Befriending Gremlins

by Kira on May 20, 2013

I originally wrote this article for the Institute for Life Coach Training blog.

Have you ever hit a wall with a coaching client? Did you find yourself thinking that person might not be “coachable”? Our clients inevitably encounter obstacles as they pursue their ideal life. As coaches, our mindset about these obstacles has a profound impact on the coaching process as well as the outcome.

Imagine that you’ve recently started working with a coaching client who wants to move in a new career direction. You’ve had several very positive sessions so far. She’s completed her fieldwork each week and has challenged herself to try out new options. She’s come to each session with new insights and a lot of excitement about the progress she’s making toward her goal.

Now it’s nearing the end of her fourth session, and it sounds as though she’s got a great plan for the next week—it’s a stretch, but not too much for what she says she can handle. You ask how likely she is to follow through on the fieldwork the two of you have designed together. She says 100 percent—she’s really going for it! You’re excited to see her moving forward, as you really want her to succeed.

Fast forward to the start of your next session with this client. Zero. Nada. She hasn’t done a thing regarding her plan. When you ask her what got in the way, she says one (or more) of the following:

• I didn’t feel very positive this week.

• I’m stuck.

• I feel powerless.

• I didn’t get to my fieldwork—I just didn’t feel like it.

• Figuring out a new career seems like too much work.

• My current job isn’t all that bad.

• I need a vacation more than a new career.

• It’s ridiculous for me to go for such an ambitious goal. What was I thinking?

• I don’t think this coaching stuff is working. Maybe I need therapy. Or maybe I just need to go out more and have some fun.

You smell a gremlin—perhaps an entire herd of them. A gremlin is a negative inner voice that blocks success and satisfaction in life. Whether conceived of as an inner critic or saboteur, a reflection of low self-esteem, or the voice of fear, doubt, procrastination, or another emotion, a gremlin is a creature that represents some form of negative self-talk.

The term gremlin, as used in this context, originated with Rick Carson’s book Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way, originally published in 1983. Carson explains that a gremlin is

the narrator in your head. He has influenced you since you came into this world and he accompanies you throughout this entire existence. He is with you when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night. He tells you who and how you are, and he defines and interprets your every experience. He wants you to accept his interpretations as reality, and his goal from moment to moment, day to day, is to squelch the real, vibrant you within. (pp. 3–4)

Carson continues,

Your gremlin wants you to feel bad and he carries out this loathsome pursuit via sophisticated maneuvers . . . and by convincing you to waste time reliving the past, worrying about the future, and analyzing the relationships between all sorts of people and things. He wants you to believe that he has your best interest at heart and that his primary purpose is to serve and protect you. His motive is actually much less honorable. He is intent on making you feel lousy. (p. 4)

A web search on coaching sites yielded a host of descriptive terms on the nature of gremlins, including sly, sneaky, subversive, fear-based, negative, pesky, sneaky, pushy, relentless, snarky, and powerful. Common perceptions would suggest that gremlins have nothing good to say about you or anything you do, and that they want you to believe that anger, hate, greed, jealousy and procrastination are good things.

If that’s true, it would make sense to try to slay or banish them so our clients are freer to reach their goals. However, if you’ve tried to implement these kinds of strategies with your coaching clients—or in your own life—you know that they don’t work. The reason that going to war with gremlins doesn’t work is because it involves banishing parts of us, which forces those energies to become more insistent and extreme in their attempts to get our attention. As Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said, “What you resist persists.”

What if that view of gremlins isn’t accurate? What if they’ve just gotten a bad rap in a culture that doesn’t like to look at its dark side? What if, as the Internal Family Systems approach asserts, gremlins have positive intent at their core? And what if they actually hold crucial puzzle pieces in the quest for success?

When we learn to listen to gremlins, they transform into powerful allies that can make important positive contributions to our lives. We need only open the door and develop a respectful, appropriate relationship with them for the switch to take place. Far from wanting to make us miserable, these little guys actually want to help us move forward in our lives. For that to happen, we just have to start listening from a centered place and provide them with witnessing and wise leadership.

In future blog posts, I’ll write about how to befriend gremlins and enroll them in a partnership that can powerfully support your clients in their coaching goals.

Advice and Agendas

by Kira on February 25, 2013

When I share with people that I’m a certified life and wellness coach, a common response is: “I’d probably make a great coach—I’m always giving people advice.” When I hear this, I chuckle to myself and calmly explain that coaching isn’t about giving advice—it’s about empowering clients to access their own “inner advisor.”

Why is this distinction so important?

As coaches, we have a wealth of life experiences that have shaped our perspective on what empowers people. However, we really don’t know what exactly will work for any particular client. Supporting clients to deepen their inner sense of which steps fit and which ones don’t allows their true path to emerge over time. As they try on various options and get a sense of “that’s not quite it, but we’re getting closer,” clients take their theories about their lives out for test drives and make course corrections that point them in the right direction.

To the extent that we think we know what a client needs, we’re likely operating from our own assumptions rather than a quality of presence that’s crucial to the coaching process. When we hear an inner voice thinking, “What you need to do is [fill in the blank],” we’ve lost touch with our coaching mindset and need to find it again.

How do we access that quality of presence?

A great strategy for accessing presence is to bring our awareness to whatever isn’t presence. One way to think about it—borrowed from Internal Family Systems (a brilliant psychological model)—is that we each have a Self that is naturally calm, caring, compassionate, and other qualities that combine to create presence. We also each have many “parts” (subpersonalities) that have various agendas and that sometimes interrupt our ability to be present. Examples of coaches’ parts that may interfere with presence include:

  • Parts that may want to be directive instead of following the client’s lead
  • Parts that retreat into analyzing because it’s safer or more comfortable
  • Caretaking parts that may feel, and even convey, a “you poor dear” sentiment
  • Parts that fear a client’s strong emotions and that may try to keep a tight lid on a client’s feelings by steering the conversation away from certain topics
  • “Need to be needed” parts that may try to arrange for the coach to be indispensible
  • Parts that get distracted or restless while on the phone with a client
  • Parts that identify with a challenge the client is experiencing and become enmeshed or overwhelmed

If you notice one or more of your own parts getting triggered during a session, you have several options:

  • Internally ask the part to relax and assure it that you’ll give it attention after the session. (Be sure to follow through later by listening to its concerns.) You may find it useful to write a quick reminder to yourself so you can let go of the thought for the rest of the session.
  • Say to your client: “I need a quick moment to ask one of my parts to relax and step back.” Far from being an interruption in the coaching, you’ll be modeling Self-leadership for your client.
  • If appropriate, you can share with your client about your part that got triggered. This one is particularly useful if a client gives you feedback about a misattunement. For example, you might say: “I have a part that’s really rooting for you to succeed, and it occasionally jumps in and tries to get me to rush the process. I realize that rushing interferes with our work, so I’m going to ask that part to relax and step back. I’ll also work with that part on my own and help it to trust the process of our work.” Again, that’s great modeling—it helps to build trust with clients because they see you taking responsibility for any of your triggered parts and setting an intention to work with them from a place of Self. At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the appropriate main focus of sessions is the client’s coaching goals, not interpersonal processing between the coach and client.
  • Work with the part after the session and attend to its concerns. Also ask yourself: What will enhance my ability to lead from Self with this client?
  • Work with a mentor coach or a colleague to calm down and attend to any parts that habitually get triggered in the process of coaching clients. This is also an appropriate place to explore when it is and isn’t appropriate to disclose to a client about any of your own parts.

It can be tempting for coaches to align with the parts of clients that want to move full steam ahead toward a goal. It’s crucial for coaches to recognize our own parts that are obscuring our access to Self. When we’re in Self, we trust the client’s process—both the pace and the route. Self-led coaches do our utmost to notice when we aren’t in Self and to cultivate our ability to return to a state of presence with our clients. We also learn to compassionately attend to our distressed parts so that, more and more, being present comes naturally to us.

Therapist or Coach

January 17, 2013

I’ve started writing a monthly blog post for the Institute for Life Coach Training and will be posting my articles here as well. I’ve always been fascinated with personal growth—ever since my first therapy session at age 19. As a young adult, I was fortunate to have a close association with the Gestalt Institute of [...]

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Vocation

January 10, 2013

“That insight is hidden in the word ‘vocation’ itself, which is rooted in the Latin for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I am to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who [...]

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Forgiveness Revisited

November 4, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately. I’ve been reading a book by Fred Luskin titled Forgive for Good. I’ve been interested in forgiveness for many years, in large part because I was raised with polar opposite messages about forgiveness. My father was the king of holding a grudge, where as my mother seemed to [...]

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Magnificent Wings

July 16, 2012

I have a daily practice doing process art and blogging about it for all of 2012. It’s called Process Art Journal. Some days I have something profound to say, and other days I don’t. I recently had a meaningful day with it, so much so that I’m reposting it here. I don’t know where this [...]

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Boundaries

June 20, 2012

I’ve been a huge fan of boundaries ever since I figured out (in my early 20s) that a lot of my woes came from not having any. A boundaries handbook should be required reading in school—every year. I read Carolyn Hax’s daily advice column in the Washington Post, and I’m amazed at how little the [...]

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Reframing

June 8, 2012

I’ve been having an enlightening experience lately as I’ve been focusing on my “ideal life.” Up until this past week, I’ve been thinking about it in terms of bringing my life more in line with my vision. For example, I have X, Y, and Z goals, and I’ve been working on identifying steps to reaching them. [...]

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Preparing the Ground

May 13, 2012

My friend Karma and I traded coaching sessions this afternoon in the first of many sessions to give birth to something new in our lives. Even though I do very satisfying work—particularly coaching and educational writing—it feels as though there’s another aspect of my highest purpose that I’m not yet doing. I’ve decided to seek it out [...]

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One Year

April 18, 2012

Yesterday was Charlie’s and my first wedding anniversary! It’s quite amazing to grasp the fact that I’ve been married for a year, especially after all my past rants about the institution of marriage. A few weeks after we got married, I incorporated some of them into a blogpost on marriage that I posted here. We wrote our [...]

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