This would be an exceptional opportunity when working with Beethoven to provide coaching with a focus on anticipation. First, one would probably be very supportive of Beethoven’s anticipation. One appreciates Beethoven’s thoughts and feelings and helps Ludwig clearly discern the nature and depth of his newly found anticipatory perspective. Perhaps, one can even do a bit of spiritually based coaching regarding his relationship with God. As a coach, one can help Ludwig reflect on ways to sustain the feeling of happiness. Using coaching strategies, one can help Beethoven build on the anticipation of good things about his work schedule, his physical and psychological health, and the setting in which he was to prepare his greatest symphony.
While Beethoven would have been “a tough customer/client,” our coaching quiver is potentially filled with many arrows (Bergquist and Mura, 2011). Some of these arrows are appreciative in nature and relate directly to the matter of anticipation. We can help our client both lean and learn into the future by helping them focus on the behaviors that inform and influence their anticipation of the near future. Our client can also benefit from appreciative coaching strategies that focus on cognition and help them appraise and adjust their psychosocial template and their specific anticipations.
Finally, there is the matter of emotions. Our body and mind together produce emotions (the primary energizing agency). Furthermore, we rely on our psychosocial template to generate information (the second critical agency). This information, in turn, helps us validate and/or modify our emotions. As I previously suggested, professional coaches can assist their clients at several different levels in helping them identify and trace out the nature of their emotional reactions to specific settings and specific actions they have taken. While emotions come from our past and linger in our present-day psyche, they can provide invaluable guidance regarding the most desirable state of our near future. We can “feel” into our future, accompanying our leaning and learning into this future.
With this brief introduction of all three domains of anticipation, we are ready to launch into an exploration of several appreciative coaching strategies related to the domains of behavior and cognition. The third element (Emotions) will be given considerable attention in our fourth essay.
Behavior
The fundamental question that we might pose to our coaching client concerns: Why? We all know that in “polite society” one should never ask “Why?” However, professional coaching is not about being “polite.” It is about being helpful to our client by asking them provocative and insight-inducing questions. These questions often concern the reasons why one’s client has taken certain actions regarding other people. The answer to the “Why?” question often takes one of three forms that relate to the matter of anticipation.
One form of anticipation concerns what is often called “the theory of mind.” When we are young or when we are older and in a stressful setting, we are inclined to assume that other people think and feel like we do. Our client might respond to our “Why?” question by indicating that they have acted in a particular way and responded to this person in this way because they anticipated that this other person is thinking and acting in a similar manner:
I would be upset if someone said this to me, so I assumed that Susan would be similarly upset about what I told her. I would probably react by wanting to get away, so I anticipated that Susan would also want to leave the scene. So, I tried to block her exit.
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