What is Ontological Coaching?

Three domains

By language we mean the stories we have learned about life, the narratives in which we live, the values we have for example, “the world is dangerous”, “it’s important to be independent”, “you can trust people to be helpful”, “money is hard to come by”, etc. We learn and absorb these from the world around us and they become part of who we are.

In the context of ontological coaching, we use emotions to mean that which pre- disposes us to act. In our approach, we are concerned with emotions in the philosophical sense – how emotions shape our way of being or our capacity for action. For example, if I am resentful I will act differently than if I am grateful. If I am sad, I will have a different pre-disposition for action than if I am angry or joyful, etc.

By body, we mean the way we move through space. For example, some people move through space quickly and efficiently, which results in them getting things done on time, however, they might be less available for connection. Others might move more slowly, take their time, and be available to connect with others but they might not get things done, or they might lose focus on the task because they prioritise relationship. It’s important to note that neither of these two examples (and there are many other polarities we could explore) is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rather they lend themselves to certain outcomes. Again, these ways of moving through space are learned. We can observe this when we look at how people from different cultures move and interact physically with the world and others, as any trip to an international airport will reveal.

We learn in all three domains. We learn stories and narratives about the world from our families, from the culture around us, etc., but we also learn emotions and how to move through space. We can say that all of this learning, happening throughout our lives, forms the “structure of interpretation” described by Flaherty above.

Narratives

To return to the previous example of the individual who sees the world as dangerous, we might perceive that, in terms of language, he might have certain narratives about the world that he learned from life – perhaps he grew up in a conflict zone, or there was a lot of anger at home, or he might have been told that ‘you can’t trust people’ or ‘life is hard’. Maybe he grew up in a family with violence and learned to hold back and lie low to avoid being seen in order to stay safe. Now, if we watch him move, we might notice that he is hesitant, holding himself back when he meets a group of people, for example, or looking around nervously when he ventures an opinion. In the emotional domain, he might be fearful or timid, or anxious – maybe there was a lot of fear at home, or in the culture at the time. All three domains together produce a coherent picture of someone who is unlikely to take much risk in life, and will tend to hold himself back. The individual may have become successful at feeling ‘safe’, but, from another perspective, he could also be seen as missing out on numerous opportunities and possibilities.

The coach’s role is to help the coachee to uncover her or his structural interpretations and how these structures have shaped them and then to open new territories for learning that were previously unavailable or invisible to the coachee – or as Flaherty puts it to alter that structure, in partnership with the coachee, in order to produce new results.

Lightness and curiosity

This requires a mood of lightness and of curiosity in the coach. A coach needs to be curious about the self in front of us – what stories have they learned, what interpretations do they live in, how have they been shaped by their lives? This requires the coach to leave behind all assessments and judgements about how a coachee should behave, or about the right mental attitude to have, and simply to be willing to find out how the coachee got to be the human being that presents itself in the coaching session. It also requires a particular mood in the coachee, which is a willingness to take a look – to be open to questioning ways of being that they have hitherto taken for granted.

Transforming the self

Having raised awareness, the coach works with the coachee to identify new ways of being – almost literally how to build a new structure to go beyond the old learned self and to discover new ways of being that were unavailable to the “old self”. Another way to see this is that, having realised that who we think we are is largely a function of what we have learned, we can now embrace the possibility of learning something new that we literally learn to be a new self by the practices that emerge out of ontological coaching conversations.

When the coachee transforms at the level of the soul, the actions taken might be very similar, but because the being that takes those actions is different, she or he might produce totally different results. As Proust puts it: “The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”