Recently, my co-researchers, Tatiana Bachkirova and Adrian Myers, and I completed research funded by a grant from Harvard’s Institute of Coaching. Under this grant, we developed an 80 item instrument that can be used to describe what happens in a coaching session.
One of the most common sources of misunderstandings and fights in the couples I see comes from an assumption that our partner is understanding what we communicate the way we intend them to understand it. You may be familiar with a game called “telephone”, in which a message gets passed orally from one person to another – often, the message has been completely transformed by the time it reaches the last person.
Welcome to the first installment of a new series of articles on how to improve your relationship with someone you love.
How many times have you had a fight about something and thought “Why did we fight about that? Why was it such a big deal?” Often, we wonder why something makes our partner so upset. Sometimes, we wonder why something makes us so upset.
Another year, another set of new years resolutions. Make this the year you succeed at keeping your resolutions, with a coach who knows how to help you overcome your natural immunity to change.
We all have immunity systems that make some changes difficult, but not impossible. Here are the steps I would use when helping you reach your goal with immunity to change coaching:
Recently, I was thinking about a common element across a lot of the work I do. Whether through coaching or counseling / psychotherapy, my clients and I get to a place where it makes sense that my clients are doing what they are doing, even though they truly want to change. And, importantly, it makes sense in a way that doesn't pathologize anyone. It's the best strategy they have found, so far, to accomplish something important - perhaps being successful, protecting themselves, or avoiding even worse consequences.
My research colleagues at Oxford Brookes University and I have been making great progress on our project to create an instrument that can be used to describe what happens in a coaching session. This project has been funded by the Institute of Coaching at Harvard University.
