MODERN APPROACHES TO PERSONAL CONSULTANCY
Titul: SYNERGIE NEWS Vydavatel: Synergie, s.r.. Autor: Markéta Palánová
TRAININGS HAVE NO DESIRABLE EFFECT, IS THERE ANY CHANCE FOR CHANGE?
It may have happened in your company as well: Your man took several personalized trainings and courses, but the regular employees‘ evaluation reports say that there has been no desirable change in his or her behaviors. Why is it sometimes so difficult to change oneself?
We can perceive a man as a personality who performs certain roles in life. By personality we mean the persisting features, which characterize an individual and separate him or her from the others, and as a role we understand an area of activity, which requires a certain way of behavior. It is evident from this difference that the personality is much more complex and evolves over a longer period of time than the individual roles we perform during our lives (child, student, wife, team leader...). Therefore it is easier to learn new ways of behavior and experience on the role-level than on the personality-level.
If a person reaches during a training or a course this notional line between personality and role, a feeling may arise that no matter how hard I try, again and again I regress back to my learned ways of reacting and change seems almost impossible. The reason behind this is that the characteristic features of our personality have evolved and strengthened through countless repetition, the figurative rails of our habits are too deep to be easily abandoned. Plus the major part of our experience (sensations, feelings, fantasy, thought, expectations) has its roots in the unconsciousness where we have no access; hence it is necessary to focus ourselves deeper inside the core of our personality.
COACHING
Coaching is one of the possible ways in this direction. Coaching is a very personalized offer of consultancy for leading employees, which encompasses a range of subjects from demands on the individual role to personal goals and possibilities. Today coaching is perceived in the company world as a means of personal growth and development, it is a combination of individual consultancy, personal feedback and practice-oriented training. Possible utilization is for promoted or transferred leading employees, in companies undergoing restructuralization or strategic changes, or within the scope of outplacement. The coach, through various techniques and tools (reflection, active listening, visualization, role-playing, identification techniques...), supports the client on his or her way to better self-consciousness, to finding new solutions and reaching goals he or she had set. The result of coaching is the development of broader spectrum of alternatives of action and a feeling of competence supported by one’s own resources and abilities.
GESTALT IN COACHING
Gestalt approach in the area of organizational consultancy was developed in USA in 1950s, used and continuously perfected from 1960s and taught from 1970s. It is based on the scientific grounds of Gestalt psychology (1920s a 1930s), which F. Perls applied in the area of psychotherapy and J. Nevis and others in the area of organizational consultancy.
Gestalt’s popularity in coaching stems from its richness in experiments and other creative techniques (work with body, voice, writing, drawing…). It is actually a very adventurous process: the coach will ask you questions you have never sought to answer, he or she will ask you to look at the situation through someone else’s eyes (wife’s, boss’s, colleague’s), you will speak for the picture, which is hanging on the wall of your office and is an impartial witness of everyday communication…
The goal of Gestalt coaching is the development of one’s self-consciousness and acceptance of responsibility for one’s subjective experience, for what we do not realize, we do not control can’t handle. Conversely, greater self-consciousness gives the opportunity to be more integral, richer and healthier.
You may fall for the magic of the “right here right now” approach. In our professional and personal life we spend huge amount of our energy on contemplating e.g. “if I had…I could have today…” or “when this period is over, I will definitely…” instead of working with what we have in our hands right now. When stuck in the past or the future like this, our ability to decide, to change, to act can be inhibited. Gestalt makes use of the phenomenological approach to describing reality, sheer observation devoid of evaluations, interpretations and reasoning. You may find it trivial, but try to think about how much are you able to watch for instance your fellow travelers in the tram without valuing them. By putting our prejudices aside and stepping off our rails of subjective perception of the world we allow ourselves to act more freely, creatively and with better understanding of ourselves and others.
If we turn back to the initial question, it is obvious that there is a chance for change. It only takes the courage to look at our current ways of reacting and the motivation to learn different ones. An expert in the field of Gestalt approach may be the ideal partner on the way to this change.
The fact that consultants of this kind work in our company, Synergie generally incorporates techniques of Gestalt approach into its consultancy services such as Development Centre, Outplacement and HR Consultancy.
