to how to practice as a coach or supervisor. Before long, this kind of thinking will be infecting organisations and letting leaders off the hook for all sorts of things. The idea has a beguiling appeal and sounds like it’s in the same terrain as constructs that are helpful to dealing with a complex world. But, in fact, it’s opposed to them. Continue reading “On getting it wrong” →

How we work

Going deep in conversation with insight dialogue

By Martin Vogel

If I’m working with a group that is highly committed to improving the quality of relationship between them, I might reach for Insight Dialogue.

This is actually a meditation practice developed by Gregory Kramer, a meditation that is conducted in relationship with someone else. Its essence is that it interrupts the normal routine of conversation with deliberate pauses and reflections, so that we might connect with the perception that we hold that might otherwise lie just beneath conscious awareness.

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How we work

Mindfulness plus narrative awareness equals critique

By Martin Vogel

This is the third and final part in my series on being and doing in coaching. In Part 1, I explained how I draw on mindfulness and narrative awareness in my work. In Part 2, I discussed the symbiotic link between being and doing, and the challenge to bring more of a sense of being to our doing.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the critique of organisations that we have developed here: the idea that organisations could be less toxic places to work and could play a more positive role in addressing society’s problems. I don’t want to rehearse those arguments again but instead look at how they come out of the approach to coaching that I have been describing in this series. If coaching is, as I maintain, a way of facilitating unfamiliarity, it follows that it is potentially disruptive of the received wisdom in organisations – the things that are so taken for granted that it’s otherwise almost impossible to question them. By putting a premium on connecting with our embodied wisdom, our gut instincts and nagging doubts, it creates space to acknowledge the ways in which the things organisations ask of us might make us uneasy.

Where does received wisdom come from? Narrative theory tells us that it is shaped by the dominant culture of the age. In our age, the common sense is defined by neoliberalism: the idea that the market is the natural way to do things and, if we live with the consequences of the market, this will be better for everyone in the long run. More than that – and more pertinent to this conversation – it’s a common sense characterised by hyper-rationality in which the insights that comes from emotion, values and embodied wisdom count for little.

Continue reading “Mindfulness plus narrative awareness equals critique” →