FEAR OF GOING DEEP WHEN COACHING

After writing about The Art of Going Deep (#36) several Meta-Coaches wrote about their fear of going deep. Then this week here at ACMC in Mauritius, our team leaders reported several sessions in which they encouraged a coach to “go deeper” with the client and they said explicitly spoke about their fear. What stopped them from going there was their fear. One said he didn’t know how to handle it if the person got emotional. Another said that she was afraid to open something up and not be able to bring it to a conclusion. Yet another said that it was out of his comfort zone.

Now if going deep with a client speaks about enter into and opening up the person’s understandings, meanings, beliefs, identities, etc., then what we are talking about awakening the person’s awareness of his meaning matrix. That is, the person’s constructs of meaning— the actual thoughts and beliefs and the processes entailed (i.e., our thinking patterns, cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, etc.). What’s inside that’s deep is all of our meanings— memories, imaginations, hopes, fears, etc. All that is inside is just human stuff. None of it is alien.