The Neuroscience of Coaching: What it Takes to Create a New Awareness

October 15, 2014

The sudden solution, amazing truth and profound understanding that gives your clients no choice but to change their minds most likely came as a result of a truth-telling reflection and powerful question, the essential elements that differentiate coaching from other learning modalities. According to the latest research in learning psychology and neuroscience, the brain needs to be aroused by strong emotions including surprise and confusion before an insight or new pattern of thinking can emerge. There needs to be a hole in the “force field” that protects the sense of self and reality before your client actively examines and changes longstanding beliefs and behavior. This is a teachable process.

This session will help you teach the students of your coaching schools both why they should and how they can deepen their capacity to create psychological breakthroughs when coaching. As a result, your coaches will become more powerful thinking partners with their clients which allows for the possibility for a new awareness to form.

Coaching that focuses on supportive processes such as building rapport and showing empathy as you actively listen may help to ease fears and defensiveness, but using only a supportive process may prolong self-denial especially when dealing with strong egos. This session will focus on how to best use direct communications and powerful questions to create new awareness. We will also explore what is needed to achieve the level of trust required to establish the intimacy needed to coach through the vulnerability clients may feel in these sessions.

Using recent research in learning psychology and neuroscience, learn what needs to happen in the brain to create a “new awareness” where a person’s sense of self and the world around them changes.
Explore how to teach students to create a safe “discomfort zone” so profound mental restructuring can occur.
Identify how teaching skills in emotional intelligence will both help coaches understand what they are sensing and stay centered when their clients emotionally react in this process.
Examine the research on listening with the three major processing centers in your neurological system – the head, heart, and gut – to know what reflections to share and questions to ask that will create breakthroughs in thinking.

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Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, MCC

In addition to coaching leaders in global companies, Dr. Marcia Reynolds travels the world speaking and teaching classes in advanced coaching skills, leadership and emotional intelligence. She is the author of 3 books and has been quoted in major online and print publications in the US and Europe. Her new book, The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs, will be released October 13th.

Marcia was 5th global president of the International Coach Federation and is currently the President Elect of the Association for Coach Training Organizations (ACTO). She is the Training Director for the Healthcare Coaching Institute, a coaching school focused on teaching leaders in the healthcare industry to use powerful coaching skills. She also works with coach training organizations in Russia and China.

Marcia’s holds a doctorate in organizational psychology and two master’s degrees in communications and education. Her experience includes 16 years in leadership positions in training departments for healthcare and high-tech corporations. You can read more at www.outsmartyourbrain.com.