Articles
What You Need to Know About Coaching Services
One of the more recent approaches to executive development has been called coaching. Distinct from other forms of training, coaching focuses on the method of learning. Under a coaching paradigm, it is believed that “the more an individual is involved in identifying problems, in working out and applying solutions for them and in reviewing the results, the more complete and the more long-lasting the learning is. This form of self learning tends to bring about learning with a deeper understanding than learning that is taught.”(Redshaw, 2000, p. 106). To give this more perspective, “coaching is very different than teaching or instructing. It is best described as facilitating. The coach encourages the learner to learn for him/herself... As well as acquiring new job competencies, the learner gradually develops new and more effective learning skills. He/she becomes a proactive learner, capable of learning from almost any experience encountered.” (Redshaw, 2000, p. 107).
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Gestalt Consulting
Over the last forty years, members of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland have been creating organization development and coaching theory from the fields of Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt therapy. Steeped in phenomenology and existentialism, holism, field theory, and systems theory, the Gestalt approach to OD and coaching has evolved into a present-centered, awareness building, high impact form of intervention. Besides the unique approach towards making interventions, it has a particular bent in its core assumptions that has led to the development of the Gestalt “consulting stance” and the “unit of work”. This article discusses the gestalt consulting stance and the application of the unit of work within coaching and organization development.
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Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change
Underlying the application of Gestalt theory to OD, consulting, and/or coaching is a lineage of paradoxical theories. In 1970, Arnold Biesser, MD named these processes implicit to gestalt theory as the paradoxical theory of change. Subsequently, the paradoxical theory of change has become the foundation of theory at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. This article provides an understanding of the theoretical concepts that underpin Gestalt OD theory. The theories that influenced Fritz Perls are elaborated and tied-back to the primary premise that all meaning manifests through the creation and dissolution of polarities.
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14 Fundamental Principals of Vision Questing
The fourteen fundamental principles below are Zen-like in their presentation in that they may seem enigmatic and filled with paradoxical riddles,but when assessed and practiced as a whole, the principles enable a quality of insight into self and other that is more than the sum of its parts. This broader and deeper sense of understanding begins the process of reawakening an awareness of relational perception that has been overshadowed by conventional analytic problem solving.
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Polarity
"Many phenomena could not exist if their opposites did not also exist" (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, p. 43). We glean both the manifest and the nuanced meaning of one from the other: day helps to define night and vice versa; hot helps to define cold and vice versa; old helps to define young and vice versa. The individual is himself or herself "a never-ending sequence of polarities. Whenever an individual recognizes one aspect of him [or her] self, the presence of the antithesis, or polar quality, is implicit" (Polster & Polster, p. 61). People bear within themselves the latent and potential opposite of their external character, for example. The person who demonstrates kindness to others does so with the sense or knowledge of its obvious polarity, cruelty, or even of many possible related polarities, e.g., "insensitivity or callousness toward another person's feelings." Erving Polster has named these several related polarities "multilarities" (Zinker, 1978, pp. 196-197).