This is the third in a series of essays concerned with the application of professional coaching to the assistance of a client in effectively anticipating what is about to occur in their environment, so that appropriate and informed action can be taken. I have proposed in the first two essays that one can be effective in providing this service as a coach if they understand and appreciate the vital role played by something called Polystasis in gaining a valid anticipation of what resides in the environment and governs the actions in which we are about to engage.
Essay Three concerns the ways in which, as a coach, we can influence the cognition and behavior related to the polystatic-based anticipation process. Before turning to the domains of behavior and cognition, I wish to provide a summary of the polystatic process that I more fully described in the first essay.
Polystasis
Recently, Peter Sterling (2020) offered a radical revisioning of the way our body operates. He proposed that we live in a world of allostasis rather than homeostasis. Allostasis refers to an organism’s capacity to anticipate upcoming environmental changes and demands. This anticipation leads to adjustment of the body’s energy use based on these changes and these demands. Allostasis shifts one’s attention away from a homeostatic maintenance of rigid internal set-points to the brain’s ability and role in interpreting environmental meaning and anticipating environmental stress.
In the first essay in this series, I introduced an expansion on Sterling’s Allostatic model, which I labeled Polystasis. I created this word to designate multiple functions engaged by complex human systems in addressing the issue of stasis. As Peter Sterling has noted, it is not simply a matter of returning to an established baseline of functioning (stasis) when considering how actions get planned and taken in a human system.
As Peter Sterling proposed, the static notion of Homeostasis is inaccurate. A dynamic model of Allostasis (at the bodily level) and Polystasis (at the psychosocial level) is required, especially in our mid-21st-century world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence, and contradiction (VUCA-Plus) (Bergquist, 2025).
Related in some ways to the perspective offered by Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004), who focused on the function of prediction in the operation of human intelligence, the polystatic process is embedded in the critical operation of anticipating the near future. While Hawkins and Blakeslee proposed that prediction requires the creation of a guiding map stored in memory, our polystatic model relies on the preparation of templates that guide both the emotional and cognitive elements of the anticipation process. As I noted in the first essay, we human beings (and perhaps all sentient animals) are living not in the present but in the near future.
Download Article
