The Reconstruction of Meaning: Part I

Dec. 1, 2015 - PRLog -- Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life (Victor Frankl, 1946:105).  Whitmore (2002:119) mentions that one of the goals of humanistic psychology is the fulfilment “of human potential through self-awareness”.

Elisabeth Denton defined spiritual intelligence as “the basic desire to find ultimate meaning and purpose in one’s life and to live an integrated life” (Whitmore, 2002:120). Zohar and Marshall (2001) in Spiritual Intelligence say that in business today people are facing a real crisis of meaning. This theme is being carried forward in most of the contemporary coaching literature. Many coaches work and integrate meaning in all four quadrants (Wilber, 1997) and work at the levels of IQ, EQ and SQ (rational, emotional and spiritual intelligence) with their clients inside the coaching relationship.

John Whitmore in Coaching for Performance (2002) highlights the mind as the source of self-motivation, and insists that for people to perform they must be self-motivated. Maslow said that all we have to do is to overcome “our inner blocks to our development and maturity” (Whitmore, 2002:110). The highest state in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was the self-actualizing person who emerges when “esteem needs are satisfied and the individual is no longer driven by the need to prove themselves, either to themselves or to anyone else” (Whitmore, 2002:111). Maslow saw this as a never-ending journey.

Associated with self-actualizing is the need to develop meaning and purpose. Clients “want their work, their activities and their existence to have some value, to be a contribution to others”; this relates to motivation because “people seek to engage in those activities that help them to meet their needs” (Whitmore, 2002:112). Through my work with coaching clients, I have come to believe that coaches are responsible for helping both themselves and their clients become aware of their own unconscious thinking processes, and how these impact on their behaviour in the world. To understand their own behaviour, clients need to understand their own intrinsic drivers at a conscious level.

The coaching intervention ranges from questions which explore feelings, motivations, perceptions, assumptions and attitudes, to reflected statements, reframed questions, role-plays, structured question frameworks, observation, or silence. In this respect, Boud, Cohen and Walker’s Using Experience in Learning (1996) had a profound effect on my thinking about the coaching conversation, and the space it opens up for coaches to help clients to learn from their own personal experience. In part II of this article, we will explore the five propositions that Boud, Cohen and Walker (1996) make about learning from experience.