Leadership
Leadership
D. Rock
Neuroscience in Coaching
Rock notes that because attention changes
the brain, you should be careful of focusing
too much on people’s emotions. This is
a trap that coaches tend to fall into as
emotions tend to be more negative.
In Rock’s opinion, the ultimate goal of coaching is to help people become more
adaptive. By being more adaptive, Rock means having the ability to respond in more
creative ways to complex situations. It means having a wide range of responses:
cognitive, emotional, physical, biological.
The challenge to this is that according to neuroscience research, there is five times
as much real estate for negative emotions in the brain than there is positive. It can
then become really easy for both parties in a coaching relationship to spend too
much time on the negative.
“Having a wide range of responses requires very flexible thinking, continued
Rock. “Flexible thinking requires having a brain that is deeply connected, or an
integrated brain.”
Rock admits that brain language isn’t for everyone. He notes that for some coaches
it works to talk about things such as intuition, spirituality, and the last thing they want
to do is bring science into it. However in Rock’s experience it is very beneficial in
coaching relationships with high level executives to bring a much more rigorous,
evidence based frame for explaining your methodology.
Coming back full-circle, having a brain that is integrated stems from having a
significant amount of language for mental experiences. When you have a wide
range of specific language for your mental experiences, you have a lot of circuitry
within your executive centers – the region of your brain that controls the whole brain.
So put simply, the more language you have for mental experiences the more flexible
you can be, and the more adaptive you can be.
6 Coaching World | February 2012 | www.coachfederation.org
“There is so much value in explaining the brain simply and having coaches and
clients truly understand how it works. Coaching at the core is about improving
thinking. Coaches need to know how the brain works. If you going to try to improve
the performance of a car you need to know how the engine works.”
Research
“Understanding the brain gives you a wide repertoire of language,” explains Rock.
“Most coaches already are using brain language and probably using it quite
successfully; possibly even unknowingly, when they talk about the amygdala hijack
for example. But there is a much broader range of language available that can help
you become more helpful as a leader and a coach.”
With respect of his knowledge of the brain, Rock believes that all learning occurs in
stages: Impasse, insight, action, and habit. Recognize an impasse and respect it.
Generate insight. Get from Insight to action, and then from action to habit. While this
process may seem like a laborious, difficult task Rock insists there are really good,
simple brain based ways of moving from one stage to the next.
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“Coaches and leaders should instead focus more on where their clients or teams are
going, not where they currently are or the feelings they have about it. Focus more
on addressing, accepting, and helping people label their emotions, but then move
immediately into creating the wiring people want, not the wiring people don’t have.”
Benefits
“Today’s neuroscience research shows that when you put specific words on your
emotional states you then dampen down those emotional states. This is extremely
relevant since a lot of time when you’re coaching people you are dealing with strong
negative emotional states. Therefore the more language you have for internal states,
not just emotions but other internal states, the better you are able to label them, use
them, and be more adaptive.”
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“If you as a coach or leader truly understand the brain, you won’t get caught up in a
lot of unnecessary side conversations and be able to focus in on what the client or
team needs to do.”