Gestalt coaches serve as “awareness agents,” a role that calls for them to use their own awareness
to catalyze clients’ self-awareness as the key asset for current and future goal attainment. To
successfully use the self in coaching engagements, Gestalt coaches work in three ways:
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2
3
Experientially, by inviting
clients to become aware
of their immediate
contextual responses
(e.g., physical, psychological,
emotional, cognitive)
Existentially, by
encouraging clients’
awareness of self and
others, which yields “data”
that informs actions to
achieve desired outcomes
The heart of a Gestalt approach lies in
internalizing and applying the power of
awareness. The skills needed to track
and heighten awareness are taught
through the Cycle of Experience (COE),
a conceptual model that illustrates
how needs and desires are sensed,
articulated, engaged with, acted upon
and assimilated through meaningmaking processes. The Gestalt coach
works with the COE to facilitate clients’
self-identification of habitual, unaware
patterns of response, particularly
those that interfere with their ability
to gauge and appropriately act in
changing situations. Gestalt coaching
clients experience an energetic sense
of “liberation” when they discern these
patterns and understand how the
patterns impact their decisions and
behaviors. Gestalt coaches learn and
practice embodied presence; i.e., one’s
way of being and presenting oneself to
the world. In turn, coaches help clients
develop strategies for being centered in
their own presence. Presence is uniquely
manifested by each coach, but being in
the relational field of a Gestalt coach’s
authentic presence evokes clients’ trust
and their hope for successful work.
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Experimentally, by
collaboratively and
creatively supporting
clients’ safe exploration of
alternative perceptual and
behavioral choices
Gestalt coaches offer collaboratively
and creatively structured experiments
to strengthen clients’ awareness of
themselves and to facilitate an aware
use of their available resources.
Experiments interrupt habitual
perceptual or behavioral patterns
and invite opportunity. Clients might
be invited to act out real or imagined
scenes from the past, present or future;
to have a conversation between their
perceived and ideal selves; or to describe
and “inhabit” fantasy scenarios of peak
experiences that have happened or that
they hope will happen. Coach and client
then debrief the experiment to see what
new learning and alternative choices for
action have emerged.
The Gestalt coach keeps clients focused on
whatever emerges in the moment, as this
constitutes data that invariably connects
to both short- and long-term professional
and personal challenges and goals. A
Gestalt approach uses whatever occurs
in the moment as the experiential and
existential ground for coach and client to
explore and experiment with. If a client
experiences discomfort with a powerful
question, the existential imperative is
to support the client to investigate that
discomfort to see how it might relate to
his or her ability to reach desired goals.
Conditions and factors that make career
derailment possible or imminent, for
example, are often obscured by clients’
habituated or resistant ways of perceiving
or behaving. These can only be changed
by fully understanding what they are and
what role they play for the client. For
example, the client might state a goal of
making her team more openly expressive
and inclusive while she simultaneously
engages in an unaware behavioral pattern
of controlling and shutting down team
members’ input. Once information about
such behaviors surfaces, the question
for the client becomes, “Do I still want
or need to choose this response? What
are my other options? ” The Gestalt
coach encourages clients to explore, to
experiment and to choose with awareness.
Coaching World |
August 2013