CONSTRUCTIVIST COACHING

Constructivist Coaching is an invaluable practical guide for coaches who is involved in supporting the personal development and learning of others.  As using a range of methods and practical applications, is aimed to work flexibly with the Coachees, allowing them to lead the coaching process to unlock what they did not know or realise about themselves and reach greater self-understanding and self-acceptance, and to enable them to engage in meaningful change.

Based on the philosophy of Personal Construct Psychology (PCP), was ahead of its time and subsequent theoretical movements have advocated themes overlapping with the originally radical position that George Kelly articulated in The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955/1991).

Personal construct theory emerged in the 1950s as both a theory of personality and a clinical psychology founded upon the central premise that humans construct our own knowledge and understanding of the world through a process of active cognitive construction and meaning making, paralleling in some ways the scientific process. Personal construct theory focuses on the general processes by which people make sense of and navigate their social worlds.

Kelly viewed individuals as agents who devise and revise conceptual templates he calls personal constructs, that enable them to interpret, anticipate and respond to phenomena they encounter in the world. Individuals construct meaning from experiences, and refine meanings across time. Overall, Kelly’s theory focuses on the structure and function of how humans construe their experiences, on the organization of systems of personal constructs, and their change over time (Neimeyer, 1985).

Kelly’s complementary methodological contribution in his theory is called the repertory grid, and involves elicitation by a researcher of dichotomous categories or facets of individuals’ personal mental constructs. This method of elicitation is also applied in clinical psychological therapeutic contexts, towards transforming individuals from positions of psychological conflict or inconsistency, to greater levels of self-awareness and cognitive integration. 

Whilst 'Constructivist Coaching' is interested in how people interpret their own lives and how they ‘construct’ their sense of reality within their social world. Relationships, social context, individual processes, identity, and active learning are all fundamental aspects of this approach.

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation where the other person misinterprets what you were trying to say even though you thought you were being clear? The idea that human experience is subjective, and that reality is a point of view formed within our own mind rather than objectively through our physical interaction with a detached and singular external world, stretches back to the work of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Kant remains a significant influence in post-modern psychology and was the first philosopher to comprehensively place the relative thoughts and experiences of the person centre stage.  He argued that knowledge is always interpreted and actively constructed using a-priori laws of nature that are themselves socially determined. Thus, he views people as being rational agents.

Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a position that sees people as adventurers, capable of pushing the boundaries of their lives as they experiment with alternative interpretations of their changing worlds in an attempt to increase predictability. Critical here are the discriminations people make, whereby they see some things as similar to and others as different from others.

These discriminations, known as constructs, are bipolar, with both poles necessary for understanding of the discrimination. “Hot” cannot be understood except in relationship to “cold.” Our actions reflect the application of these construct poles, as we behave in accordance with our constructions. Contrasts are central to an understanding of change in that the contrast (or opposite pole) to the current way of seeing the world is the most readily available alternative, and changed behaviour will reflect this, at least initially. The processes that relate to the development, application, and modification of this construing are central to understanding differences between individuals and facilitating change, rather than merely the content of construing per se.

Critical to the construct system’s development are processes such as the Validation Cycle, (see above) in which ways of making sense of the world are tested and revised or buttressed, as in Kelly’s metaphor of the person as a potential scientist, and the Creativity Cycle (see below), which describes how we can create something new by successively loosening the ways we construe, then tightening up to a defined outcome (Walker, 2007).

One of the fundamental conceptual issues in psychological science is the conflicting debate between determinism and free-will. Determinism is the view that all events, including human emotions and behaviour are the unavoidable outcome of a causal source, whereas free will contends that the person holds the ultimate decision about how to feel or behave regardless of external influences.

Personal Constructivists adopt a more middle-of-the-road relativist perspective, which is shared with Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a relativist theory because it regards the universe as a fully integrated and interconnected system (Leitner, 2012). And central to the theories is the role of personal agency, the individually located cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and decision-making.

In Personal Construct Psychology (PCP), a person has free will because they have the ability to choose how to interpret the meaning of their experiences, rather than their experiences being in control of their thoughts and feelings. However, these choices are bounded by the person’s construct system, which they have themselves built, consciously or not. Thus to enable change and growth, the nature and breadth of the person’s construct system must be explored, challenged and potentially re-interpreted so that self-limiting constructs that are operating at an unconscious level (and behaving in similar ways to the forces presented in psychoanalytic theories) can be surfaced and reframed.

Constructivist approaches such as personal constructivism, social constructivism, and social constructionism are often referred to interchangeably and subsumed under the generic term ‘constructivism’ (Charmaz, 2000). They have a common view that human experience is irreducible and emphasise the importance of both personal and social aspects of knowledge development (Raskin, 2012).

They regard people as active sense-makers living in an interpreted world, where reality is constructed through social-cultural processes and organised by both the individual and collective ‘categories of meaning’, as much as it is by physical artefacts (Neimeyer, 2009). However, they have a different perspective on the correct level of the ‘person’ and how people create their lived sense of reality.

Personal Constructivists assert that the ‘Self’ is an ultimately idiosyncratic conception built upon three intra-personal human essences: that the individual are closed psychological systems, active meaning-makers, and social beings (Raskin, 2011)

This is intrinsically different to a social constructionist perspective, which asserts that there is no such thing as an individual, that we are all an amalgamation of our shared experiences, which are transferred through language, and social relationships (Gergen, 2009). Social constructivists sit somewhere in the middle. Although they agree with personal constructivists on the role of the individual mind constructing reality, they see the Self as a more open system that is significantly influenced by social conventions, history, and important social interactions.

Coaching is ultimately an interpersonal intervention; therefore, it is better suited to a personal constructivist rather than social constructivist or constructionist approach. For when adopting a personal constructivist perspective in coaching, you should acknowledge and embrace within the coaching process the influence of social and cultural experiences on a person or group’s sense-making processes, but also recognise that how they ultimately make sense of their experiences is an intra-individual process (within themselves) that is then shared, rather than an inter-individual process (within themselves} that is then shared, rather than an inter-individual process (between selves) that is created by the group.

There is general agreement that having a personal sense of ‘who we are’ is a very important psychological concept. And it is this sense of individuality that offers us stability in a constantly fluid and changing world, even in collectivist cultures that privilege family and community over individuals with systems that respond to the needs of society rather than individuals.  Feeling that we are distinct from others in who we are or what we contribute provides us with a sense of personal worth and the meaning that we derive from our existence.

Alongside the notion that human experience is irreducible, another important distinction in constructivism is that it adopts an identity-based conceptualisation of personality. This means that it thinks about personality in a very different way to the established trait perspective. Trait theories, and their associated personality inventories such as the various Big 5 (OCEAN; openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) measures, sit within a positivist paradigm and regard personality as reasonable fixed across time and contexts. 

They adopt a nomothetic approach to measuring individual differences, suggesting that we all share common traits, and a person can be understood by reducing them to these common constituent parts, for example, by how extrovert or conscientious they are. Identity theories, on the other hand, see personality as idiosyncratic and constantly evolving over the life span, dependent upon the person’s context, and their experiences.

The term 'nomothetic' comes from the Greek word 'nomos' which means 'law'. Psychologists who take a nomothetic approach are concerned with establishing general laws, based on the study of large groups of people, and the use of statistical (quantitative) techniques to analyse data.

From this perspective, the person can only be understood as a holistic entity and cannot be adequately measured through standardised criteria.  Within an identity perspective, the beliefs an individual has about themselves is called their self concept, which is constructed both socially (from their interactions with and feedback from others), cognitively and conatively (how they think and feel inside their own heads).

It is important to note here, that Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) was originally written as a distinct and fully articulated theory of personality, in response to dissatisfaction with the piecemeal theories predominating at the time. Within personal constructivism, people are regarded as similar or different to each other on the basis of their construing and not on their biographies or their traits. Their thoughts, feelings and behaviours are embodied as a whole and only operate separately as ‘modes’ for construing things (Bannister & Fransella, 1986).

COACHING MODEL – the Sense Making Cycle

The sense-making cycle, is our articulation of the process of intervening in the dynamic process of construing, in order to help the coachee arrive at a new, negotiated and more personally useful understanding. The sense-making cycle operates as a basic framework for facilitating enduring personal change within the coaching process by raising a person’s meaning making process to a conscious level and encouraging the active experimentation of alternative ways of thinking and doing. By re-articulating the act of construing as a cycle of four stages, the coachee can be helped across session to move around the cycle in relation to any chosen topic and different topics be worked on at different time points.

Stage 1 – Exploring current decision choices and role positions.

Stage 2 – Innovating thinking through creativity

Stage 3 – Learning through experience

Stage 4 – Reflecting on shifting perspectives

FLEXIBILITY OF APPROACH

In 'Constructivist Coaching' you work ideographically, where each person is unique and can only be understood in their complete form.  By this, we mean their intertwined thoughts, feelings and actions.  This perspective is at odds with a positivist approach, where psychometric tools help the coach break people down into their constituent parts or characteristics.  In constructivist coaching, the coachee determines the path to be travelled and the role of a coach is to facilitate new ways of thinking about themselves, their values, their relationships and their social rules, within the holistic flow of their individual life story. 

This means that, unlike behaviourial coaching approaches, you cannot just “test and tell” within a standardised coaching offering. Instead coaches need to work flexibly with the coachee and see where their story takes both the coach and coachee.

The foundation of all constructivist approaches, in coaching, teaching or research, is developing a climate of trust. The coaches must always feel in control over what is explored and when explorations should cease.  To be an effective constructivist coach this should not simply be an ethical stance but  one that recognises that people are responsible agents, potentially open to life long development, with whom we are engaged in cooperative enquiry.

Therefore, building such a rapport, indeed selecting and working with any of the many techniques that can be considered constructivist in philosophy requires empathy, recognising that different tools will suit different people at different times in their lives.   

CONSTRUCTIVIST COACHING PRINCIPLES

In their ethical practice, Constructivist in any field strive to embody all the following ethical principles in their practice:

Do no harm: be aware of boundaries and take care not to operate beyond them.  Not to coerce or direct the other person down a path that is not of their choosing.

Be open: about the potential pitfalls of the process and not just the benefits eg. that it may surface unconscious feelings that could take time to settle or raise challenging issues).  Also, to ensure that the coachee is always aware of the purpose and procedure of any activities undertaken with them.

Respect others in the relationship: to provide enough information to ensure informed consent and enable the coachee to act autonomously within the process. To be clear about their rights to data privacy, confidentiality and withdrawal.

Act as an equal: to be aware of power differentials within the relationship and work to main equilibrium.  This will involve ensuring that the coachee understands their role as the expert and retains ownership of it.  It may also involve considering incidental relational issues, such as how you dress or your use of non-verbal behaviours.

In an article on Linkedin, as stated by Yves Cabanac (2022) "to anyone beginning an interaction with someone from a different gender, race or country is this: If you want to be treated as an “equal”, act “equal”. It is only when we see ourselves as worthy, that others can, too. At the end of the day, our diverse cultures may influence our working styles and communication methods. But what unites us is a desire to improve, to be the best version of ourselves, and do our best to achieve our goals, both personally and professionally." 

Consent: due to the flexible nature of constructivist coaching it is important both to gain informed consent at the start of the process and ensure that explicit consent is maintained throughout the process.  This can be done quite simply at the start of each session by recapping what was covered in the last session, and rechecking that the coachee recognises your interpretations, has no additional questions and is happy to continue.

QUESTIONING SKILLS

Incorporating constructivist questioning styles into your coaching conversations enables you to move your coachee beyond their own assumptions by accessing and moving deeper into their inner worlds, as well as helping you better explore and understand your own inner world.  As mentioned earlier, the approach is discursive rather than extractive, which is essential if you are to avoid making your coachee feel that they are being interrogated or that you are prying rather than helping.

The coaching conversation should always be purposeful with both parties agreeing on the topic being considered and clear on the form and aims of any tools used to elicit  or challenge constructs. As the coachee talks you through their experience, you should make note of the constructs they use to describe what happened and their perspective. When you interrupt their narrative to ask a question or seek clarification, be mindful not to put words into their mouth of influence the scope and direction of their practitioners because it requires patience as you allow the coachee time and space to realise and describe their constructs in their own words with no suggestions from the coach.

Once the coach has surfaced some construct to work with, the coach can move into exploring their meaning by asking the coachee to provide the contrast pole for each.

LADDERING CONVERSATIONS

There are five ways to classify the purpose and role of the constructs within the associative mental map known as the construct system:

1. As representations of either the general or identity-based beliefs (core or peripheral).

2. As either higher or lower positions with the hierarchical structure or constellatory network (superordinate or subordinate).

3. As either fixed or elastic entities (impermeable or permeable).

4. On their breadth of application across events (comprehensive or incidental).

5. On the contextual consistency of their application (tight or loose).

Constructs are both the foundation of understanding our lived worlds and our filters for communicating our perspectives.  We rely on some constructs more than others and use those across a wide spectrum of events. Certain constructs help us express who we are, both inwardly to ourselves and externally to others. Laddering is a discursive skill that helps the coach identify the nature of the construct that surface and to broaden and deepen the surfacing process.  The coach can either ‘ladder down’, which is a form of questioning that progressively accesses increasingly concrete or subordinate, constructs. Or a coach can ‘ladder up’, which helps the coach progressively access increasingly ‘value-laden’ or superordinate constructs.

Laddering down, sometimes referred to in literature as 'pyramiding', which helps the coachee add experimental depth to their narrative.  Styles of laddering down questions include sense checking, such as “how would you recognise that?” image-based questions, such as “what does that look like?”, or elaborative questions such as “can you give me an example of when that might/did happen?”. Laddering down can help the coach identify the permeability and breadth of constructs and the consistency of their use across events.

Laddering up helps lead the coachee to an articulation of their core, comprehensive and/or superordinate constructs.  These are the value laden, deep, and usually unconsciously held, constructs that define and shape the coachee and that they are most reliant on.  The simplest explanation of laddering up is that it is a ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ forms of questioning. 

ADOPTING A SOLUTION-BUILDING APPROACH

To reiterate, the constructivist stance in coaching, is that they work with people at a holistic level, taking into account their contextual thoughts, feelings and behaviours that they may or may not be able to consciously articulate.  This means that they have a difference perspective on the meaning of goals and see them only as experiential steps in the sense-making cycle (as aforementioned), rather than fragmentalist tools to ‘break down a task.

If the coach uses the term ‘goal’ with the coachee, then the coach should be aware that this word signifies a positivist, rather than a constructivist perspective for them and comes loaded with all the unspoken expectations.  It is therefore, useful to ensure that the coach have some time to explain to the coachee the somewhat different meaning of goals that is adopted in constructivist coaching, and how your approach is more about a process of reconstruction and building solutions, rather than simply changing behaviour.

In broad terms, constructivists favour a system-thinking and solution focused or solution building, perspective than a goal directed approach (Savickas, 2015).  The person is seen as both shaping and being shaped by their lifeworld while reality is something that exists in singular and static form around us.  From this viewpoint, individuals are proactive agents in determining and crafting their life path and attention is given to the processes of meaning creation evolving from their internal interpretation and social interactions.  The coachee is already intrinsically motivated and do not need goals to be set to activate them, instead they need help in understanding the personal usefulness of their sense-making processes.

Although the approach involves understanding each person’s current sense of reality, the process of transition is one of hope and optimism with the primary focus being on where the person wishes to take themselves in their future through the development of any resources to help them transition successfully. As the constructivism adopts a more positive, future-orientated view of the coachee’s potential than many other branches of psychology. 

Constructivist Coaching has the potential to help people overcome more complex issues and dilemmas that are impacting their personal reality or impeding the perceptual quality of their life, whether they have an awareness of them or not, by the coach helping them understand their self-limiting beliefs or foreclosed constructs thus empowering the coachee to find the solutions and make the changes that they want for themselves.

As the role of the 'Constructivist Coach' is one of a co-explorer, someone who join the coachee on a journey into unchartered territory and who lets the coachee take responsibility for the direction, while at the same time help with navigational suggestions.  Another way of looking at this is that the change process is a staircase and the constructivist coach facilitates the coachee’s movement up the staircase by ensuring that each step is built at the right height and depth for them to feel they can move upwards incrementally in relative safety.   The coachee, on the other hand, always remains in control of the actual steps they take, and the materials used in the building of each of the steps.  Once they reach  the top of the stairs, they will have a wider and richer view of the landscape that is their world.

EMPOWERING YOUR COACHEE

Being concerned with how people make sense of their everyday lives and working with them to let go of their constraining thoughts in order to find more personally useful ways of thinking, feeling and acting, obligates the constructivist coaching practitioner to work with the whole person to embrace all that it means to be them, accepting all their inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies, recognising these as part of the joy of their existence.

The mindset that the coachee brings into the coaching relationship has a bearing on their ability to enact alternative constructions.  To succeed, the coachee need to have a hopeful attitude towards the experimentation stage and believe that testing out a different way of thinking and doing will take them to a more desirable place. 

The constructivist coach can help empower the coachee to act as their own self guide by helping them to elaborate on alternative possible futures, to envision more positive ways of how things could be.

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[Extract from Kim Bradly-Cole and Pam Denicolo, (2021), Constructivist Coaching: a practical guide to unlocking potential alternative futures, Coaching Psychology, published by Routledge, ISBN: 978-1-138-31090-2]

REFERENCES:

Cabanac. Y., (2022), To be treated as an equal, act equal, (online) published by Linkedin, To be treated as an equal, act equal. (linkedin.com) [accessed 05/04/2024]

Michael J. Cavanagh and Anthony M. Grant, (2014), The Solution-focused Approach to Coaching    solution-focused-coaching-pages-75-88.pdf (iiabc.org)[accessed 05/04/2024]

Reynolds, Rebecca. (2013). Personal Construct Theory, published by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey      (PDF) Personal Construct Theory (researchgate.net) [accessed 05/04/2024]

Walker, Beverly & Winter, David. (2007). The Elaboration of Personal Construct Psychology. Annual review of     psychology. 58. 453-77. 10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085535. (PDF) The Elaboration of Personal Construct     Psychology (researchgate.net) [accessed 05/04/2024]

Hernandis, Bernabé & Briede-Westermeyer, Juan. (2009). UNA APLICACIÓN EDUCACIONAL PARA EL DISEÑO DE    PRODUCTOS Y SISTEMAS DE INGENIERÍA UTILIZANDOMODELOS CONCEPTUALES INTEGRADOS. Ingeniare.    Revista chilena de ingeniería. 17. 432-442. (PDF) UNA APLICACIÓN EDUCACIONAL PARA EL DISEÑO DE    PRODUCTOS Y SISTEMAS DE INGENIERÍA UTILIZANDOMODELOS CONCEPTUALES INTEGRADOS    (researchgate.net)(link is external) [accessed 05/04/2024]