South Wales Coaching Network – June

13.07.2017

Our June session focused on Neuroscience, with guest speaker Clive Hyland giving us an insight into his work as a leadership coach and how he utilises a combination of psychology and neuroscience to develop and support effective coaching relationships.

Clive talked through the model of the Triune brain, with its three distinctive parts:

• Basal (reptilian) – instinctive, attuned to the environment
• Limbic (mammalian) – co-operative, social
• Cortex (human) – rational thought

He introduced the concept of the heart having an impact on how the brain operates, meaning that emotions are as important as thought, and explained how mindfulness and meditation are used to quieten the cortex in order to reach the emotional part of the brain that allows sustainable personal change. The theme of connectivity was reinforced, with an awareness of our own and others’ energy encouraging us to tune in to what is really going on for others and forcing us to be more self-aware.

We had an interesting discussion on applying neuroscience in coaching, around relationship building, visualisations and using these techniques to ‘get in the zone’ and we discussed how our instincts are essentially visual; thus, an organisational vision needs to grab our attention quickly in order to engage our brains. Confidence is driven by the heart, so in order to create a confident organisation, we need to link to the ‘heartbeat’ of a company.

We talked about using a neuro-scientific approach to create trust, recognising our different states during a coaching conversation and using this as a platform for conducive sessions. We explored ideas around how these different states of mind affect decision making and perception.

Clive explained how our responses are emotional, rational or instinctive, depending on our state of mind and we worked in small groups to build a model for an effective coaching conversation using different communication styles taking into account the emotional, rational and instinctive states.

Those who attended agreed it had been an engaging and fascinating session that has prompted many to reassess the way in which they approach coaching conversations. Thank you to Clive for sharing his extensive knowledge with us, and to John Lewis for hosting the event.