The Experiencing Scale: How to get the most out of Coaching
The main catalyst driving people to seek coaching is a feeling of being stuck in some way. This often manifests as feeling disillusioned with a key area of life - essentially a search for more meaning in work, relationships, or simply within oneself.
Basically, feeling sick and tired of feeling sick and tired…
This is a good place to start. Humans' strongest motivation is not to seek pleasure or rewards - it’s to remove discomfort. So feeling unhappy or dissatisfied is a powerful incentive for change.
What helps with this process?
When it comes to Life Coaching, in my experience there are two major factors that affect what you will get out of it: the practical, and the emotional. For the type of Life Coaching I do, the emotional is most important, and it’s that aspect I’m talking about here. The reason for this is that most of our behaviour is emotional - it’s driven by the nervous system. Our surface behaviour simply reflects our inner state. So rather than focus on the surface behaviour (a self-sabotaging habit, for example), I work with clients to understand the drivers and logic beneath the surface behaviour. If someone struggles with anxiety, rather than try to simply silence anxious thoughts (which we all know doesn’t work), we’ll go deeper into the core emotions that are operating unconsciously under the surface, that are manifesting as anxious thoughts. When we discover the origin and purpose of those emotions, we are much more likely to elicit different behaviour over time.
This requires working at depth, and the level at which an individual is willing and able to work is a major predictor of their outcomes in coaching.
The Experiencing Scale
The Experiencing Scale is a description of 7 levels of emotional and cognitive engagement with our own ongoing inner experience. According to the creators of this scale, the more we feel safe to explore deeper levels of our experience, the better the outcomes of any type of coaching, group work, counselling or therapy are likely to be.
The 7 levels of the scale are as follows:
The client simply talks about events, ideas or others
The client refers to self but without expressing emotions
The client expresses emotions but only as they relate to external circumstances
The client focuses directly on emotions and thoughts about self
The client engages in an exploration of his or her inner experience
The client gains awareness of previously implicit feelings & meanings
On-going process of in-depth self-understanding, which provides new perspectives to solve significant problems
We can see here that as we go down the scale, we’re moving into deeper levels of awareness, understanding and agency.
From my perspective as a coach, I’d ask two questions: when it comes to looking at my experience in more detail, am I willing, and am I able?
Of the two, willingness is more important. Many, many people have never really had the experience of time dedicated to themselves, in which to explore their own inner world. Patriarchy conditions women to act selflessly, neglecting their own emotions and experiences, and forbids men from having an inner experience at all. No wonder we all struggle. However, given time, space and safety, it’s possible to learn or re-learn how to listen to our own cues, and comprehend and process our own emotions.
Talking about vs talking from
When we’re trying to process our experience, a pattern that we often fall into (myself included) is describing at length, focussing on others, external events and outcomes. Oftentimes, this feels useful and even necessary, but as we can see from the above, we’re probably only operating at levels 1 - 3 on this scale.
A more effective approach is to give just enough context for your coach or therapist to be able to understand the broad strokes of the situation, but try to keep the focus on your own inner experience. Your feelings, your physiological state, and the connections you can make between this present event and your past history.
When we spend less time describing external events, and focus more on what’s happening internally, we’re much more likely to begin to soften and move the unconscious tectonic plates that underpin our day-to-day behaviours.
Many of us are very well able - sometimes even gifted - at describing events and feelings (their own and others), but only in narrative form. I think of it this way: if your life was a movie, it’s the difference between describing the plot in great detail, versus sharing the lived experience of the character inside the movie. Both are based on the same reality, but the latter approach will lead to much more significant outcomes. It helps to talk about our experience from the inside out, because then we are actually connected to it.
There is a big difference between speaking about, and speaking from. Speaking about our experiences is good - it's useful. But really connecting with our experience and speaking from it - from our emotions, patterns, memories and sensations - is a driver of genuine change.
The creators of this scale (Klein M H, Mathieu P L, Gendlin E T & Kiesler D J), suggest that the reasons why it’s more effective to work at deeper levels include:
In working at depth, we develop a clearer understanding at head, heart & gut levels of why we think, feel and react as we do.
We gain more contact with feelings, which allows them to be worked on, processed and integrated to produce better balance in thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
We create a stronger connection with healthy, appropriate emotions, which can energise us to act to change outer circumstances in helpful ways.
It should go without saying, but just in case: ALL of the above is predicated on the client feeling safe with their coach or therapist. You should never, ever feel pressured into sharing anything that you don’t feel comfortable to, and it is the job of the coach - not the client - to provide a safe container. Going into emotional depth - as we see from the above - is a useful and valuable element of Life Coaching, and necessary for genuine change. But in order for that to happen, you need to know for sure that you are being listened to, respected and acknowledged in a non-judgemental, safe and welcoming space. If that is not there, then bounce. As Brené Brown says, you don’t owe anybody your story, unless they earn the right to hear it.
Once that is in place, I’d say be brave. Say The Things. You should meet nothing but respect and support from your coach, and in turning towards our underlying emotions, there is such an opportunity to free ourselves from old patterns, and create the change you came here to find.
