Existential Coaching understand the sorts of dilemmas and issues
that people want to deal with in a coaching relationship?
Existential Coaching bases its approach upon the central assumption
that life is an uncertain enterprise and that the one predictable
thing we can say about it is that we will be confronted with the
unpredictable at any point throughout our journey.
As human beings,
we all share the experience of facing and confronting any number
of uncertainties of living. These may be personal (such as issues
surrounding health, employment, or romance) or work-related (such
as the eruption of unforeseen conflict within one's company, or
between competing organisations or nations) or, often, contain elements
of both. Whatever the uncertainty may be, however, our experience
of it provokes a felt sense of unease, or anxiety.
Coaching recognises that anxiety is not necessarily "a bad
thing" or a problematic presence that must be reduced or removed.
The feeling of anxiety can be stimulating, can put us in touch with
our sense of being alive, and is the source to all creative and
original insight and decision-making. On reflection, a life that
was anxiety-free would be empty of meaning, enthusiasm, curiosity
and the urge to advance itself.
the anxiety regarding the experience of life's uncertainties becomes
confounding, unmanageable or intolerable, we attempt to initiate
ways designed to reduce or remove that anxiety. Unfortunately, the
most common ways that we adopt can be problematic in themselves.
rely upon strategies that refuse to face up to the existence of
felt anxiety. Or we try to transform our felt anxiety into other
sorts of anxieties with which we might be better able to deal. Or
we are likely to "crumble" at our felt anxiety either
by acting impulsively and irresponsibly or by continuing to "plod
along" through life in the hope that the anxiety will eventually
fade away sooner than we will.
While it is
a "given" of being human that we all experience anxiety,
just what specific occurrences will provoke the highest degree of
intolerable anxiety in each of us and how we will respond to it
is determined by our unique "way of being in the world"
- our worldview.
Coaching argues that it is not terribly useful to apply general
techniques to specific and uniquely experienced life-issues. Instead,
the creation of a secure and trustworthy "life-space"
encourages clients to get to know more accurately and to experience
more honestly just what their worldview is, what it is like to experience
oneself and others through that worldview, and how the current dilemmas,
concerns and uncertainties that are presenting themselves may be
challenges to, or outcomes of, that very same worldview.
is freedom's possibility