incorporate chem into their practices and their own self-work. Conflict
management coaches commonly share techniques and che benefits of
mindful awareness with their clients.
Harnessing Clients’ Creativity
Coaches help clients harness their creativity
to be able to act upon their new insights.
Coaches apply a variety of techniques to help clients harness their
creativity. This ability enables clients to explore and express new and
different ways of chinking, doing, feeling and being. According to
psychologist Robert Epstein and his colleagues, there are four core
competencies of creative expression:
• Capturing our new ideas.
• Surrounding ourselves with interesting people and things.
• Challenging ourselves by cackling tough problems.
• Broadening our knowledge. 37
One way in which coaches help clients to cap into their creative
selves is by ensuring that they stay focused on their goals and chat they
capture and apply their insights. Coaches also challenge clients co
confront their conflicts directly and expand their awareness. They facilitate
this process through effective questions that encourage clients
to examine themselves, their situation and the other person from different
perspectives.
Changing the way we look at a problem-for example, by taking
another person’s perspective-can induce psychological distance, and
this distance in turn can lead to creative ways of addressing the problem.
38 Helping clients gain distance from their conflicts is an important
component of conflict management coaching.
Positive Reappraisal
Positive reappraisal facilitates a change in perspective.
Positive reappraisal is an active way of coping with stressful events
and is also a strategy for regulating emotions. It has been defined as
“a form of meaning-based coping,” an “adaptive process by which
stressful events are reconstrued as benign, valuable or beneficial. “39
Reappraisal, also known as recontextualizing or reframing, involves
re-examination of a situation to discover alternative and less threatening interpretations
Kevin Ochsner, a psychologist who studies the neuroscience of
reappraisal, states that “our emotional responses ultimately flow out
of our appraisals of the world and if we can shift those appraisals, we
shift our emotional responses.” 40 He adds that “the one thing you can
always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the sicuation.
“41 James Gross, a leading expert on emotion regulation, refers
also to the fact that among our range of choices is a strategy co make
cognitive changes. 42
Reappraisal, however, cakes energy. We must first inhibit our current
way of thinking and then generate alternatives that we can hold
for a sufficient time to be able to decide which interpretation makes
more sense. Besides the required time, effort and focus, reappraisal
takes practice. 43
Acknowledging these realities, coaching offers clients a structured,
supported opportunity to concentrate their energies over a protracted
period. Over chis time, conflict management coaches, help clients reflect
on alternative ways of perceiving and experiencing their conflicts,
themselves and the other person.
These and other studies in neuroscience contribute to coaches’ and
clients’ understanding of what helps people on the journey to selfdiscovery,
so chat they can make decisions and move ahead in new and
different ways.
