Appreciative Life Coaching

By Bob Tschannen-Moran

What can two people do, separated by an ocean, who have never met but who have the ability to connect using telephone, Skype, and Internet technologies? It turns out they can do a lot when the approach taken focuses on strengths and appreciates possibilities. That is exactly what happened when Tatiana, a professional health coach with aspirations to develop her business, reached out to me in September 2009 for consultation, collaboration, and coaching. From the island tourist destination of Mallorca, Spain, in the Mediterranean Sea, Tatiana dreamt of establishing a successful coaching practice with area residents and health providers. She was not exactly sure what form that might take or how to get from here to there, but she was confident that with a little help she could gain clarity and discover a way forward.

Initially, Tatiana had some work to do on those “voices in her head” that argued against her ability to make this happen. She also had to come to terms with ways in which her own life did not adequately embody the “work-life-kids-marriage balance” that she would be working on with others as a professional health coach. Tatiana dearly wanted to walk the talk and to serve as a role model of well-being, lest she comes across as an expert with a “do as I say, not as I do” message. Those mindset and lifestyle dynamics both required empathy on my part, as I sought to understand and explore her underlying feelings and needs.

Such empathy is an important part of one-one-one coaching. Appreciative Inquiry without empathy is interrogation. That does not mean we pity or sympathize with clients as though they were helpless victims or reflections of our own issues. That rather means that we seek to understand the beauty of what clients are wrestling with, even when that beauty lies hidden under a patina of judgments, evaluations, criticisms, and complaints. The more Tatiana came to understand the richness of her heartfelt yearnings, the more she came to appreciate the life-affirming motivation behind those voices and desires, the more she was able to increase her self-efficacy and expand her view of the possible.

The process I like to use for expressing empathy in coaching is called Nonviolent Communication^® or NVC (Rosenberg, 2005). NVC encourages practitioners to distinguish between observations and evaluations, thoughts and feelings, needs and strategies, as well as requests and demands (Tschannen-Moran & Tschannen-Moran, 2010). As Tatiana shared her stories with me, I would assist her to play with those distinctions and to discover new ways of looking at her world. It worked. Appreciative empathy paved the way for Appreciative Inquiry.

As in organizational initiatives, one-on-one coaching can also make use of Appreciative Inquiry through the kinds of questions we ask and invitations we make. It is especially helpful to ask a lot of strengths-based questions in the Discovery phase of the process. Such questions connect clients with their capacity. I therefore invite clients to take the Values-In-Action Signature Strengths Questionnaire (www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) and to write out their answers to the following ten questions. Tatiana answered the questionnaire and then answered all of the following questions in great detail. This laid the foundation for a series of dynamic, strengths-building conversations.

As our conversations progressed, Tatiana made the shift from focusing on the shortcomings of her current situation to the opportunities of her emerging future (Scharmer, 2007). Through the use of a future-self exercise during a coaching session and the ongoing creation of a vision board in her home office, a wall-mounted poster on which Tatiana began to portray in words and pictures her desired future state (she would send me digital pictures of this as it progressed so we could talk about it together), Tatiana had an “aha” experience regarding the question of her “bigger picture and bigger purpose.” It is not that she didn’t know these things before, but our coaching conversations combined with her work on the vision board to call forth a deeper sense of connection and clarity regarding her identity and vocation. “I think it is better to concentrate on the ‘light within,’” she wrote, “and let that shine first of all, rather than all these things that are bogging me down, or not working, or annoying, or hopeless. Then consequent steps will be more intuitive, regardless of what these exactly are.” So that is what we did together: we cooked up a clear and compelling vision of the future so as to chart a cogent and captivating path of personal and professional development.

Tatiana described the progression in these terms: “I am looking forward to defining my own long-term aspirations and dreams, both for my work and for myself. I have a kind of ‘snapshot’ idea but it is not really detailed. This big vision will help me ‘lock in’ long-term, mid-term, and short-term plans. It will help me to compare that vision to what is happening in my life right now. I guess I have been like a sailboat in the sea, floating here and there. Now it is time to set the destination and steer that way. I most specifically want to work as a professional health coach and I want to work in that field for a long time to come.”

To flesh out the details of Tatiana’s aspirations, we focused considerable attention on what she had written in response to the question about environments that enable her to shine: “I am at my best in a productive group setting, be it with friends, at work, on a team. I do especially well with people who are near me, who believe in me, or who are very ‘connected’ themselves. I do well with people who have a high vibration, who are strong, who are complex. I also do well if I have to organize something. Because I have so much energy (always), I am happy being productive. I do well if I can organize my time independently and be flexible (for instance, some days I love to bake and cook all day; other times, I need to just ‘throw’ dinner on the table!) I do well with variety and in general do not like being told what to do. I do well when I feel accepted and wanted in a situation. I do well when I can balance my time so I get enough time alone, time to think and rest and plan.”

This insight gave us the opportunity to brainstorm around how Tatiana might find and/or create such an environment. We worked with the concept of designing environments where she could be great just by showing up—not ones that would require her to learn all kinds of new skills or that would force her into an uncomfortable position or manner of working. We strove to envision and then to evoke an environment that would bring out Tatiana’s very best and reward her with both meaningful and fruitful work.

As good brainstorming always does, our brainstorming generated a wide variety of new ideas, from the ridiculous to the sublime (Kelley, 2001, pp. 56–62). The wilder the better when it comes to brainstorming. Or, to quote Albert Einstein, “If at first an idea is not absurd then there is no hope for it.” We certainly played with many such possibilities, including total upheaval and relocation from the island of Mallorca. In the end, however, we kept coming back to the notion of staying in Mallorca while partnering with larger organizations and group settings. After exploring a number of alternatives, two emerged as leading contenders: a global consulting and training organization with virtual offices and a local hospital and health care organization with physical offices. Although Tatiana did not close the door on the virtual opportunity, she decided to see what she could make of things at the local hospital. Given the hospital’s stated interest in serving the expatriate community living in Mallorca, Tatiana could present a ready calling card: she was trilingual (English, Spanish, and German), well networked in the community, and trained as a professional health coach. If ever there were an opportunity to be great just by showing up, this looked to be very promising.

Tatiana began by talking with the hospital director. To prepare for the meeting, we brainstormed ways to reach out and talk with people who were doing similar things in other hospital settings. She wanted to learn how health coaching had been integrated into hospitals and clinics, how clients were referred for coaching, whether coaching was conducted one-on-one or in group settings, how coaches related to the staff team, and how compensation was structured. With my help and the help of colleagues in her coach training program, Tatiana reached a point of confidence and readiness for having the meeting. It turned into a ninety-minute tour of the hospital that went amazingly well, with many happy coincidences including Tatiana meeting several people she already knew. The director and Tatiana ended the tour with a strong, mutual desire to clarify their vision, develop a job description, and move the position forward. The director went so far as to ask Tatiana whether she would consider working exclusively for the hospital. As Tatiana noted, “That was lovely to hear” after all her efforts to put herself out in the world.

It took several months for all this to come together, but once it did Tatiana had a sense of living into her destiny. In addition to one-on-one health coaching with clinic patients, she also started to develop programs for large and small groups using the hospital auditorium as well as a variety of wellness-coaching initiatives for hospital employees. Becoming the resident “Coach Salud” was not a salaried position. Tatiana had loads of internal sales work to do in order to recruit clients and program participants, but the work gave her “a good feeling” and she enjoyed having “a true focus for the first time in years.”

None of this might have happened without our appreciative, strengths-based coaching work. Tatiana has indicated that the coaching gave her the extra boost she needed to get going and try her best. After one of our last coaching sessions, Tatiana wrote in an e-mail, “Thanks for the extra time today. I shall have to ‘live without you’ as I move forward, but I guess I have learned one thing: when in doubt, I can always fill in a questionnaire! Kidding aside, our life coaching sessions have made the difference between night and day for me in many ways. I would not be where I am today with this position were it not for the work we did together.”

Such is the potential of Appreciative Inquiry in telephone, Skype, and Internet coaching. It can literally assist people to discover, dream, and design new destinies in life and work.