Brain 1 Discussion (Dec 2020)

[Allyson Duffin-Dalton]

Summary-

I enjoyed this section but also found it very difficult. I’ve never enjoyed science and always had a difficult time understanding the terminology. I do better with diagrams and images than words and definitions. This portion of EBI is one that I’ll need to watch multiple times, because honestly I lost a lt of what I should have learned by being confused on all of the scientific terms.

[Naffer Miller]

I have been in the role of a Career Coach at my company for over a year now, and I have been working with K recently on the issue she brought to our 1:1 of feeling stuck. We had only had one session prior to our Brain and Change module, and while it was a good session, I was excited to meet with her again after learning about the Stages of Change. While ‘stuck’ is a commonly used word – I know I have certainly used that word more than once in my own coaching sessions, and I have heard it in other sessions as well – here was an opportunity to explore it within my client’s unique experience and within this new framework.

K started the session asking for my advice on creating long-term career goals because she thought that might help her start to break away from her stasis that she described. She identified shifts that she had recently made in her personal life and with her career, and she shared her frustration with how none of them seemed to help her feel like she was moving forward. With each decision, she felt like she was just moving laterally.

As her coach, a struggle I had was in identifying which of the stages of change she was in. She wanted to get un-stuck and feel like she was moving forward in a constructive, meaningful way, but we hadn’t quite landed on her deeper need. Could the vague notion of just wanting to find her “next thing” be enough of a goal? It wasn’t a SMART goal, but it was a start. Her stasis had not been a problem before, those patterns were no longer serving her now, and now she was ready for a change, so it felt like she was in Contemplation.

As we continued to explore her deeper need, at one point she said, “Now I’m finding that I don’t much like not knowing.” We have been learning that the brain loves patterns and will find them where they don’t exist because our brains also don’t like uncertainty. The high level of uncertainty that K was experiencing was causing her stress, so I asked her some questions that I hoped would help get her neurons firing in a way that would find other patterns that did not cause her stress, patterns of certainty and knowing.

She was very fidgety, and while I can only see her from her shoulders up in our Zoom meetings, I was tracking her baseline and noticing signs of disregulation. After guiding her through some breaths and grounding, I invited her to keep her eyes closed and think about what it looked like for her at a time when she was in a place of knowing, when she was moving forward toward a clear goal. We then spent time with her experience of being in graduate school, in a program she loved, and explored those patterns and behaviors that she named as empowering and of service to her and her goal and how she could apply them now and moving forward. Her statements of excitement about her “homework” indicated to me that she was starting to write a new story for herself, focusing on possibilities.

K started by asking for my advice, and she left our session with next steps and a new excitement that she identified for herself without one bit of suggestion or advice from me. While we didn’t do a threshold out on the land, we did talk about the possibility of doing a wander in the future. I “put a pin” in the word wander for a future session because she talked at one point about being drawn to “people who like to wander”, envying them, and wanting to be able to do that herself.

I was unsure of myself at the beginning about how I would do with the Stages of Change, and I was excited when I noticed early on in the session that she was jumping into Planning. I also felt validated when I reached the bottom of page 41 in my copy of Changing for Good and read, “’I want to stop feeling so stuck.’ Those simple words are typical of contemplators.”

[Naffer Miller]

One of the common threads that has followed us throughout the course is that “one size does not fit all.” This is something I have intuited since I can remember, and it is one of my favorite aspects of coaching and guiding… and of teaching and facilitating, for that matter! In stepping us through the Stages of Change in Changing for Good, Proschaska, Norcross, and DiClemente emphasize the number of techniques that can be employed within each of those steps. While there are universals that serve as a framework for tracking where our clients are in the process of change, they are unique individuals working within and amongst those universals. The steps serve as a framework, and the deep work we do with our clients will flow iteratively and fluidly within it.

For my own neural pathways and reflections on my development as a Nature-Connected Coach, I journaled about my session with K on a few different days. One of the things I wrote about was how it helped me hear a familiar message in a new way, “What we focus on grows.” I have often used my garden as a metaphor for some of my own growth and my own journey. During that session, I also heard and experienced that interconnectedness between focus and intention. I am curious to see how that message comes back to me in future sessions, especially when my focus starts to turn toward any doubt about my ability to guide effectively, for example.