Background:
So it all starts when we are born, we have some innate qualities and we also have some capabilities that are present already. For example, my qualities may mean I am easily soothed or I am easily excited – I may have many needs or I may be very placid – often if there is more than one child, my parents can see and feel that I have a different ‘energy’ from my brothers and sisters, and they have different energy from me and each other. My qualities and attributes will unfold in time. I am born into some kind of family system which has its own language its own history and its own time, place and practices. All these factors get put together to create a ‘narrative’ – a story into which I am born. The ‘narrative’ answers the following questions: Who am I ?, Who are others ? What am I to do ? How should I engage in the world ?
In my early interactions in the family I am born in to, I quickly learn how to survive. I adopt a strategy to fit in and survive in the system. All the ways I could be are defined by how I figure out my way to survive in the family system. This way of being that has me survive creates and becomes embedded in my nervous system. My nervous system either becomes one that relies on the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system. My survival is either related to the ‘fight or flight’ hormones (sympathetic) which are turned on for me to survive, or the ‘freeze’ hormones (parasympathetic) which have me calm down and be still in order to to survive. We develop as human beings who rely on one of these systems for survival.
As adults, if we have been used to using our sympathetic nervous system to survive, we tend to go faster and be on the move more when we are under stress in every day adult life, and if we used our parasympathetic nervous system to survive, we tend to withdraw and disappear under stressful conditions. We can see that how we ‘survived’ as children gave us the nervous system we use today as adults. The effects of the use of these parts of the nervous system manifest themselves as the ingrained habits that become our automatic way of acting in our lives.
As adults we can ask ourselves what we do to get by under stress? Do we fly off the handle ? Do we close down or collapse? Do we fade away? Do we lose our power to get things done?
This foundational narrative has a very significant effect on the continuum of narratives (or stories we find ourselves in) that come to us in our lives. I will have certain competencies and will know how to act so that things either happen or do not happen – I know the effect I can have. Our sense of possibility and what life is gets formed by our foundational narrative.
The world we perceive through this narrative, and which makes sense to us, informs how we act. Being in the world, and living from our narratives means that we pay attention to certain things and we ignore others – the narrative we have is shaping our perception in every moment. What we are paying attention to and what we are ignoring brings forth the world for us. In our narrative, we are at home, at ease and our nervous systems are used to this.
Integral Coaching:
In our lives there are interruptions, things which disrupt our normal way of being, which challenge the narrative we are in and which threaten the way of surviving that we have developed. We will all attempt to use our normal strategies to deal with these disruptions – sometimes they will work, and sometimes they will not. Sometimes we don’t want to use the same strategy as we have always done, as we realise it has never really worked in the first place. At some point we find that the disruption is too big for any of the survival strategies we have under our belt, and in this disruption there is a chance for a new narrative to emerge – one that would require changing our language and our practises in order for a new way of being to unfold. For a new narrative to form – there has to be an opening that has us be willing to admit that we ‘do not know’.
At the start of a coaching relationship, we are looking at what it takes to make real changes and we ask whether we can see the automatic reactions that we live in every day. Integral coaching is about examining deeply held habits and questioning them so that we have some more possibilities in our lives than what is currently in front of us. It’s about learning to respond in fresh ways, it’s about discovering other ways of being that mean life can be experienced differently.
The nervous system is difficult to change. It has the strength over us that it had when we were children. As an adult it is possible to stay present when our nervous system kicks in with its automated habits. We find that certain practises build the capacity we need to stay with discomfort even when our nervous system is crying out for us to do the habitual things we always do to cope with stress. This is when the nervous system starts to change itself – when we do not act, we just let it be there.
Every time that we do something that we are habitually not accustomed to, our nervous system changes. For example, when you yell, it gets easier to keep yelling, when you do not yell, it gets easier not to yell the next time. Integral coaching is about ‘coaching’ the nervous system. The practises we take on in Integral Coaching are about shifting the nervous system – a good practise addresses the nervous system directly. We become interested in discomfort, in being with the sensation of not following my habitual impulses.
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