Absent but Implict: Harnessing the Disavowed Forces of Coaching 

Is there an unacknowledged strength and benefit to the disavowed aspects of the human relationship in coaching?
Do shame, judgement, fear, shared assumptions, impatience, annoyance and other everyday emotions drive and inform coaching more than we acknowledge?
If so, is it useful to acknowledge them?
Indeed, can we even harness them?
Animas founder, Nick Bolton, believes the explosive rise of artificial intelligence is challenging us to consider many assumptions that have underpinned coaching for the last 30 years.
In particular, he is fascinated by the way common assumptions such as the non-judgemental nature of coaching is being questioned when considered in the light of a truly non-judgemental experience presented by AI.
Whilst, in the face of AI, there are some who wish to maintain the status quo and others who want to rush headlong to the future, Nick believes the real value is in exploring how it confronts us with what makes the human relationship unique.
We are being presented with an opportunity to think more deeply as to what lies at the heart of coaching that begins to take in, and account for everything that is happening both at the surface and also unseen beneath the observable interaction.
In considering this question, Nick has become fascinated by aspects of the coaching relationship that have often been left in the dark.
Aspects of relationships that touch on areas such judgement, shame and fear are frequently either ignored or assumed to be absent from coaching.
Yet as Nick has considered the difference between a human relationship and a relationship with an AI interface, he noticed that some of what lies behind coaching is the very stuff that has been disavowed.
Considered in the light of the pure non-judgemental AI experience, it can be considered that these disavowed emotions and behaviours have real utility - not explicitly, but implicitly.
Nick will contend that, whilst we do not want to create shame, we can at least acknowledge that, as a human dynamic, it is present in coaching whether we like it or not. Likewise, judgement, collusion, uncritical assumptions and much more that we thought we bracketed from the coaching experience.
Nick believes that AI offers the purest form of non-judgemental, non-shaming coaching and yet, in this, lies its weakness. It is not human.
It is time to embrace everything that makes us human and learn how to work constructively with it.
- How do we work with judgement, in a collaborative, authentic manner, rather than merely pretending it doesn’t exist or working around it diplomatically -often at our own expense.
- How might we allow for the shame that is there no matter how we might wish it away?
- How do we acknowledge shared values and beliefs that keep the coaching relationship held within a bubble of possibilities until that bubble is seen?
- How do we acknowledge and work with the power dynamics in a coaching relationship to stretch towards the equality we hope to gain, but rarely truly achieve?
Join Nick on a journey into the disavowed aspects of coaching and see what emerges.