CHAPTER 10
the call of compassion
an invitation to dream
Most of us care about others and try to help them. The source of our caring may be a desire to inspire people with whom we work to learn and grow or to protect our children or others. It might also be a desire to help others improve their performance or live up to their potential. It might reflect a deeper sense of love. All of these desires are noble but can easily lead us to do the exact opposite of what we intend. We can quickly slide into trying to fix others or prescribing specific ways to change. Although it may seem more efficient, by this point in the book we hope you recognize this slip into wanting to fix others as coaching for compliance (however well intended) and a catalyst for negative emotion and stress.
As leaders, parents, teachers, doctors and nurses, and coaches of all kinds, we are all witnesses to the reality show called “Life.” We see injustice and people treated poorly around us. We are offended at people who feel entitled to “free stuff” and abuse the kindness of strangers. But most of all, we see people in influential roles seeming to promote themselves more than helping or leading others.
In a world of rampant narcissism and self-righteous, self-centered thinking (after all, this is the generation of selfies as a popular form of photography and social media!), we can do our part to reduce defensive behavior by helping others and building better relationships. The best antidote to self-centered narcissism is to care for others. One genuine way that you, the reader, can help others is to inspire and motivate them toward the best version of themselves. The positive emotional contagion created in the process will also help you feel inspired and positively influence others around you. Compassion is contagious!
In the earlier chapters, we asked you to reflect on who helped you the most to become who you are or to get to where you are in life. We explored how people’s answers to that question show us how compassion through gratitude invokes the PEA and all of the good things that come with it. So let us now ask you a follow-up question: Whose list will you be on? It may be our most enduring legacy in life—making a difference in other people’s lives.
compassion as an antidote to self-centeredness
Through the real-life stories of people becoming energized by the possibility of a new future, we hope you have a new appreciation for how and why connecting positively and deeply with others is beneficial both for your own personal sustainability and those with whom you interact in the multiple arenas of your life. We contend, based on our research, that the one powerful and accessible way to care for and help others is to coach with compassion. Not every conversation presents a coachable moment and coaching in the way we’ve suggested is not the only way. Coaching for compliance is needed at times, and in small doses. But too often, we let the NEA dominate the experience and therefore shorten the durability and limit the sustainability of any learning or change. Coaching with compassion is something we can all do with intention and practice as the stories throughout were meant to illuminate. Here are some highlights.
The Greg Lakin, Emily Sinclair, and Amy Szabo stories (chapters 1, 2, and 6, respectively) showed us how dramatic the impact on people’s lives can be when we coach with compassion in contrast to coaching for compliance. That is, great helpers and coaches inspire, encourage, and support others in the pursuit of their dreams and the achievement of their full potential. In each of these cases, coaching with compassion began by helping them explore and clearly articulate their ideal self and a personal vision for the future, and tease out the distinction between their ideal self and ought self. As we saw in Mary Tuuk’s case (chapter 5), a personal vision was a holistic, comprehensive expression of her ideal self and ideal future, including dreams, sense of calling, passion, purpose, and core values. The vision provides meaning in life and work. It helped each of them continue on the fruitful, but often frustrating, path to getting closer to their ideal self.
As we saw in Neil Thompson, Darryl Gresham, and Sean Hannigan’s stories (chapters 2, 4, and 7, respectively), key resonant relationships helped them make a leap and move forward. Because emotions are contagious, the quality of the relationship with the helper or coach is crucial to inviting the PEA repeatedly. Beyond the relationship to the helper or coach, a person is more likely to sustain their learning and change efforts if they develop a network of trusted, supportive relationships. Lori Neiswander’s example (chapter 8), showed how helping others to form peer coaching groups can feel like simply the coming together of two or more people for the purpose of personal or professional development. But the quality of the relationships is durable and helps the change effort be sustainable while promoting a positive emotional contagion, which can become the basis of an organizational or family norm.
As we saw in Aaron Banay’s story (chapter 4), asking someone an evocative, open, positive question can elicit new information. We know from research that it awakens the PEA, activating a specific network in the brain that triggers hormones called the parasympathetic nervous system (i.e., renewal). Asking a negative question or questions pulls a defensive response and arouses the NEA, activating a different network in the brain, which triggers hormones that are the sympathetic nervous system (i.e., stress). In Melvin’s story (chapter 3), such questions activated the ought self, narrowed the possibilities, and made him feel stuck.
In Ellen’s health story (chapter 6), we saw that entering the PEA is both a state of being open to new ideas and a tipping point along the path of sustained, desired change. We know from others’ research and our own neuroimaging studies that to sustain a change or learning process, a person needs to regularly cycle into the PEA two to five times more often than being in the NEA. We saw further in Bob Shaffer’s story (chapter 5) that renewal activities in smaller doses—in terms of time and more frequent episodes of renewal activities—are better than longer, less frequent ones. It also revealed that renewal using a variety of activities is better than using the same one or two repeatedly.
We witnessed in Melvin’s story how focusing on strengths and not weaknesses in the context of his personal vision opened new possibilities. He experienced a profound sense of freedom and purpose as a result. The process of change often unfolds in discrete steps, such as in Sean Hannigan’s experience to become a better leader by becoming a better listener. Other ways to invite the PEA include envisioning an exciting future and creating a plan that was energizing not obligatory, as we saw in Bassam’s story of change to becoming a more patient and friendly project leader (chapter 6).
Entering the PEA and coming back to it during conversations often requires a resonant relationship and the feeling of care and trust that comes with it. We saw that build in Karen Milley’s story of talking to her son (chapter 6). She then transferred her experience to create different conversations with direct reports at work. As we saw in Ellen’s story of the conversations with her teenage daughter (chapter 7), high-quality helping relationships require helpers to prepare their mindset to create a positive, meaningful connection through deep, active listening. This is fundamental and essential for coaching with compassion.
Ellen’s story of conversations with her daughter also showed how a coachable moment requires the coach or helper to be prepared to notice when such a moment is happening and adopt a coaching mindset. It involves a potentially critical situation or opportunity to which the person to be coached may or may not be fully aware, and the coach correctly perceives that the individual is both open and ready for reflection and learning around that situation or opportunity. Capitalizing on coachable moments often involves assessing and potentially enhancing the readiness of the individual to be coached.
We referred throughout the book to a number of organizations that use coaching. But we also illustrated how coaching can benefit families and a long list of other helping relationships. There are three basic approaches to making positive helping a norm in your families, communities, and at work. They are: (1) encourage (and/or train as needed) people to coach each other (at work this would be peer coaching in pairs or teams); (2) provide access to a variety of internal or external kinds of coaches or helpers; and/or (3) equip managers, physicians, and other helpers in positions of influence to build developmental relationships and provide coaching to those within their team and organization.
learn to help yourself
Even with the best of intentions, people cannot inspire and help others to learn and grow when they slip into the NEA themselves. The personal sustainability of the helper or coach is central to the ability to continue effectively helping others be open, develop, and change.
Our recommendation is straightforward but sometimes difficult to implement amid the stressors of everyday life and work. The key is to dose yourself with renewal every day. It is, in fact, the responsibility of helpers or coaches to sustain themselves and emote the positive emotional contagion that can only come from experiencing the PEA more than being in the NEA. In other words, we suggest that it is not a self-centered act to make sure you have renewal moments each day. Helpers and coaches looking to develop a long-term, sustainable means of reaching and maintaining a level of effectiveness would benefit from forming peer-coaching groups with other coaches. Coaches of all kinds need support just as much as the people they are trying to help and support.
an invitation to dream
A primary theme we’ve stressed throughout this book is using a personal vision to evoke positive emotions—essentially, to begin with the end in mind, thereby setting up the connections in the brain and emotions that will help us pave the road to the desired end. So now, we invite you to dream with us for a moment.
Imagine it is ten to fifteen years from now. If you are:
A coach: You have many, many clients and they come from a variety of cultures. Your clients are transforming, learning, growing, developing, and performing. They are living meaningful lives. Most of all, they are thriving emotionally, physically, spiritually, and relationally. Some clients have formed peer-coaching groups, and in some of your clients’ organizations, peer-coaching groups have become a norm. What’s more, there is evidence that in your clients’ organizations, the cultures are becoming more engaging and developmental than they’ve ever been.
A manager: Your people are excited and engaged in their work. They feel a shared sense of purpose. They are innovating and adapting to changing market conditions and customers’ needs. They feel that you are connected to the needs of people and are committed to their development. You invest in their growth and advancement. You provide exciting and novel projects. Your people not only want to stay in your organization, but also wish they had more time to spend at work. They are so excited that they’ve formed peer-coaching groups in which they reality test, help each other deal with problems, and envision a better future. In fact, the entire company culture has changed, with everyone contributing to one another’s development.
A physician, nurse, or physician assistant: You have motivated others to achieve wellness. Your role is to help people truly heal and maintain health, and your patients’ adherence to their treatment plans are at 100 percent. Patients get better faster and stay well longer. All of this occurs because they take care of themselves. They are vulnerable to fewer maladies, with a high quality of life and low health-care costs. If your work is in palliative care, your patients leave this life with dignity, feeling loved and at peace.
A parent: Daily events in your home life feel like an idealized movie version of a loving and caring family. Your teenage children want to talk to you. Meals with the family involve interesting conversations and laughter. When anyone in the family needs advice, they come to you. Your older children take you out to dinner periodically, and you are involved in family vacations with your children and their families.
A therapist, counselor, pastoral counselor, or social worker: Your clients are focused on well-being—beyond their problems. They want to be well and are motivated to carry out their therapy or treatment plans. They spend less time egocentrically focusing on themselves and more time helping others less fortunate in the community. They care for others and extend themselves. They engage their families in loving and fun activities and strive to improve their work organizations.
Sound good? Here’s a way to make such visions more likely to happen, for anyone reading this book. It’s kind of a “pay it forward” experiment we can all try. Next month, each day have just one fifteen- to twenty-minute conversation with a different person to help them discover and connect with the best version of themselves, their values, dream life, desired work, or personal vision.
It may sound daunting, but it is likely that you will work or interact with more than thirty different people in the coming month, whether you are a parent, manager, coach, doctor, teacher, cleric, or in some other helping role. We are asking you to have just one fifteen- to twenty-minute conversation—within the 960 waking minutes available to each of us every day—focused on helping someone experience positive emotions and discover or reconnect with his or her personal vision. It could be over coffee, lunch, or driving in the company or school carpool. Or you could talk with a group at work about the idea, perhaps as an opener or closer to a staff meeting. Then imagine each of those people feeling so inspired that they in turn cascade the conversation to someone else they know, and so on. As a result of emotional contagion and social mimicry, the compounding effect could be tremendous. Large numbers of people will have had a potentially life-changing positive emotional experience based on being coached with compassion and thinking about their personal vision of the future. All this from one humble start: a fifteen- to twenty-minute coaching conversation!
We hope the stories and ideas in this book have inspired you to try a few things to ignite the spark of positive change in your life and the lives of people around you. Our deepest wish is that you will feel the hope, compassion, mindfulness, and playfulness that can result from caring for others and inspiring them to enhance their lives. That is the promise of coaching with compassion.