Using Nervous System Science to Help Coaching Clients Locate Creative Energy Reserves

New Scientific Understanding

Our nervous systems do not offer a midlevel functioning between fight/flight and shutdown. If we are facing a predator, we want to bounce back and forth between between short-term fight-to-the-death motivation and a hopeless-feeling lack of motivation. We want to have superhuman bursts of fighting-fleeing attempts and the kind of lack of presence that could make a predator lose interest.

However, short-term hyperfunctioning is only worth the resulting depletion of energy reserves in dire circumstances.  Fight/flight often results in the body’s shutting down to create a lack of presence that makes death less painful when it finally comes. Neither of these states are a sustainable way to live—only a way to survive and eventually die.

Creativity Coaching

Because science helps us have a more accurate picture of our nervous system functioning, we can now encourage clients out of plague mentality and into renaissance mentality. Creativity energy builds when we use the nervous system functioning that exists in our bodies for times when we sense safety—times when we know predators are out there somewhere in the forest, but those predators are not infringing on our habitat presently.

Coaches can invite nervous system functioning that makes space for creativity by:

• Educating clients about the two different types of ups and downs—one for when we sense safety and the other for when we face life-threatening danger
• Offering assurance that while failure brings a kind of loss, failure does not equal death
• reminding clients that there is great value in letting go of some ideas in favor of other ideas
• Inviting expression of feelings of disappointment, regrouping, and getting back to the drawing board, as they say with a kind of playful enlightenment that makes space for creativity

 In plague mentality, the brain shuts down. We cannot sort through ideas to determine the next steps on the inventive path. As we help clients sense that failure is not life-threatening, we invite renaissance mentality, opening space for the play that births creation.

This article was originally published on ICF Coaching World.