Family Life Coaching: Empathy

For my internship, I decided to enroll into a Family Life Coaching class at BYU-Idaho. As I have been in this class I have found so many life tools that will not only help me in my future career, whether it be counselling or coaching, but also in my everyday life. I want to touch on just one here. One that if you do not use you will not be a good coach at all.

1. Empathy.
What is empathy? Empathy is feeling with others. It is to never pretend that you understand. It is a fueled connection with another. It is a vulnerable choice. I love the word vulnerable. When we are helping one and/or coaching another we have to be vulnerable to what they may voice and say. We are not to be judgmental. We are to listen with empathy. I want to share a video about empathy.

I absolutely love this video! It shares how hard empathy can be. This video portrays the skill of advanced empathy which is understanding the underlying problem or issue that one is going through.
Have you ever seen an iceberg? If not, here is a picture of one that I took while I was in Alaska.

You can see that there are some rough as well as smooth spots on this iceberg but what you can't see is how much ice is under the surface. There is a diagonal line on the front face of this iceberg, everything below that line was once under water. This iceberg will shift and rotate in the water. It actually did it when I was taking the picture. about 2/3's of the iceberg is under water. The goal of a coach is to help those find what is under the iceberg and how they can accomplish that if they desire. 

" The voice that speaks in him speaks low but he who listens with a third ear, hears also what is expressed almost noiselessly, what is said pianissimo." 

I absolutely love this quote because this is talking about empathy. You can also apply it to advanced empathy. When you have a true desire to hear and understand what one is going through you are listening with that third ear. 

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside you." -Emerson

Power of Assessments

How do you know where someone stands in what means the most to them? How do you know what they want to work on? In Coaching we have so many different tools that are a strong resource to helping us figure this out. These are assessments. At the beginning of my experience with these assessments and with my coaching clients I picked out a few that I felt were applicable.

The first one is the Life Wheel. I love this assessment. I love that one can look at these different sections of their life and find which ones matter most. I did this for my self. and found that my Spirituality was my highest. It was the one that I care the most about with my self-image the least, the one I need to work the most on. As I did this with my clients I got a response back of many wows, I didn't know that that was so important to me. And now I can see what I want to work on.
                                            
The second one that I liked to do was a visioning exercise. This helped people to look at what they desired most by imagining the perfect day. Life isn't perfect and never will be! I think that is very important to know. However, imagining gives you an idea of what you want your life to be and then having a Coach can help you to achieve the goals you wish to set to achieve that dream. I did this with one of my clients and it was an amazing experience. It led the rest of the sessions and helped not only myself, the coach, but also my client to know what she wanted to work on. These visioning exercised can be anything but they are there to help one see the potential they have.

The third is something that I haven't used yet in my coaching but came across in my Adult Development class. It is a Competence and Environmental Press graph which is used to measure your competence and environmental press when dealing with stress. I wish I knew about this well before I started my coaching because it is such an amazing graph and helps one visualize how competent they are with their stress and the environmental press that is causing the stress as well.

I tried my best to draw this graph on the computer so here it is. What one would do is they would plot where they feel they were. Did they have high levels of environmental press or low levels and then take it to their competence, low levels or high. One wants to be in the zone of max comfort not in either of the maladaptive parts of the graph. I feel like if I knew about this I could help a client take each of their stressors and then plot them on this graph and then plot the overall number and see where they fall. This would give them a visual of where they are in handling each stressor that is in their life and if they wanted to proceed we would go from there. 

Assessments help one to see where they are at as well as need to be legit. The last one that I mentioned is not an assessment and/or has been tested. I do feel like it is a beneficial tool that could be used. 

Carl Rogers

This post is going to be based off of Carl Rogers. My Professor drew this picture on the board in class on Thursday, 9/28, and It really stuck out to me. So you can see what each of the parts of the picture stand for; sun-acceptance, nutrients- empathy, tree-personal growth, rain- congruence. 

If we imagine that the tree is our client, we (the coach) help provide everything else. I like this because it helps me to see what my purpose is as a coach. I am not supposed to be responsible for the growth and I am not supposed to give them the answers on how to find the solution that my client is searching for. I am there to be real with them, to listen to them, to accept them for who they are, no judgement, and I am to provide empathy. As I provide empathy the acceptance will shine onto the tree and when the congruence comes it will nourish the empathy so that my client can grow into the tree they want to be.