Heidegger feared that this technological attunement was concealing what it truly is to be human. In this way of attuning, we no longer view ourselves or others as being loving, kind, compassionate, courageous, steadfast, or virtuous in any way. And yet, these and other human virtues help us to face and navigate through complex situations. Indeed, the very complexity we face in today’s fast-paced world is a clarion call for such virtues.
Heidegger’s suggested remedy to the technological attunement is to cultivate a poetic attunement alongside it (Heidegger, 1975). Attuning poetically to our world discloses the essential truth, beauty, and goodness of our humanity and of life itself. It transports us into a mood of wonder and awe at our potential for being. This is precisely the attunement that creates the conditions for creating experiential mismatches and leveraging memory reconsolidation in the process of supporting the development of our clients.
In Aletheia Coaching, the coach and client are attuned by a love of truth, beauty, and goodness for its own sake[2]. This way of attuning creates the conditions for deepening unfolding and automatically directs the focus of the coaching conversation towards generating fresh experiences for the client, easily creating mismatches with past emotional learnings thus opening the memory reconsolidation window where those learnings can be either erased or edited.
The Core Principle of Aletheia Coaching: Letting Be, Letting Unfold
Mostly we don’t let things be. Instead, we try to grasp, manipulate, control, improve, fix, enhance, correct, change, transform, or develop what arises in our experience. In some cases, we even try to keep change from happening. And we do this for good and well-intentioned reasons. Yet, as a result, we don’t fully receive what is given in our experiences. Unfolding proceeds somewhat paradoxically from letting things be and letting them unfold.
At first glance, it may seem that nothing changes if you let things be. However, the opposite is true when it comes to inner experiences. If during a coaching conversation, the client starts to feel sad, their experience will unfold by simply letting the sadness be, by simply being with it, and feeling it. Usually, within a minute or two, the sadness will have passed, and the client will be in touch with something else.
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