The dominant players in the world of ontological coaching and its underpinning philosophy are commercial entities namely Newfield Network, The Ontological Coaching Institute and Newfield Consulting. Their focus is largely on coach training and personal growth with some coaching and consulting activities. The development of the ontological theory has appeared to have been largely left to the key writers about the work – Rafael Echeverria and Alan Sieler. I am not saying others do not write about the application of the ontological approach or even add to the distinctions, just that the underpinning philosophy has not shifted much over the past thirty years.
Although I have worked as a professional coach since 1999 and also run an ontological coach training program, my main interest, certainly in the last ten years, has been to develop the ontological philosophy. Rather than simply looking to further explore how this work could be developed utilising its original origins, I have sought new fields to enrich and often rework some of the original distinctions. This web site is the result of those efforts.
How Does My Work Differ from the Newfield Approach?
A New Foundational Premise
The ideas in the original ontological work largely stem from a foundation of our way of being. On reflection I felt this was inadequate as it lacks a temporal component. After much reflection, I developed the following fundamental premise:
Every human life is an entirely subjective, internal, and bounded experience. We define our life on a timeline of past, present and future, yet we experience time as a self-constructed and constantly changing present moment that is always focused on the immediate future.
There are two key aspects to this. The first is that our sense of our life consists entirely of our experience of living. What does this mean? Well to begin with, we experience our whole life from within our body and therefore from our own subjective point of view. As an individual, we can only ever know what we observe through our senses and in our bodies – physical sensations and actions, emotional states and thoughts. We spend our lives interpreting all that information and act habitually or intentionally to take care of our concerns, primarily survival. The implication is that we can never be objective as, by definition, this requires an absence of subjectivity. There is certainly an objective reality in which we live, but our view of it is always subjective. It cannot be any other way.
Our experience is always bound to our own personal biology. We cannot have anyone else’s experience nor can they have ours. They might tell us about their experience but we can only interpret what they tell us from inside our own experience which occurs in the context of our past experiences. If the experience is unfamiliar we will still draw on something from our past to create an interpretation as best we can. As we only have our own experience of living then the best we can do is guess at others’ experience. Most of that process of interpretation and guessing is done outside of our awareness. We just do it and fortunately we are very good at doing it but only to a point.
How We Relate to Time
The second aspect of the fundamental premise relates to time. We have socially constructed a common sense idea of time known as the ‘arrow of time’. This idea has been around for millennia and is made manifest in our calendars and clocks. We generally think of the arrow of time in terms of the past, the present and the future. Most people assume we are always living in the present, but this begs the question what is the present? If the past, present and future are all found on the arrow of time then there must be boundaries that separate the past from the present and the present from the future. Here it is important to distinguish between how the present is defined on the arrow of time and how we experience it.
If we assume we are always moving through time then I assert the present is not a space but a boundary. It is simply the boundary between the past and the future. However, human beings have memory and as such we hold aspects of the immediate past in our short term working and sensory memory. We also have brains that are largely predictive in nature. That is to say, our brains are constantly predicting and simulating what will come next, although all this happens outside our awareness. This connection to our very recent past and a constant sense of the future can be seen to provide us with an experience of a present moment.
Our way of being is fundamentally set up to step into the future rather than living in the present. We do not respond to the world we observe rather we predict what we will observe and how we will act and then observe to see if we have guessed correctly.
This idea of stepping into the future rather than living in the present may seem somewhat pedantic but it sets up a very different way of looking at the human condition. The future is always uncertain and so to always be stepping into the future means we are always stepping into uncertainty. The implication is that life is always about uncertainty and risk. So the challenge to leading a successful life lies in developing better ways of navigating uncertainty.
Predictive Brain Theory
Neuroscientific research is producing new theories of the workings of the human brain. One of the theories gaining a lot of traction is predictive brain theory. Rather than lying dormant waiting to be stimulated, the neurons in our brains are constantly firing, stimulating one another at various rates. This ‘intrinsic brain activity’ is one of the great recent discoveries in neuroscience and appears to involve our brains making predictions of what we will encounter next in the world based on our past experience. Our brains do not react to external stimuli; our brains are predicting what those stimuli might be and then assessing the result.
The majority of these predictions are at a micro level, predicting the meaning of bits of light, sound, and other sensory information. Every time we hear speech, our brain breaks up the continuous stream of sound into phonemes, syllables, words, and ideas based on distinctions we have learnt, and predicts what will come next. Other predictions are at a more macro level. You are interacting with a friend and, based on context, your brain predicts that she will smile. This prediction drives your motor neurons to ready your mouth in advance to smile back, and your movement causes your friend’s brain to issue new predictions and actions, back and forth, in a dance of prediction and action. If sensory input indicates any predictions are in error, your brain has the capacity to correct them and issue new ones. All of this happens very rapidly and outside of awareness.
Predictive brain theory can explain the physical nature of transparency and breakdown, feeds into the idea of stepping into the future and also provides a very different interpretation of feelings and emotions.
Constructed Emotions
Whereas the distinctions about moods and emotions in original ontological work are based on the now discredited triune brain theory, my work is based on Constructed Emotion Theory developed by Dr Lisa Feldmann Barrett and which she based on predictive brain theory. Her approach is a better fit with the temporal nature of our way of being and also provides a different set of distinctions of what our moods and emotions might be.
Consciousness
Human consciousness still promotes great debate as to what it is and what it means. The original ontological work does not address issues of consciousness directly but implies a dualist approach – that is a mind-body divide – as it speaks to soul and spirit.
My work is more pragmatic and I have chosen to work with what can be grounded as opposed to ungrounded belief and faith. To that end, my philosophical work is materialist and takes the view mind emanates from matter. With that it mind, it can be said my ideas speak to everyday living rather than a spiritual quest.
Relating to Others
Most people see trust as the basis of relationships, but how do we relate to someone whom we don’t trust. My approach stems from the idea of stepping into the future together. By doing so, one person will allow the other to impact their future. This idea is linked to the linguistic acts and means one person gives the other authority to impact their future. I have termed this, “The Authority Dynamic”. The ways in which we establish authority in relationships happens either through seeking to force the other to accept our way forward, known as the paradigm of control, or to do so through trust. Healthy relationships are built on trust.
Conversations
The original ontological coaching work spoke generally about conversations but I could not easily see clear connections between the conversations themselves nor in how those conversations related to body, emotion and language. In hindsight, I was struggling with the idea of coaching being all about conversations but not really getting much insight into those conversations. My first challenge was in how conversations were defined. I was taught there were six type of conversation – conversations for stories and assessments, conversations for possibilities, conversations for the coordination of coordination of action, conversations for relationships, conversations for clarity and conversations for possible conversations. These distinctions confused me until I had a light bulb moment and realised why. The first three conversations were generic in nature whereas the the last three dealt with a specific breakdown.
That realisation then led me to appreciate there only need be three types of conversation – the first three. The others required dealing with a type of breakdown but utilised the first three conversations. A conversation for relationships could be any or all three of the generic conversations depending on the breakdown. More effective conversations would include clarity. Finally a conversation for possible conversations would utilise the first three conversations to resolve the breakdown of not being able to engage a desired conversation. I also felt the names of those first three conversations was somewhat cumbersome, so I changed them to descriptive, speculative and action conversations.
Finally I realised that to have an effective conversation there was a general pattern to be followed. Descriptive conversations came before speculative conversations which came before action conversations. Sure, we might weave back and fro in those conversations but an effective conversation would end in a strong declaration or promise. My effective conversations model was born.
And Furthermore…
These are just some of the changes I have made to the original ontological work. Clearly, I think those changes improve the work, others may well disagree.
I have attempted to generate a rich depth and alignment to my work but I also recognise I may be able to do this better. I invite you to have a look around and see what resonates and what does not. With that said, I would welcome any thoughts or criticism you might have to offer.