The Science of Sustaining Personal and Career Development
I recently conducted a workshop with MBA students in which we discussed what is the best method for engaging in sustained personal and career development. I decided to write this article as a follow up to the workshop as it is topic that is close to my heart as a career counsellor and coach. I find it fascinating to understand how we can create the right conditions so that we can maintain our momentum as we progress in our careers and lives. In recent decades neuroscience has helped us to help clients and students engage in sustained growth and development. This short article will explain how you can engage in this process in your own time.
The key to coaching effectively requires an understanding of both practice and research. For me to be effective as a coach and career counsellor I need to understand what the most recent research says about helping people to engage in effective personal development. It is incumbent on me to utilise that research in my counselling sessions with students and clients. Historically coaching has emphasised an approach that focused on convincing clients to agree to a plan to improve their lives, this is often referred to as coaching for compliance. According to this approach, we work to persuade clients to buy into certain strategies to create sustained personal development. We now know through neuroscience that this philosophy of coaching is counterproductive. As soon as we start telling our clients what to do their brain and nervous system starts to shut down. Coaching for compliance is experienced by the client as an order, this takes place at an unconscious level but ultimately it serves to shut down neurological networks in the brain that would otherwise lead to change.
We are therefore compelled to ask the question, “How do we help our clients engage in sustained growth?” This is ultimately a question of motivation, and we now have a much better idea of how to create the condition for change in our clients by understanding neuroscience. Dr. Richard Boyatzis advises us that the best question we can ask our clients is as follows “If your life was perfect, what would it look like?” We should not focus on a problem, or develop a specific goal, we should encourage our clients to develop a vision of their ideal future selves. When we encourage this process, we create the correct neurological conditions in our clients that leads to lasting motivation to engage in personal development.
It is important to note that a vision for an ideal future can change and shift as a client progresses, it does not need to remain fixed. Therefore, it is advisable to keep reconsidering the nature of the vision and ask if it needs updating based on the new information that arrived as a client progresses their journey of personal development.
To incur sustained change, we need to activate a psycho-physiological state which involves moving a client from what is called the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) to the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The SNS is the survival mechanism that we all have and is of course very helpful in life. Conversely, the PNS is the part of brain that relates thriving, and it is what helps us to plan for our future. The problem with society today is that much of life is spent in the SNS and we have significant body of research to support this hypothesis. We only need to look at our own lives to understand this point, so much of our time is spent rushing from one place to another, paying bills, getting work done, picking kids up from school, running errands and so forth. The speed at which life functions reduces our capacity to enter the PNS system on a regular basis. When we are stuck in survival mode for long periods of time we can make important life decisions from a position of fear rather than openness and curiosity. It is for this reason that we often find ourselves stuck in jobs we don’t enjoy or find meaning in. This is because when we are in the SNS for prolonged periods of time we experience cognitive and emotional impairment. It is therefore necessary for guidance counsellors and coaches to help our clients move from the SNS to the PNS to identify a path in life that will excite them, and the best way to do that is true encouraging our clients to dream about an ideal future self. This will active the PNS and create the necessary conditions in a client’s brain and nervous system that will support a motivation to change. This is where effective coaching can truly help clients navigate their lives in a more purposeful way. Finding purpose in life stems from the PNS and it is crucial to effective guidance counselling and coaching.
There are two simple methods anyone can engage in to activate their PNS system. My first recommendation is to start keeping a career journal and write weekly about your vision for your future, give yourself license to dream big, do not put any limitations on what you would love to do in the future. Describe what it is you would love to be doing and describe why you feel this vision for your future self would be good for you. It doesn’t need to be long description, just writing a paragraph two or three times a week is enough. Secondly, identify someone who can support you on path towards your dream, this should be someone who will listen and be supportive, they do not need to do anything other then be a good listener. I encourage the students I work with to buddy up with a classmate that they get on well with, and to take turns playing the role of coach and client. In this exercise one person describes their vision for their future while the other person listens carefully. Then I get the students to switch roles; I suggest that they continue to do this at regular intervals during their studies.
The recent introduction of neuroscience to coaching has greatly improved our understanding of how we can support the students and clients we work with to engage in sustained personal development. I enjoy teaching this topic because it also helps me understand why I should regularly revisit my vision for my ideal future and I hope this article will convince you to do same.
