Coaching With the Brain in Mind

David Rock: I have a kind of standard definition that I've sort of edited and evolved over years and I've noticed it hasn't evolved much for about four years, which is a good sign because I'm always improving things. The definition is 'facilitating positive change by improving thinking' and it's a particular definition, 'facilitating positive change', so you are facilitating, not making it happening, you are enabling it to happen. It is very much positive change so it is strength-based, it's forward-focused, future-focused, solution-focused, all of that. And 'by improving thinking', so you are working at the level of how people think, not just what they think but how they're thinking, how they think, so coaching improves people's thinking, they think differently, they think more effectively. As a result of that improved thinking, they improve their behaviors and they improve their performance at the end of the day, but that's my definition, 'facilitating positive change by improving thinking', it turns out to be a simple but quite powerful description of the art of coaching, from my perspective anyway.

Rachel Salaman: How does that definition differ from how other coaches see it?

David Rock: Well it's interesting, I've asked probably in the order of a thousand people over the years this question, how we should define coaching and most people have a roughly similar answer with very, very different words. Most people say some version of facilitating people's growth or helping people achieve goals or motivating people or growing people or enabling people to achieve things, most people are in that area and then I find you have about 20-30 percent of people who say it's fixing people's problems and focusing on what people aren't doing well. So most people know that coaching is solution-focused but you have maybe about 25 percent who still see it as a deficit-focused activity and not everyone is working with thinking, a lot of people are focused on just goals, on the outcomes, some people are focused on emotions and feelings, some people are focused very much on purpose and belief and perhaps more of a person-centered approach, more of a psychological approach.

I actually mapped out some years back all the different approaches that there are to coaching and there are as many as there are trees probably. You have got some people who are very psychologically-focused and even within psychology you have got some people who have more of a solutions-focused therapy approach, others have more of a person-centered approach, you have got people that have a Gestalt approach. I mean just as in psychology you have got really hundreds of schools of thought that have influenced thousands of coaches and then you have another group of people who think of themselves more as NLP [Neuro-Linguistic Programming] coaches and others who see themselves more as spiritual, you have Christian coaches and religious coaches of different sorts. So it is really, really broad and I think if you had to summarize the whole field of coaching, it's about facilitating learning and speeding up learning, so people do better. At the end of the day it's about that, it's helping people do better.

My particular definition is something I've evolved and it works for me, it may not work for everyone but everyone is in the business of helping other people to do better. It kind of gets messy once you dig in to the theories that support that but that's one of the things I set out to do in this text book that you mentioned, Coaching with the Brain in Mind.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and that book is a really comprehensive look at coaching and how neuroscience plays into it. It also takes some time to establish the foundations of coaching by looking at its history as a practice. Can you briefly outline now how coaching has developed in recent years?

David Rock: I'll explain the theory field a little bit and it will help you see how it is has evolved to some extent. I had a very unusual opportunity that I'm really, looking back I'm really grateful for, tremendously grateful for. I partnered with New York University about five, six years ago and I spent several years working with them, and my job was to build a theory base for coaching essentially, that didn't reside just in the school of psychology because this was an adult learning division, it wasn't a psychological school. It was to devise a theory base for coaching and kind of pull together and explain the theory of coaching by drawing on multiple different areas and I had this great opportunity to actually debate this one question of what are the influences in coaching, where does it come from and debate it not just like for an hour or a week or a month but for about three years with literally hundreds and hundreds of people. Not three years back to back but over three years I ran probably about eight or nine different programs with between 50 to 100 people in each and each time we ran the program over those few years we took a whole other deep dive into where does coaching come from, what are its influences?

We tried to pull it together and we saw this really interesting trend, there is definitely some influences obviously from philosophy, the Socratic approach and some of the philosophical thinkings. There is also a lot of influence from many, many fields from within psychology in the last 100 years but there is sort of this rough evolution that you can start to tease out, particularly from psychology where you see that we've gone from a deficit model and slowly, over a hundred years or so, moved towards more of a strengths-based and a forward-focused model. Then we've gone from long-term therapies to much more short-term therapies and those two influences combined have definitely influenced coaching a lot.

There are a lot of other fields as well that have emerged that have had a big influence on coaching and certainly the study of creativity and how people come up with ideas and have insights, that's been a big field. The whole wellness field, how we maintain peak wellness physically and mentally, that's another big area. There's another field that studies change, there's a whole field of change and change theory and there are many, many great thinkers who have spent their lives studying how change occurs from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Prochaska's Theory of Change and William Bridge's theory and many, many people, I mean there are about a dozen major change theorists who have really devoted a huge amount of their lives to just studying change.

So you have got that whole field and then you have got the whole field of systems theory and how systems form and how systems change and how systems emerge over time. So you have got the systems theory, you've got the change theory, you have also got that enormous field called learning theory, evolving out of education and adult education, so that is another area entirely and in many, many other fields. You can imagine how much our heads hurt after diving into all this and this was the problem. One of the things at NYU is that they had terrible ventilation, terrible lighting but they had fantastic whiteboards and these whiteboards sort of stretched the entire length of the room and in a couple of the early classes we had the opportunity to send about two days physically mapping out these fields and putting them all up and kind of getting the whole group to stand back and say, what do you see? If you put Solutions-Focused Therapy and Systems Theory, Learning Theory, perhaps Positive Psychology, Change Theory, philosophy – all these things together, what are the threads?

It did make people's heads hurt, it really did and what we found was that sort of by accident we started to introduce some neuroscience and when I say by accident, it was because I'd had a really strong interest in this area for many, many years and I'd read quite widely in terms of popular brain science books. I wasn't a neuroscientist but I had read pretty widely and I was reading papers and I was reading pretty heavy books that were available in stores and I started to introduce a little bit of neuroscience and it was very, very interesting what happened.

The first time I did it was fascinating, there was a group of people, about 70 people in the room, it was the afternoon, everyone was quite brain dead and I just handed out one sheet of paper that had a couple of quotes on it and in this room that wasn't very well ventilated or lit, the entire room suddenly got charged up and excited in the afternoon. You really notice when 70 people get excited about something in a room like that, the change was very, very tangible and what they were excited about was just a couple of the quotes, the neuroscience, actually provided a bridge between a whole range of different fields and it was like adding an ingredient and this ingredient actually linked everything together. It was just a couple of simple quotes and I decided then that I would include a bit more about the brain in the next program we ran and in the next program we included about an hour on the brain and that lit people up even more so in the next program we included a couple of hours and in the next program, a few months later, I really dove into it more and started to really research and write and think about this and that's when I started thinking on Quiet Leadership which came out in '06.

I decided right back then, this was in 2005, that it would be fantastic to actually explain everything those people had been through in the room and kind of lay out in book form the whole theory of coaching and show how neuroscience does provide the link because it really makes a tremendous amount of sense. So to cut a long story short, the neuroscience provided this kind of link between these fields that made these fields actually make more sense and fit together, almost like the glue that is fitted together or a piece of cloth that wove it together in some way.

We spent a lot of time working out how to visually interpret that and we came up with one framework that became the structure of the text book and it is that there are three major bodies of influence in coaching and this now answers your question – it's a long answer isn't it? Three main bodies – firstly there are foundations and if you think of maybe like an oil well or perhaps more environmentally sound, a platform that you swim off in the ocean or something but if you think of a platform out to sea, you have got foundations that hold it there and these foundations in coaching are not what you directly touch in coaching but they are kind of important and they are things like philosophy, psychology – general psychology, wellness theory and also some aspects of psychotherapy in some of that.

So that's foundational. Now there are many, many coaches who know absolutely nothing about any of those fields and they can still be effective coaches, so they are not essential but they provide a pretty useful foundation.

Above those foundations are what we call the pillars and those pillars are holding up the platform and the platform is the neuroscience. The pillars that hold up the platform are a lot more relevant to coaching and a lot more directly connected and they are Systems Theory, Change Theory, Adult Learning Theory and Positive Psychology. So those four theories sit on the foundations and they directly connect to what we think of as the platform. The platform is understanding the brain and what we've started to do, since those early days and now, five years later, what we've started to do is explain everything that we do in coaching from a brain perspective, both in terms of training coaches – in how to coach we explain everything from perspectives of the brain – and coaches now are starting to explain what they do to their clients or with their clients, from a brain perspective as well.

Those two things I profoundly believe create more effective coaches and more effective coachees, more effective clients because, they are separate reasons, but the coaches essentially know what they are doing more and are more present because they are able to see in real time what it is they're doing and the coachees become more relaxed and at ease because they understand what's going on much, much more.

So that's really what's happening and that's led to kind of a new definition of coaching which is more of a just a scientific one which is 'facilitating self-directed neuro-plasticity' and that's how I now think of coaching from a scientific perspective, is that coaches facilitate self-directed neuro-plasticity, which means coaches help other people to rewire their own brains and become smarter. So that's kind of the way that I see coaching has evolved and certainly the way I shape it up. There are many, many people who are academics in the coaching world who think completely differently to me, I'm not saying mine is right, but what I find is that teaching coaching this way seems to create very effective coaches and certainly more effective than before I explained the science and before we had the theory. So that's the evolution, as it exists in my world anyway.

Rachel Salaman: How new is that idea of bringing neuroscience together with coaching?

David Rock: I guess I'm not the only person that's been doing it, I'm probably the most vocal about it, doing the most research on it and the most writing about it. In 2006 the first book really about coaching and the brain came out and that was Quiet Leadership. It's been pretty widely published, or the ideas about this have been pretty widely published in coaching and in business journals and in other things now but I definitely was one of the first people to make the significant links and have been speaking about it. You'll now find there are quite a few people who are thinking about this and writing about it and that is not necessarily an accident, I set up an institute to actually enable that, I've set up an institute so it is not just me thinking about this, there are many people researching this and there is now post-graduate education in the neuroscience of leadership which is a lot about coaching and aspects of leadership. So there is a field emerging and it is definitely at most five years old.

Rachel Salaman: So how much do we really know about the brain, how advanced is neuroscience as a discipline?

David Rock: Well, it depends on your perspective. Everything and nothing, depending on your perspective: everything compared to thirty years ago and nothing compared to what we'll know in another ten or twenty years. It is the most complex thing in the universe, that's not just a glib cliché, that's very, very true. The amount of research is staggering, especially the accelerating rate of it. I mean you've got a handful of papers published in a year not that long ago, in the late 80s and now you have dozens of papers published a day and you have about 50,000 neuroscientists working in the field but just in the area of, say, mindfulness, pure mindfulness, we've got something like 150 scientists

studying various aspects of mindfulness. In the area of social neuroscience, social cognitive neuroscience, which is things like attitudes and fairness and how we know each other and how we get to know each other and all that, that whole field is between 400 and 500 neuroscientists, so a lot less than 50,000 but they are publishing a lot of research all the time and that field is growing massively. The area of social cognitive neuroscience is one about three or four major areas that if you are a coach you would want to know about. There are others, but that's one of the big areas.

So we know a huge amount more now. The way it works, Rachel, there are some things about the brain that we are really pretty clear on, and there is still enormous territory that we know nothing about but there are definitely some things that we are pretty clear about that are really, really useful for coaches to know.

Rachel Salaman: Like what?

David Rock: Oh gosh, give me a year and I'll tell you all of it! You know, many, many things. For example, there's just no question that there is a direct relationship between the strength of an emotional response and the resources available for logical linear thinking, there's just no question, and it is an inverse relationship so in other words, the more emotional you feel about something, either positive or negative, the less clearly you can think and what's fascinating about that is that it kicks in at almost imperceptible levels in a very, very big way. So for example, we know that if you facilitate a very subtle threat response by just getting someone to complete a maze and in that maze they imagine that they are a mouse and there's an owl at the end of the maze, you create a threat response that has about a 50 percent impact on problem solving compared to if you don't have the owl but you have a piece of cheese. You can influence people's problem solving ability by about 50 percent with an emotion that they can hardly even sense and we've seen this, that study has been done literally with a maze, with a mouse and all that and I write about that in Your Brain at Work.

The same kind of study has been done with a smiley face at the end of a sentence versus a frowning face and that has a perceptible difference on problem solving and the same study has been done with pushing something away from you versus pulling something towards you and that has a perceptible impact on problem solving. So the brain is finely tuned, the threat and reward response is finely, finely tuned. The threat response has a big impact, much more than we realize and it significantly reduces two things. First it reduces logical linear thinking by shrinking pre-frontal function and literally reducing the amount of oxygen and glucose available for your objective function. The second thing that it does, it reduces your ability to notice subtle electrical signals and subtle shifts in dopamine levels and that equates to reducing an increase in any emotion, positive or negative, it's just that the negative is stronger more often. But any increase, a strong increase in negative or positive, decreases not just the linear processes but it has a significant decrease on your ability to notice very, very subtle signals and these subtle signals are the hunches, the clues, the tickles, the instincts, the quiet voice, the things that actually often provide us with real insight and this is a source of insight. So we see that as you make people in the lab slightly more anxious, even in tiny ways, you see a significant reduction in the number of problems they can solve with insights and as you make people happier, you see an increase, also an increase in the number of problems they solve with insight. So that's just one area, that's why I said give me a year, that's one small area and there are dozens and dozens of studies from many, many different angles, all saying the exact same thing about the brain which is, if you want people to solve problems, then do everything you possibly can to reduce the threat response and increase the reward response and even tiny, tiny things that you do have a significant impact on that, everyone is really clear about that.

Just take that once principle and now go and see what someone normally does as a coach, go and see what a manager does normally as a coach. One of the first things to know is that just speaking to someone more senior than you creates a threat response in itself so you have already literally, so if you're a boss and you are trying to coach someone, you literally reduce their IQ just by speaking to them. They are already threatened so their ability to be smart and solve the problems you want the to solve goes down just by speaking, so unless you actually work hard to create a reward response and reduce the threat response, unless you work hard to do that you are actually going to increase the threat response so the very act of saying to someone 'Can we talk about Project X?' actually makes people less intelligent and doesn't work so well.

So this principle that you have got to minimize threat and maximize reward, this is an overarching principle of the brain, it is one of the main organizing principles and it is a big, big principle for coaching because coaching is about, from my perspective, improving thinking. How do you improve thinking if people can't think very well? You have got to start with helping people think and so everyone who has ever done any kind of coaching intuitively does this. You have got to make people feel safe, you have got to create some rapport, you have got to settle people down but we have never understood just how important that is, just how much of an impact it has and just how far you need to go as well. So that's one tiny little finding and really there are dozens and dozens of findings that are pretty much agreed on in the neuroscience literature that coaches can draw from, so there's one example.

Rachel Salaman: So if you are a coach or a manager who wants to use some of these theories in their work, is it something that's easy for laymen to understand because it all sounds rather scientific?

David Rock: Well that's one of the problems and neuroscience is something that scares people off and the brain is, as I said, it is a complex thing. One of the things that I've been setting out to do is make the brain research accessible and easy to digest mentally and understand and there is a paper that I wrote this year that is talked about in a couple of my books but there is a paper called Managing with the Brain in Mind and it contains one fairly simple idea that seems to have taken off. It was published in strategy+business magazine which is one of the top business journals in the States and it became the most popular article in 2009, it was the most downloaded article of the year and the idea is that it is giving managers some basics about the brain and when I say basics, not just oh you've got three parts to your brain, not that stuff, that's not really helpful, but some basics about how to interact with others, drawing from neuroscience.

And there is this one idea called the SCARF Model, in American it's S-C-A-R-F for the American audiences, and the SCARF Model is a summary of the things that are important for the brain in social situations. There is basically two parts to it: the first part to it is that the brain decides whether every situation is a threat or reward and mostly it decides things are a threat, it is far more common and the threat response has a bigger impact and longer lasting and harder to displace and many other things, but the brain decides with every person you see, every book cover you see, every voice you hear, every URL you see on the web, everything that we see the brain categorize is essentially good or bad, said simply. When you think something is good you go toward it, when you think something is bad you stay away from it, it's a very simple function and it is really the overarching organizing principle of all behavior according to one of the leading integrative neuroscientists, Evian Gordon, who has been studying literally thousands of different neuroscience studies to find the patterns.

So this is the first part of the SCARF Model, which is that everything is either good or bad and the second part of the SCARF Model is identifying five other domains that the brain seems to really, really care about a lot in social situations. When I say the brain cares about them, the brain cares a lot about food, the brain cares a lot about water, it cares a lot about oxygen, if any of those things decrease we get quite upset and when those things increase we get a reward response. The same thing happens in these social domains and actually using the same system, one of them is status, one of them is certainty, one of them is autonomy, another is relatedness and the final one is fairness and these five domains are five individual – they are linked but they are individual different domains that the brain is keeping track of and when any of these are threatened, like when people feel that certainty is getting worse, people feel there is less certainty, they get a threat response. It is very, very similar to physical pain or being hungry or thirsty, there is an anxiety produced.

In those five domains, if status is threatened, if you feel like you are going to look bad or if you feel that uncertainty is going up or you feel that you have no autonomy, no choice or you are not related with people, you feel they are a foe not a friend or fairness, when any of those things are threatened you get a pretty strong threat response because the threat response is pretty big. Even a small threat response has quite an impact and the way you offset that threat response is with a reward response. So for example, if you focus on people's strengths then you are not going to create as much of a threat response than if you focus on their weaknesses, which is attacking status.

If you ask people what they would like to do about a situation you are increasing their sense of autonomy rather than when you tell them what to do, you are decreasing their sense of autonomy. When you focus on solutions, you are kind of increasing uncertainty in a way because problems are more certain, problems are in the past and so people will tend to naturally go towards certainty and so you have got to provide safety in other ways. If you are going to try and get people to be uncertain and try to get them to go into uncertainty, you have got to make them feel safe in other ways, perhaps with more autonomy, let them choose to do that, perhaps with more relatedness, by connecting and feeling safe and connected to you and other things.

So this is probably the most viral idea from all the work I've done in five years and probably in all the work I've done my whole life, this has been the most viral idea that people have found tremendously useful and it is five simple words and easy to remember and it is kind of a neuroscience explanation of what happens when we try to collaborate and influence other people. It took about two years of research to write that, it was published in the first NeuroLeadership Journal which came out in 2008 and then last year, in 2009, I published a paper called The Neuroscience of Engagement which posits that the SCARF Model is really the heart of engagement. People are engaged when they feel that they are increasing in status, that certainty is going up, etc, so that's been one of the most useful ideas and relatively easy to digest and understand.

Rachel Salaman: Now you mentioned mindfulness earlier, can you explain the different between the brain and the mind?

David Rock: Oh my gosh! That's two years, that one. I mean it's not a simple question and it depends how technical you'd like the answer but there is tremendous similarities because they are just two halves of the same system and tremendous differences as well because one is physical and one is not. So there are so many ways to answer that but what I can say is that people will argue about it forever, that there are a number of people within neuroscience, the majority of people in neuroscience will say that the mind is really an ephemeral phenomena and we are just physical processes and we are reducible to physical processes, there is not really a mind. I'm not in that camp, the reason I'm not in that camp is that I know that the mind also changes the brain and the choices that you make moment to moment also alter different experiences, physical experiences.

So to me there is a dynamic, there is a mind and there is a brain, they act on each other. It is like the nature and nurture thing, the more we are digging in to nature and nurture, we are seeing that actually genes get turned on by the environment. It's not just a case of one or the other, it's a very deep dynamic between the two and so the brain obviously changes the mind, the mind does actually change the brain. It can do that in seconds, we used to think that it would take months for neuro-plasticity to occur, we see now that just a few seconds of focusing on something changes circuitry, we've seen studies in the last twelve months from that, so it's really a dynamic. It's not so much how they are different, it's how do they interact with each other and they interact with each other massively, all the time.

It is a fascinating question but if you say we are just our physical biology, then really we don't have any free will, we are determined and when people think like that, they act far more unethically by the way, there are some studies on that. When people are primed to think deterministically and reductionistically, they are far more unethical and do far more nasty things to each other and when people are primed to see that you can change your brain, when kids are primed with that they learn better, they become smarter and adults act more ethically and do more of the right thing. So I can't tell you for sure scientifically which is the correct answer but I can tell you scientifically which answer seems to create a better world.

Rachel Salaman: And finally, what one tip would you give a coach or manager who was new to this whole area, which might make them do their job better, something from the world of neuroscience?

David Rock: I mean the simplest tip to someone who is trying to coach another person and it turns out to also be the hardest tip, the simplest tip which is the hardest tip is also the most valuable tip and in essence it is quite simple and that is just ask don't tell. When you ask you raise someone's status, you raise their certainty, you raise their autonomy. Three out of the big drivers of reward are activated in the reward state. When you tell someone, you drop their status, you drop their certainty, you drop their autonomy, the threat state is very strong and so mostly when you tell someone what to do, you get a threat response – when you are trying to change behavior I'm talking about – when you ask people and you get their input, you get their involvement, you create a strong reward response. So the one thing I would say is start to watch what happens when you ask rather than tell, start to see what people do and you will probably see surprisingly people stepping in, people becoming more engaged, people lighting up. It sounds glib, it sounds simple, everyone thinks they are doing it but then when they actually watch and observe themselves, most managers find they do by far more telling than asking and that one change really does change people's mental function in a very big way and very immediately, so that is something to take away and try.

Rachel Salaman: David Rock, thank you very much for joining us.

David Rock: My pleasure, thanks very much Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: If you would like to find out more about David's work, you can visit his website www.davidrock.net.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then, goodbye.