Alison Whitmire, PCC, is President of Learning in Action, a company committed to revealing derailing blind spots and creating awareness resulting in breakthroughs. She is an authority in Emotional and Relational Intelligence.
Today we talk with Alison about her article How Not to Coach Like Your Parents that was published in our March 2021 issue.
Watch the full interview on Youtube by clicking here.
Alison Whitmire, PCC, is President of Learning in Action, a company committed to revealing derailing blind spots and creating awareness resulting in breakthroughs. She is an authority in Emotional and Relational Intelligence.
Today we talk with Alison about her article How Not to Coach Like Your Parents that was published in our March 2021 issue.
Watch the full interview on Youtube by clicking here.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Gary Schleifer. And this is the meet the author series brought to you by choice the magazine of professional coaching, the ultimate resource for professional coaches in this wonderful arena of ours called professional coaching. Or more than a magazine choices, a community for people who use coaching in their work or personal lives. We've been building our strong, passionate following in the coaching industry for almost 20 years. Yes. Next year will be 20 years. Lots of things coming up in today's episode. I talk with coach educator and speaker Alison Whitmire about her article in choice magazine, which had me chuckling how not to coach like your parents, by the way, it's this issue here, the March of 2021 issue, the art science, the impact of coaching. And I'll tell you a little bit about her the officialdom which will be included in the write-up for this session.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Alison, what Myers the president of learning in action, a company committed to healing the divide within and between people sounds like something that really need these days. We believe we can become divided from our divine essence and similarly divided from others in ways we don't know. And can't see, we aim to heal the divide through the cultivation of loving awareness for ourselves, others and the world. Alison is an authority and emotional and relational intelligence, a professional certified coach, just like me, a master IQ practitioner, and a certified narrative coach. She has thousands of hours of experience, coaching entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business owners. She's a certified 2000 R Y T yoga teacher and a mindfulness meditation teacher. She's a TEDx speaker and a three time TEDx conference organizer. Welcome, Alison, thanks so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Thanks Gary. I'm really happy to be here. I'm
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Thrilled to be here too. So I'm just going to grab onto a little bit of that bio stuff, because you know, when I read that it's like an emotional and relational intelligence. So I know you through our friend mutual friend, Susie, but I have to say we're connected through a community of coaches called cam conversation among masters. And I've always felt related to you even though we don't see each other that often. So you are already doing the work, I guess, with me on relationship intelligence. So thank you for imparting your, your raise, your magic wand, whatever it takes to, you know, remind me how much I I appreciate and respect too.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Well, thank you, Gary. You you've always been incredibly I've felt supportive of me and, and my colleagues and I've felt that really genuinely. So I I'm very appreciative of that.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Thank you. Okay. You have to tell us what's a 2000 R Y T
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Just a different designation of yoga teachers. There's 500, 200 an hour trainings. There's 500 hour trainings. There's 300 hour training. So it gives you a set, I guess it's equivalent of like ACC PCC. MCC might be the VR, the ACC version.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That's where I was going with that too. So, and what was your TEDx speaker topic?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, so it was on it was related to blind spots, you know, learning. It was about learning a new way of being was the talk and it was very, for some reason I'm very and have been for a long time interested in the topic of what we can't see about ourselves. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Well, you know, the term unconscious bias came up a lot for me when I read this article. Right, right. And reminder, we're talking about the article article, how not to coach like your parents. Very interesting. So, so what, what was the Genesis of this article? Why?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, so a lot of the work that we do at learning and action is around relational intelligence and how we can relate more effectively to others and ourselves. And what we've learned after, you know, doing this work for like 20 years, I bought the company, you know, eight years ago and they will come, they spin around for 20 years. And what we've learned is that an awful lot of how we relate to others is impacted by our first relationships, how our parents and us related together, like how we learn to be in relationship. And the thing is we go out into the world thinking all relationships and how we are to be in relationships are like our first relationships. Right. And they're, and they're, they're not we have loaded in our implicit memory, which is that memory that we know, but don't remember, right. Wait, we can't file it away. We can't access it. It's literally embedded in us. That's where our, how we show up in relationship resides. And so that it is by and large outside of our awareness, how we relate to others is largely outside of our awareness. And so obviously one of the, if not the most important aspect of coaching is how we relate to our clients and it can be impacted by those first relationships, particularly when we're not aware.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. Well, and you know, and I give you credit too, for the fact that, you know, sometimes people feel like they didn't have parents and you added, included gave us the wider perspective of caregivers because ultimately we were raised in, in relationship with somebody from the time we were born until today and who knows. Right. So, yeah. Thank you for that. Now, how would we know if we're coaching like our parents?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah. Typically we don't. Yeah. Typically the doc and and that's okay. There's some of that that's going to always creep in. And what we do is we have, we it's, it's incumbent on us as coaches to have lots of different inputs in our coaching, whether it's to get assessments that begin to look at how we relate to each other, whether it's to work with supervisors or mentors to, or to even just have transcripts of our own coaching, to see how we're showing up and kind of patterned conditioned reactive ways in our coaching. That's not spontaneous and present, like the ways in which we show up that aren't spontaneous and present are often reflective of the ways we learned to cope in our first relationships. Those are the, the, the kind of hallmarks of how we might be coaching like our parents or how we might be not, maybe not coaching like our parents or how we might be coaching in a way or relating to our clients in a way that we learned to relate through our relationships with our parents. Yeah. Well, one
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Of the places I got a good example from in the article was when you spoke about and I'm just going to say generically, because if you really want to get it, read the article and that is you know, if you if you avoid coaching conversations that have to do with things that you didn't deal with in your, in your relationship with your parents or caregiver, for example, anger, if anger wasn't something that was what, that was something that was avoided in your upbringing like it was with mine. And I guess that's why it resonates with me was you will tend to, as you put it, I think try to come up with a quick solution to avoid actually dealing and getting in depth with that, to which we are as a coach uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Exactly. Exactly. So we will tend to be blind to, or not accept or judge or criticize in our clients, what our parents were blind to, or didn't accept or judged or criticized in us. And so that's how it will show up for us in any way in which our clients aren't feeling accepted will get in the way of our coaching. And anger is an example. Another example is if we had parents who like when we expressed needs kind of labeled us as needy and needy, like media is bad, like don't be needy. And so we learn, oh, it's like, my parent can't accept my needs, or my being like labeled needy, like that's bad. And then if we have a client who maybe expresses their needs for us in ways that are uncomfortable for us, then we may consider our clients to be needy, right. Just like our parents did it. So those ways in which our parents didn't accept us or our needs or our expressions, we will tend to do that to our clients. If we're not really, really clear and get opportunities to, for outside insight, every way we can through assessments or supervision or our own
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Personal work and mentoring and that sort of thing. You, you made a good point about that in your article is about doing your own work. Like a lot of the things that were uncomfortable for me growing up, I've recognized some of them, right. Obviously not all of them when I read the article. Okay. So I'm going to go back to when the article was first submitted and I'm like, how not to coach, like your parents, like right away, the title was, I was an attention grabber my note like, oh, am I coaching like my parents, you know? And it turns out I, I probably am and need to do more of my own work. Done a lot already as many coaches have, but we're on the road to mastery. It's like, it's always additional support peer groups and supervision, mentoring assessments, things like that. So, yeah. Thank you for that.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah. You bet. Yeah. There, there, there are kind of two ways that we've seen that kind of coaching. Like your parents are based on your relationship with your parents, tend to show up and one is I'll tell you the manifestation of it. And then we can kind of backtrack and how it comes to be that way. Is there are certain people, certain coaches that will take too much responsibility for the coaching. Oh no, no. I know, right? No, tell me no. And if they're extremely compassionate, they may tend to take responsibility for their client's emotions. Right. And regardless, they'll tend to take responsibility for the client's outcomes and, and not really be able to have this like clear separation, clear boundary between what's theirs and what's the clients and what's their responsibility and what's the client's responsibility. And that all comes from, you know, attachment style, attachment to relationship in our earliest lives. You know, we will tend to take more responsibility than is ours to take. And that has everything to do with our very first relationships and how we learn to kind of psychically and physically survive in those relationships. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Wow. Well, yeah. Lots of, lots of stuff behind all that. Right. So I'm simple attention grabbing title and it's, it's really, you know, that's why we put you in the feature section and right up near the front. So so we talked a little bit about this, but what else are the most common ways in which one's coaching would be impacted by their parents?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, so, so there's the taking too much responsibility, right? The other thing that we see most commonly, and this shows up two different ways. One is stepping over the client's emotions. So we've found from researching this for years and years and years now that about 15% ish of coaches have unprocessed trauma in their life. What percentage? About 15%? I was expecting higher, but yeah, maybe 15 to 20, but unprocessed trauma. And you would say, what else I'm like, how would you know that? Well, I mean, that is what learning action does. It takes a snapshot of our internal experience under stress. And one of those snapshots, one of those archetypes is of unprocessed stress or unprocessed trauma. And so what happens is when a coach with unprocessed trauma is coaching, they will do with the client what's happening internally, which means they'll step over anything distressing, just almost act like it's not there.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
So the client will show up and there'll be, let's say feeling fearful or shameful, or maybe angry or sad. And the, and the coach will just kind of step right over it by turning to something positive, trying to, you know, see the bright side or just stepping around it to another topic. So we see that, that artful kind of distancing of distressing feelings in the coaching session. Right? And that's because they have some degree of unprocessed trauma and they're distancing themselves from their own. So we can't, we will tend to dismiss in our clients what we dismiss in ourselves. Right. The other aspect we see, and it's a different way of stepping over emotions. And we see this a lot is that coaches who learned at an early age, like when things get stressful to get busy, like to do something right, that's where this Cole kind of ready fire aim thing comes from, and this is true in our clients.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And about 60% of the population has this. And it basically means what I say has this. That means what's going to make them feel better under stress is to do something, anything doesn't matter what now, when that shows up for us as coaches and our coaching, it ends up showing up like coaching our clients into action. Right before we really explored the current situation. Like I overheard a coach talking with their client and the client's like the CEO of this business. And he's talking about how businesses ban and he's really upset and he's lost some employees and he doesn't know what to do, and he's really discouraged. And, and like the coach says, but what are you gonna do about it? Right. And thinking like, that's the great question. And like, you know, oh, I'm going to be a coach and I'm going to, you know, what are you going to do about it? And like, oh my gosh, there's so much missed. Right. And we're just stepping over all that distress and going straight to what are you going to do about it? So those are really the kind of the three common things we see in coaches that are being influenced by their past relationships is it'll take too much responsibility for the coaching or they'll step over emotions to kind of silver line it, or to turn to something positive or they'll step over emotions to get busy and get an action. Got it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
I will definitely look at my coaching again, a lot differently, you know, as well to this. I don't know, we talked about this was, this might be a bit of a step back. How do our brains get wired by our relationships that we have this, you know, skip over, avoid all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah. Well, so we come into this life with very, very undeveloped brains, right? Really only the brain stem and only the parts of the brain that we need to survive are actually fully formed. All the other parts of our, of our brain, the cerebellum, the prefrontal cortex are all very much in developed undeveloped and in development. And so I can imagine that the purpose of that is so that we adapt, adapt to adapt to that, to our, the specific environment we're in, well, much of what we're adapting to are the people we are in relationship with. Right? So, so our literal neurology, our brains are wired to fit into the relationships we're in both the family constellation, the siblings that we have and the family structure but also the way that we learn to be in relationship with our caregivers. And what's okay and what's not okay.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
And we learn all of that. What's okay. What's not, what's rewarded. What's not, what's punished. What's not we learn all that at a, before we have any kind of memory and it all gets wired into our brain and it becomes like the water to the fish that we are. Right. We just don't, we don't see it anymore. And so that's, that's why lays the ways in which our parents or caregivers can influence us can be so pernicious is because we literally have no memory of, for it it's implicit and not explicit. And it's literally wired into our brain. Louis Castellino has this great book called the neuroscience of human relationships and he talks about how our brains are literally wired differently dependent on attachment style. Wow. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Gosh, you know, we, we think, you know, we're told we're 99.9% the same as everybody else and yet, oh my gosh. All the differences, like just something is, well, let's not say simple, but something as impactful as your upbringing, your attachment to your caregivers, your parents, whatever it may be, can have such an profound influence on the rest of your life.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
True. We spend the rent and the, and some people, when we talk about this, they can kind of go to a place of why are we blaming our parents? You know, I'm, you know, they kind of go to that, like, it's not fair. We can't blame our parents for the rest of their lives. And that's not what we're blaming. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Like I've, I at one point forgave my parents for something, right. Like it wasn't, you know, and I, it was, then it quickly came to realization is they just did what they knew how to do. My parents didn't have those role models, those characters. My dad was an apprentice in a, in a, in the meat business when he was 13 living somewhere else, he didn't have father figure since he was 11. You know, he did, he did. I had to think back and rather than just forgiveness, there was one incident, but you know, it made me who I am,
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Blah, blah, blah. But it
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Truly was, it's like, no, I don't hear that at all else. And I don't hear it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Well, that's just another part, you know, what's funny is that, that part that comes out and people that say, oh, we're just blaming. That's also a part they learned from their parents. So yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I too, like I, I had to do that same work around them. My parents were just doing the best they could. My dad was the sixth of six children born to sharecroppers, poor, poor sharecroppers. My long was the child of a single parent born during the, during the depression, you know, trying to be an entrepreneur. My grandmother was an entrepreneur during the depression, a single mother entrepreneur during the depression, you know, so that I learned a lot about yeah. How she grew up. Wow.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Very interesting. Yeah. And I may want to go back and sign up for Angeles, ancestry.com and get, get a bit more detailed about my family. Right. I'm going to live long. And I look a lot like my grandfather and my grandfather's side of the family, so, oh, that's so cool. So you have long longevity genes. My mom is 88 and no chance to slowing down. She still drives, well, please 10 pin bowling twice a week. And usually beats the pants off the younger folk. Oh my God. And if she has a problem with their computer, she has no problem calling apple and saying help.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Does she ever get anyone on the phone?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, she, how she does it, but she manages. So that's good. That's good. And what else would you like our listeners to take away from this article and this conversation?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, I think just the, you know, I take as I'm sure you and the people, you know, who will, who will listen to this, do take, you know, coaching really seriously. And I feel like coaching and the space we create and the relationship we create with our clients can be one in which we can create a kind of relationship with them that they may be. They've never had that we can create this space of, of complete and total acceptance and unconditional appreciation and give them maybe all the things that, that they didn't get anywhere else in their lives. And, and that means that we, we must do that work for ourselves to give that to our clients. We have to do that work for ourselves. And so and I, and honestly, I believe that by giving doing that work ourselves and given that work, giving that to our clients that complete and total acceptance that we can heal our divides, that they can show up any way that they show up and it's okay.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
And we can support them and becoming more fully expressed becoming who they were meant to be, whatever that means. And that's how I feel we can heal. The divide is only look the ways in which we've become divided from who we are, who we're meant to be who our essence are, and that we can provide that for our clients. We can help them, you know, begin to accept themselves because we accept them and then they can grow into who they, we have meant or meant to be. So I don't know. That's, that's why I feel this is so, so important.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah. Great. Thank you. Final kind of question is you know, with our articles, we always ask the author to give us some our coaches, some actionable items. I I've heard a few in there, but let's just reiterate, what would you like the re the listeners to, to do? Sorry. Yes. There's some to do,
Speaker 2 (24:06):
And as we are conscious [inaudible] yeah. So I'll start with the B, be curious about yourself and kindness. Goodness. Trust yourself. We coaches. This is, I'm going to say something that seems paradoxical. One is we coaches constantly feel like we need to no more, no more, no more, no more, no more about what's out there. Right? What these other models, these other ways of coaching we'd sign up for these classes, but the unexplored territory is so often in here. And so do the exploring in here. And so, yeah, we can do the traditional exploring, like around supervision. We've talked and mentoring, we've talked about that. Some of the traditional exploring is doing things like holotropic, breathwork like doing things like going into to isolation, chambers even like the safe use of plant medicines. Like those kinds of things get really quickly to unexplored territory. And it gives us ways to look at things that we didn't even know were there. And so that's where I feel like we can do anything. It's like turning our attention inside and exploring with every modality. We know how.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Wow. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. And acceptance, I think was the other key one just being, not just and acceptance. I think it was great.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Anything else you'd like to say before we get into some how to breach your details?
Speaker 2 (25:59):
No, I mean, this has been so fun. Thank you. And I did, I didn't, I didn't want it to say that, like, w w I have seen a change in you, Gary, like, just, even since I've known you, like, I see how you're doing your own work genuinely genuinely see how you're doing your own work. And I just wanting to acknowledge that.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. Thank you. Well, I'm leaving this call thinking that I want to do something like some sort of, I think like a retreat. I mean, we've been locked up for a long time, but to go somewhere to do kind of a structured work, you know, I'm thinking of Susie, her and her daughter away this past weekend to a yoga, a vegan yoga retreat. And I can't wait to follow up with her cause she's like beacon. Anyway, I think, you know, a proactive approach to doing more work. Like I've signed up for a pathway to MCC. So I'm working on my end. So that'll be a lot some work. And you suggested like supervision and mentoring and assessments and peer group it'll have all of it. And then that starts in the fall. So, Hmm.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Well, I mean, I did a as part of my mindfulness meditation teacher training, we were required to do a seven day silent retreat. And that was really wonderful as well because there's no, there's no reading, no writing, no talking, no electronics, no consumption of data or content. Like it's, it's, there's nothing going in and nothing going out and you'll only have yourself to be with. And I know it's amazing. And so stuff comes up and up and up and up and up and up and up that that we unknowingly journal or anything. Well, you're not even supposed to write. Wow. Right. So, because that can become a distraction. And what I found just happened organically is these, you know, memories came up and these kind of unprocessed kind of trauma with small T kind of would come up and I go, and it just organically began.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
You know, our bodies, our minds want to process through this stuff. We're built to want to process through it. It's just that when we fill our lives with more and more busy-ness and stop and distraction, which we all do, and I'm guilty of for sure that, that we don't give ourselves the time and space to process. And so when you go to something like a seven day, 10 day, whatever retreat that you have, nothing but space, and that, that tends to come up organically. Can we do baby steps? Yeah. So they have three days. They have one day you can do something really tiny. You can do a one hour isolation chamber. You know, they, they have this, you know, salt water tanks. You could go for an hour and it's the same kind of process where there's no one here and all my other senses are, are brought down. And there's just, just me. It's just me in there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
No, and I have access to one just down the street. So maybe I'll start with that. There you go. I'm committing to being that the month of July how's that I can always go into the next booth and you get a tan at the same time. That's great. Alison, I want to thank you so much for being on our meet author episode. We hope that you'll write again soon. Your, your call, your article was like so valuable so much. We thank you for it. And to come on the call today and talk more about, it was just, it just elevates the knowledge and the experience and and the, the depth of what it is. You're trying to say. So thank you. I do want to ask what's the best way to reach you.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Sure you can. Reach me if you want to email me personally@alisonwithonelalisonatlearningandaction.com. If you want to learn more about the courses we offer, you can go to learning and action.com and learn more about the company or learning in action.com/courses and find all our offerings. We are offering a a class on how to integrate mindfulness in the coaching. Two session class later in July, and then we're are offering a brand spanking new integrating or mindful coaching certification, a 12 week program in the fall. And then our, our kind of crown jewel offering is EEQ training IQ certification. Also a 12 week program starts in the fall,
Speaker 1 (31:01):
And we'll be promoting you your programs as well. We're happy to help and support others in their profession. So thank you. Thanks. Thank you. That's it. For this episode of the meet the author, please sign up to our email list@choice-online.com to find previous episodes or subscribe to your favorite podcast app so that you don't miss any of our informative episodes. If you're interested in getting a free issue of choice magazine. And I think if you go now, you'll actually get the one that Alison's talking about. Yes, that's the one I think we're offering for free. And the article is on page 24. Enjoy you just have to head over to choice national online and click the sign up now button, and it will be delivered to your inbox. So thank you very much for that. I'm Gary schlepper enjoy the journey to mastery.