What does collective life look like in 2022?
Individuals are left to themselves to cope with all the confusions arising from modern disembodied techno-social life, confusions that manifest in self as splitting, fracturing, sabotaging, deception, and shadow.
Differentiation and integration are ways to wholeness achieved through intentional practice and supportive resources.
With discernment, engaging wise elders’ wisdom and guidance can be a supportive resource.
Alternatively, a coaching program with the right fit can be a supportive resource, too.
The freshpractice framework is an integrated coaching framework aiming to be principles and evidence-based.
The integrated self is a central concept in the practice of the framework; it is the implicit and explicit purpose and outcome of the coaching and an essential ingredient in the whole engagement.
Metaphorically speaking, the stream of integrated self flows into integrated practice, and the stream of integrated practice flows into integrated self.
Aspects of the integrated self
In the coaching context, the relevant aspects of the integrated self are
Psychological flexibility,
Positive psychological capacities,
Values,
Strengths, and
Embodied awareness – sensing, acting, thinking, and feeling.
Integrated practice
Integrated practice is built on the emergent potential and growth edge of the person; it is conceived as an expanding cycle or spiral of phases; beginning with goals and designed practice; flowing into accountability, support structures, and resources; giving rise to awareness, responsibility, commitment, action; leading to results, and new goals and practices.
The freshpractice coaching for wellbeing model
The model’s main assumption is that wellbeing is an outcome of well-living, which involves living an engaged and meaningful life, experiencing the full range of human potentials (including the full physical-sensual-emotional-intellectual-creative-relational-spiritual pleasure-pain spectrum).
In short, well-living involves living as a fully (optimally) functioning participant in human endeavors.
The view of the human is as an organic, integrated, hierarchically organized, process-relational form in the process of becoming.
The hierarchical organization has been articulated in many frameworks and models we see as relevant and helpful to bring into the learning space to build on and explore the possibilities of positive growth for the individual and the community as an organized, interrelated whole.
This is the promise and purpose of a freshpractice.
Enhancing capacities, enhancing experience of self and life
{Grow in capacity to grow in life.}
The word for capacity in Turkish is derived from the word indicating shallowness or depth of containment (Latin capax: that can contain or hold much; wide, large, spacious, capacious, roomy).
We could say that your (psychological) capacities determine your (actual) shallowness or how deep you can tap into your potentials, what you can access in you, of you.
Your capabilities are real, but they are not all actual. They become actualized as they are filtered through your capacities.
The nice thing about capacities is that you can intentionally use them to the degree you see fit.
We are concerned not about enhancing capacities per se but about intentionally engaging enhanced capacities.
A pastry funnel or the baking shapes into which you pour the pastry could be a metaphor for capacities. Your capacities will determine your shape, first psychologically and as you live out your endowment, in the shape of your life.
Can you live a bigger life without becoming a bigger person? I doubt that.
Your capacities filter your experience. Your experience is what you are living.
Have you ever thought about what it would mean to grow?
Personal growth. Nice idea – rarely realized intentionally. We get our share by being dragged randomly from one event to another.
The freshpractice coaching for wholeness program
The program explores what it means to enact and embody deeper capacities to care for each other and the planet while realizing and embracing our innate wholeness.
With these capacities, we can serve the possible emergence in our lives, communities, and world. The emergence of emancipation leads to equity; the emergence of fairness leads to peace; the emergence of presence leads to full participation.
Beneficial effects of positive psychological capacities
You want a beneficial impact from whatever you are pursuing, developing, growing, or nurturing. So, to propose that you develop hope and optimism, I should be able to show their beneficial impact and effect on your life, self, and wellbeing.
For our purpose here, I use optimism as a positive explanatory thinking style and realistic expectations of a positive future. I also want to note that theories and explanations have limitations and strengths.
We assume that positive mental health should correlate with a less distorted perception of the world and self.
Realistic future expectations and a balanced view or thoughts are in contrast to catastrophizing, doomsday scenarios, or the other extreme of paradise garden scenarios, unlimited material growth and positive-impact-only consumption with no negative externalities.
Research indicates that optimism goes with resilience and wellbeing; happiness goes with health and success.
Achieving our goals, intentionally and purposefully, requires self-regulated action and effort in facing challenges and adversity.
Higher optimism and lower pessimism could serve to sustain action and effort.
Expectancy-valence theory of motivation points to expectation of and belief in positive outcomes as a driver of motivated action toward desired and valued goals and their benefits.
Goals are desired because of the benefits that you or I value.
The valence of the benefit -> (leading to) desire -> (leading to) goal is transferred to the action through the expectancy of the action to produce results.
Willing is a continuous process; we are always willing for something. With growing expectancy, some willing energy is filtered and funneled into action.
Action is directed toward goals by valence. Growing valence directs energized action toward itself; it is a pull factor.
Expectancy is a lever or facilitator or “unleasher,” a spotlight.
Positive psychological capacities of hope and optimism can nurture expectancy, which we could also consider a positive psychological capacity since it is similar to self-efficacy.
The ‘BEST’ model of engagement with goals
Referring to the BEST (Beliefs, Effort, Skills, Talent; John Franklin, 2019) model, we could say that effort in tandem with beliefs or capacities and skills and talent lead to outcomes, whether intended or not. There is always an outcome. It may not be the one we planned for.
Generalized optimism as a personality trait may serve as general support and thus be blind to the outcome. Still, optimism as a capacity can be adapted, turned on and off by demand, and adjusted to the task.
With an eye on outcome, at times of deviation, we can bring in critical and reflective judgment to reevaluate the goal, our approach to reaching the goal, our skill level and necessary re-sourcing, and our type and strength of effort.
Capacities are states which can be intentionally engaged or disengaged, as needed or as seen appropriate.
The person
I have thrown around the word person, so let me make a short note about what I point to by this word.
When we say “person,” we may point to (any, some, or all) aspects of the whole person, as represented in the following concepts. The whole person appears in integral quadrants as
(upper left; singular, internal, subjective) the intra-personal, constituted of the physio-affective-cognitive subjective dimension;
(upper right; singular, external, objective) the extra-personal, constituted of the object-oriented dimension;
(lower left; plural, internal) the trans-inter-individual, constituted of the socio-emotional-relational dimension;
(lower right; plural, external) the inter-individual, constituted of the techno-material-social instrumental interaction dimension.
We use “person characteristics” mostly reductively, referring only to the intra-personal and, by extension, only referring to the extra-personal, leaving out the other two dimensions completely.
A whole-person approach should bring in and integrate all four dimensions.
As a first step, person characteristics are experienced subjectively as attitudes, judgments, and behaviors emerging as feeling states, such as pride and vitality; thinking states, such as decision and choice; and doing states, such as performance.
Bringing in another dimension of fluidity-stability, we may see values as representative of the person’s fluid characteristics and personality as belonging to the more stable side.
Another perspective is the dialectic of the person, behavior, and situation; these move together and constitute each other.
In this way, we can differentiate and integrate, distinguish and link ever more dimensions and aspects of the human experience to approximate and render a fuller picture.
View on Self
With the Agent Self, we emote, cognate, and connate (willing).
With the Actor Self, we outwardly manifest the agentic self.
Capacities manifest as skills in the form of intrapersonal, personal, interpersonal, and social skills.
Strengths are built on talents. Talents emerge from the temperamental endowment of the evolving self. Personality shapes strengths, and vice versa. Strengths feed into capacities.
Capacities link strengths and talent to the agentic self.
Everything is revealed.
A word on differentiation and integration
Taken together, differentiation and integration are valued as an outcome and a process toward wholeness. Both are moments of transformation in dialectics.
Their value can be mapped as directionality. The integral model’s directionality is rendered as all quadrants, all levels, or AQAL.
In the dialectical thinking framework, the directionality results in (first) a widening move into the four quadrants of dialectic; context, process, relationship, and transformation quadrants; and (second) a deepening move within the quadrants giving us three levels of depth; pointing, elaborating, and linking (of thought structures).
Embodied learning and change
Learning and change imply new behavior, which is a reorganization of the embodied self; behaviorally, psychologically, and somatically.
Practice strengthens neural networks; stronger neural networks make up for stronger habits.
The soma reacts moment by moment to what it perceives to be there, to be the case, to be real. It forms an idea and representation of the world. An idea is a linguistic expression, what we generally call thinking (to be more precise, it is linguistic thinking, the speaking and talking, as distinguished from eidetic thinking, the imaging and visualizing), and the affective experience. An idea involves beliefs, judgments, questions, and the associated feeling and willing states.
An idea comprises a linguistic and an affective experience.
For example, love and hate are complex somatic experiences involving memory, judgments, beliefs, and sometimes cranial shockwaves and feelings.
Soma also reacts as a whole-body movement; some part of it comprises behavior, and some part comprises orientation, posture, neurophysiology, etc.
Cycles of experiential learning {with the support of learning relationships}
Practice, Contemplate, Relate, Build ritual
Expanding awareness, enhancing capabilities {of self and other}
The learner takes ownership of their learning in terms of authority and commitment.
The learner learns from experience and engages in critical reflection, constructive dialogue, and reflective action.
Invite the whole human experience of both the coach and the learner, including cultural differences, value orientations, culture and group membership, and its influence on perception and interaction.
Awareness opens up the possibility of experience. No awareness, no experience; experience is the inner aspect of action and praxis.
For example, a mindless walk in the forest may serve as a physical exercise but not as an experience of nature.
Take in; make contact.
The coaching process and the person
The coaching process begins by placing the adult learner at the center and entering the space of transformation. Coaching brings the whole person characteristics, issues, and life aspects into this learning and transformation space. These include the internal mental process, outer embodied practice, inter-individual relationships, and instrumental interaction with others and the environment.
The coaching relationship and process are embedded in the coach and the learner’s social-emotional and cognitive processes (or self); from here, coaching results arise. Each aspect relates to all other aspects based on, embedded in, and flowing back into those. This constitutes a transformational system; any boundaries we may imagine or see are only for orientation and illustrative purposes.
The inner experience and the outer manifesting patterns go together. The internal process seems to unfold around core propensities or attractors, resulting in our inner orientation for moving in the world. We may broadly identify these patterns as seeming to move against, move toward, or move away. We can broadly identify each pattern to serve a purpose, such that moving against serves the inner purpose of controlling with the outer purpose of achieving; moving toward serves the inner purpose of complying with the outer purpose of relating; moving away serves the inner purpose of protecting with the outer purpose of (?? observing ??).
From the perspective of the adult learner, the coaching results in subjective, personal, interpersonal, and developmental change.
From the perspective of the larger context, the generated coaching outcomes overflow into the organizational, the business space or the wider economy, and the flourishing of stakeholders and society.
In the process, the learner’s task is to identify and plan needed change, work to achieve goals, and make continuous improvements, while the coach’s task is to reveal the learner’s sense-making and meaning-making structures.
As a convention, in a coaching relationship, we divide the humans into two separate villages, two sides: the client and the coach.
Then we start to speculate and state some assumptions about the client, “the client is this and the client is that, etc.” What we assume to be valid for the client as a person will also be generally valid for the coach as a person.
Then there are the tasks and the role of the client. In this case, the coach’s tasks and role complement the client’s. So, the coach becomes a complement to the client and completes the client in task and role. This is in contrast to the client person; as a person, the client and the coach are complete and whole.
The developmental lens of the freshpractice framework
Coaching is about becoming the person you need to be to achieve what you commit to doing. It is a developmental intervention.
To use the metaphor of journey; as a coach, I support your person development journey; so I may also be considered a guide to you in your journey.
This implies that I knew the territory and the terrain; I have an idea about the destination; I probably have a map; I can read and orient with it and use it purposively.
The guiding principle for the coach is to facilitate you, the learner, to become all you can be, become more of yourself, to become who you are.
The discourse on developmentals may utilize words such as potentialities, actualities, salience, flow, motion, etc.
Energy could be seen as potentialities in motion. What is in motion becomes salient; what is salient goes into motion. The static is a moment, and it becomes dynamic in the next moment.
What puts matters in motion?
Either you or the world provide the impetus.
Nothing gets erased or annihilated. Deep history is not a black hole. There is no center of the galaxy. There are centers all around. What once was more becomes less; what was less becomes more. Here we are.
Experience and understanding
What is experience, this experience I am living in right now?
Wait for it, here it comes …
It is self; “here I am” is equivalent to “here I am experiencing.”
Self is the experience. Outside of self, there is no experience; outside of experience, there is no self.
Experience is central to learning since the self is central to learning.
Meaning is always self-related. The meaning of an experience is the learning of an experience. The meaning of an experience is constructed by relating the happening to the self.
With limited sense organs and memory, we engage with happenings in limited ways, partially, fragmentary, and non-holistically. This creates the feeling or illusion of “I am having an experience.”
By becoming whole, we become self, and the meaning of experience becomes the experience. The reward of the moment becomes the experience of the moment, the meaning of the moment, the self.
This is enlightenment, the intimacy with the now, the intimacy with the pulse of being, the breath of life.
For practical purposes, we assume a structured, differentiated, layered self so that we can work with the self as client on the goals of client.
Learning is an active process wherein you construct meaning from experience. Learners use their experience as a resource to construct new learning based on previous understandings.
This introduces the aspect of the self we call understandings; there is you, and there is your understandings.
When we say, “What is (was) your experience with this situation?” we mean, “What was the impact of this event or happening on you; what meaning did you make, what sense did you make, what was your understanding of the situation, what did you think, feel, how did you react, how did you act, how have you been shaped by this?”
Has learning happened? Yes. Your nervous system has changed, and your schemata have changed; even in the case of a mundane situation where nothing unexpected has happened, you have learned that you know it all, and your schemata deepened and got stronger.
Has transformation happened? Not necessarily.
For transformation to begin, some degree of disorientation would need to happen, or an intentional attempt to process the situation mindfully and in a new way, maybe a more open way, would need to be initiated.
The psychoactive meaning maker is an aspect of the agentic self. When the agentic self endeavors to take on social roles, it encounters developmental tasks that are not part of its wisdom of implicit knowledge. This triggers the meaning generator to formulate the encounter as declarative knowledge, to tell a story and give meaning to what is happening.