Video Transcript: Life Changing Coaching Part 2

Unit 01d Life Changing Coaching Part 2

Welcome back. My name is Steve Elzinga, and you are in the life changing coaching class. In the first session, I talked about how learning some of this could not only affect your professional life or your ministry life, but it also affect all your relationships: your relationships at the workplace, your relationships, in the neighborhood, in your community that you live in, your relationships with your parents, your relationships with your extended family, your relationship to your spouse, if you' re married, or your relationship to your children.

Coaching is just another way of trying to lead. It's not a teaching, leading, it's more helping the people around you discover their gifts and their abilities, and to help people see how God has wired them., and some of the things that God may be calling them to. It's very non-threatening.

Sometimes counseling or mentoring or teaching can be very threatening, because I am giving you information, or I'm correcting you, or I have an associate pastor who's going to preach, and then afterwards, we evaluate what he's done. And he can feel very threatened because he put his effort out on the line. Now I might say, Well, that didn't make any sense at all. A lot of times, as we're trying to lead people, and people can feel easily threatened.

With coaching, it's not a threatening relationship at all, it's really an encouraging relationship, it's helping a person step up and take responsibility for their own life. In this session, I want to tell you a little bit about where this whole thing came from. Because of where it came from, or at least has some roots, there's an issue behind it that we have to deal with before we can really launch into this.

The background, of this whole coaching thing is Rogerian therapy. I majored in psychology in college, many years ago, and we studied all the different models of psychology. The Rogerian theory or therapy was one of the models that we looked at. Rogerian therapy is person centered. It was developed by Carl Rogers in the 1940s. This type of therapy diverges from the traditional model of therapists as experts: you know, I'm here to help you and train you and help you discover things and teach you things, and moved instead toward a non-directive approach.

Empathy is when I'm emoting that I care about you and I'm positive towards you. I'm not negative. I'm not bringing you down. I'm not finding fault. The empathetic approach empowers and motivates the client in the therapeutic process. Try to motivate the client to take ownership for his own therapy in some ways.

This is a picture of Carl Rogers, of course he's gone now. I just thought I'd give you a little sense of the man by with some of the quotes that that he that he spoke. Experience is for me the highest authority. He was not a Christian. We would say the Bible is the highest authority and experience is very suspect. The devil can give us all kinds of experiences.

But for Carl Rogers, experience is my highest authority; the touchstone of validity is my own experience. Something is real when I experience it; no other person's ideas and none of my own ideas are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is the process of becoming in me. He can see that there's a bit of a new age slant towards this, that truth is sort of relative.

As Christians, we believe that truth is absolute, that God is absolute and that he gives us his absolute truth in the Word, the Bible. But for Carl Rogers, your experience forms truth within you. Your experience, of course, is different than my experience. So your truth is based on your experience, and my truth is based on my experience, and when two people meet, it's just a difference of experiences, and different truths based on those experiences.

Another quote. In my early professional years, I was asking the question, How can I treat or cure or change this person? I think that's a natural feeling when we're trying to lead someone, we're trying to help someone go from here to there, we're like, how do I get you over there? How do I help you become more successful? Right now, your marriage is a disaster, it's broken, or there's brokenness in your family, there's brokenness in this relationship, or you're not succeeding in your business and it's failing, and you can't put food on your table.

How do we fix this? How do I help you fix this? How do I treat cure or change this person? They're doing things that don't work. Now, I would phrase the question in this way: how can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? How can I walk beside this person? What can I do to help this person in a relationship, figure out how to change things? It's not me changing them. It's that they're changing who they are in this relationship.

Another quote: it is the client who knows what hurts. That's true, often true. You see, it's sort of true, but it's sort of not true. Do you know that sometimes the client knows, they just know that they're hurting, but they don't always know why they're hurting. They don't know what the cause of their hurt is.

The client knows what hurts, what directions to go. Do they? What problems are crucial? Sometimes, clients have no idea what the problem is; sometimes clients are trying to work on this when there's a problem that's more systemic, or more foundational. Without fixing that problem, you don't fix others.

That's true with alcoholism. Alcoholism is a foundational problem. You can have a problem at work, a problem of finishing things, a problem of lying, a problem of cheating. But the foundational problem is the alcohol. You can work on the cheating and the lying and all these other things, but you'll never fix it unless you go back to the foundation.

It's the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, so what he's saying is often in the counseling situation. As a counselor, I'm focused on how clever I am. You know, I listen to my client tell me his story and what's going on, and then I fix it. Because I'm so smart.

I understand all the dynamics that have gone into your life and cause you to end up in the problems you are in, and I will tell you what happened, and then I will tell you how you can fix it. In other words, I'm the clever one. I'm the smart one. You just have to listen and do what I say.

Carl Rogers is saying, do I really need to do that? Or can I trust that the client can figure these things out if I help him? Unless I have this great need to feel great about myself as the counselor when I'm done with the counseling session, I feel good about me, because of how clever I am, and how I figured out his problems, and the advice and the stories that I told for my own life.

That's often the case. I mean, that sometimes that is the way is, as pastors do, we stand up and preach. A lot of times, it's more about us and our sense of being a good speaker and being clever and finding this really cool part in this passage, so that other people are impressed with us. Our focus is on ourselves as the counselor, not the client.

I had a need to demonstrate. It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in the process. Again, it's this whole notion of client centered. I'm not going to be counselor centered, I'm going to be client centered. The client has the answer, the client is the one that has to figure out what to do to change their life.

Three key qualities that make for a good client centered therapist. This is all still the Rogerian therapy, again, not talking about coaching. I'm still talking about something that I think is behind some of the ideas in in the coaching arena.

Number one, unconditional positive regard: if you're going to trust the client to figure things out and come up with solutions, then you're going to have to be positive towards them. You can't be negative. If you're negative, if you're finding fault, then the client is going to be less inclined to say anything.

So unconditional positive regard is an important practice for the client centered therapist; the therapist needs to accept the client for who he or she is and provide support and care no matter what she or he is going through.

If  I'm the counselor, and I'm projecting judgment, like you're cheating on your spouse, and you shouldn't do that, because the Bible says you shouldn't do that. Well, then I'm shutting that person down. I am now the judge, not the one going, Hey, how can you figure out what to do with your life? I have to be positive all the time.

If I show negativity, that shuts the client down. He's now seeing me as the judge, not the positive supporter.

Number two, genuineness. A client centered therapist needs to feel comfortable sharing his or her feelings with the client. Not only will this contribute to a healthy open relationship between the therapist and the client, it provides the client with a model of good communication and shows the client that it's okay to be vulnerable.

So, it's about working on a relationship, if I'm going to help you solve your problem, we're going to have to really get along, we're going to have to feel like we're together. I have to model to you what I want you to do. I have to be willing to share and be vulnerable, so that you can share and be vulnerable.

Number three, empathetic understanding. The client centered therapist must extend empathy to the client: I care about you, I believe in you, I'm with you, both from a positive therapeutic relationship, and to act as a sort of mirror, reflecting the client's thoughts and feelings back to him or her.This will allow the client to better understand him or herself.

Mirroring: maybe you've heard of some of that sometimes. Or maybe you've been in a counseling situation, or you've been in a leadership situation, where you say something, and then the person that you're talking to just says it right back to you.

If I was the client, I might say, I'm really feeling frustrated and angry with regard to my spouse lately, and the therapist respond, So you're saying that you're feeling frustrated when you start dealing with your spouse? And then the client goes, Yeah, that's how I feel. And you're like, Well, what's the point?

A lot of times, people will tell you things, the client will tell you things, but they don't really know what they're saying as they're telling you. They're not thinking about what they just told you. When you mirror it back, when you present it back, in sort of an I'm with you sort of manner. Oh, so it seems to me that what you're telling me is that when you meet your wife, you feel frustrated.

When you're in her presence, you might say it in slightly different words. Then they get to hear it. Sometimes  when we speak, we don't even hear what we're saying. But when someone puts it back to us, we can finally hear it, or we can correct it.

Sometimes we say something, but we mean a whole bunch of other things behind it. My father was like that. He would tell you something, and then I would reflect back exactly what he just said to me. And he would say No, that isn't what I'm saying. I'm like, I just said what you said to me.

But see, he wasn't very good at saying what he really thought. Mirroring is a way to keep going over the subject many times so you can finally get it. It creates this sense that we're in this together, rather than being alone.

Alright, let's get through the issue. This is the Rogerian therapy. I think some of this is behind the whole coaching phenomena that's really occurred over the last 10 years or so.

The issue of client centered coaching:  number one, it assumes that mankind is good. So if I'm going to meet with someone, and they have issues and problems in their life, and I think that the solution is inside of them, I'm assuming that that ultimately, this person is good, he's got a good nature.

The problem is in the Christian world, we don't say that. We say mankind is bad, that people are born in sin. They're born with a sinful nature, which is selfish, doing things for oneself, self-absorbed, where we're so concerned about ourselves that we don't even think of other people.

If that's what a person inherently is, if I'm the therapist, and I come to you, and I'm trying to help you become more selfish. I'm trying to help you become better at being self-absorbed. So that's a problem.

It assumes mankind is good. Number two is that it assumes the answers to one's problems are within oneself. Again, the Christian view is that the answer is narrow, not in yourself. The answer is outside of yourself, in the Word of God, in a relationship with God, walking with the Holy Spirit. You can't just trust yourself. That's why we have so many problems in the first place.

Number three, it assumes the client actually has positive dreams and desires. If I'm going to come along and coach someone to do something, to go after their goals and their dreams, I'm assuming that they have good dreams.

You know, if I lived in the 1930s in Germany, and I was coaching Adolf Hitler, I'd be coaching him to be a better Adolf Hitler. There's something inherently wrong with this whole process, isn't there?

I mean, this is the Rogerian sort of philosophy that Carl Rogers saw that most of the therapeutic kinds of models before were based on problems. Sigmund Freud had one view, other people had different views. And we’ve got to fix these problems, and there's brokenness at the center of it.

And he started turned around and said, No, there's something good at the center of it all. And we just have to step back and let it come out. That the good is there. And we just have to create an environment where the good can come out.

Why it can work with Christians. All this, the Rogerian theory in the therapy was sort of, the Bible’s not a part of it. Prayer, God, none of these things are there. Human beings inherently have something good inside of them.

Now, why can that philosophy work with Christians? Okay, what I'm saying is, it doesn't work as a general rule. But it may sort of work when you're talking about Christians, and here's why.

The client is a Christian. If I'm working with a Christian, then Christ is in him or her. There is something good inside. The client has potential, the client has gifts, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, God has a plan for the client, therefore, the coach can believe in the potential of the client and help draw the God-given thing that God has already placed inside of this person.

The Rogerian therapy says there's just something good already there. A Christian will say, No, there's sin and brokenness there. But when someone becomes a Christian, they have a new heart. They're given the gifts of the Spirit; all the good things of God are inside of them. Now you can bring that out.

Number two, there's not the potential conflict of worldviews between the coach and the client. If I'm just helping some guy that wants to take advantage of people and become filthy rich, no matter what it takes, there's a conflict with my worldview. I don't think that's what people should do, and I don't want to help someone do that.

But if I’m the coach, I'm a Christian, and my client is a Christian? We're on the same page. We have the same worldview, that Christ is king. And that God's Kingdom is what ultimately everything is all about.

So, with Christians, we can do this coaching thing, because we're on the same worldview page.

Number three, prayer and Bible helps can be used in the process. In other words, we're not just on our own, it's not just what's in you. There's prayer alongside, there's the accessing the Word of God. How did the Word of God inform what we're trying to figure out as we're trying to pursue different goals?

How this client-centered Christian coaching can help in ministry. We dealt a little bit with the issue, and we'll keep talking about this as we go. But what's the point of this? How does this really help in ministry anyway,

Number one, it helps leaders deal with dependents. Okay, dependents sometimes really do not want to be fixed. A dependent is someone who always is looking for help. They like the attention counseling affords them. Coaching puts the focus on action, rather than just making people feel better.

If the dependent never wants to do any action about their problems, then the coach has the basis to terminate the coaching process.

When I started in ministry, I was thinking more counseling: how do I help these broken people? What ended up happening is that I get all these broken people, and many of them don't want to be fixed. They like the attention that I was giving them. I had no way of getting out of this relationship.

They kept taking up all my time. They really needed a friend. They needed connections with other people, but they were using the counseling situation and the pastoral care as the means to get it. I had no way of getting out of it, because there was no action. There was nothing I could call them to.

If they're not willing to do this, and without knowing this whole coaching thing, I started asking people look, you’ve got to at least read the Bible in prayer; you’ve got to have a prayer and Bible life. If you're not going to do that, if you're not going to at least do that action, we're not meeting again, because people would just totally waste my time.

Number two, it can help leaders spend time with the people that have the most potential. Often it's the squeaky wheel that gets the attention of church leaders. 80% of a ministry leader’s effort goes into 20%, the 20% that does very little ministry in the church. I can tell you that's true as a pastor: 80% of my time is taken up with 20% of the congregation, the 20%, that doesn't do much.

I give 20% of my time to the people that make everything happen, because they don't demand my time. Almost no effort goes into helping the 20% of the people who do 80% of the ministry. In coaching, the focus is on people who want to do something, people that have some goals, and want to get involved in something.

As a style of working with people in the church, this is way more productive. I'm working with the people that actually want to do something. The people that don't want to do something, I can let go. I don't have to keep putting my time into people that don't want to do anything.

Coaching can focus on people that show promise, coaching can focus on people that have a passion for ministry.

Ephesians 4: Christ Himself gave the apostles the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers. Notice these are all leaders. Christ Himself gave all these different offices, all these different leadership roles. Why? What's the purpose of a pastor, to do the ministry? No! Verse 12: it’s to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up. The purpose of a leader is not to do all the ministry.

Sometimes churches have that thought we hire a pastor to go and do the ministry. No! Our church hires the pastor so that he can equip the people to do the ministry, to go into action. What happens is that pastors get bogged down with all the counseling. They get bogged down with having to give people advice and solve all the problems that are going on in the church instead of motivating and getting the people that actually want to do something to do those things.

My church plant in Vancouver, there was Carol Dow. She was kind of a homeless lady, started coming to our church. There were some members as, we started our church in Vancouver, and we made 20,000 phone calls. We got 200 people to come to our church. In the process of doing that, there were some people that our people, that the leaders that wanted to help me plant the church, they connected with these dependent type people who would require all kinds of work.

So they brought Carol Dow to church. I remember she had a little puppy, and she wanted prayer for her puppy every week.The people that brought her to church and said, There you go, Pastor, now she's yours. You have to disciple. We've done our part. We brought her.

I said, No, my job is to equip you to do the ministry. They were dumping it all in; they were expecting me to do all the ministry. That's often what happens in the church. It becomes this counseling, advising, teaching, instead of bringing the best out of potential leaders, so ultimately, they can expand the ministry.

If I have to take care of every single Carol Dow that comes to the church, I can only take care of so many. My job is to equip many to do that.

Highland church, my first church counseling, when I started on ministry, I just wanted to help people. I wanted people to grow, I wanted the brokenness in their life to be changed. I just took on everything. I did the preaching, I did the teaching, I did the young people thing. I did the pastoral care, I started doing counseling, and it was it was non-ending.

I just got bogged down with all those things. I didn't spend the time that I needed to spend getting people that have the potential to go out and do things. So the ministry grinds to a halt, because you're just one person. You have to realize that if you're a minister, if you're in the on the pastoral team, your job is to expand the ministry, not to do the ministry.

We're not saying you never do ministry, but your number one job is to expand who you are, because you're only one person. One person can only do so much. What if you could help 20 other people become part of who you are? Now, there's not just one you, there's 20. You see how you can multiply this thing.

A little summary. Coaching has this background of Rogerian therapy, which is a godless thing. It assumes something good about people, when we know that people are born in sin, but we can sort of redeem it. Because if you're a Christian, and you're working with Christians, there is some good thing in there that you can bring out.

So that's sort of a prerequisite for this whole coaching thing. The coach has to be a Christian, and then the people that you're helping have to be Christians as well.

Alright, until next time.