| Roland: Martyn, you created a system of
coaching that you teach internationally - Soulwork Systemic Coaching.
I know that your work attracts many medical doctors, psychologists and other people with high
credentials. Can you tell us about Soulwork? Martyn:
Soulwork offers a wide
spectrum of services - including business coaching, health coaching, individual
coaching, couple coaching, team coaching ... and more. Can you be more
specific?
Roland: What is the theoretical basis for Soulwork Systemic
Coaching?
Martyn: We integrated principles and practices from
many disciplines. Anthropologist Dr Gregory Bateson
provided a hierarchy of abstraction which helps us analyze a person's
cognitive habits. The psychologist Dr Clare Graves provided a hierarchy of social evolution
which predicts the development of relationship skills and organizations of a
person or group. Dr Richard Bandler provided
a concept he called metaprograms, which are useful for predicting behavioral
constraints. We also integrated skills used by native
Hawaiian healers, who helped us recognize
and change relationship bonds, and the concepts of family
soul and healthy relationships that permeate Soulwork.
An authentic
experience of integrity can provide a reliable sense of life direction,
meaning and fulfillment. Integrity is the Soul of Soulwork.
Martyn Carruthers
|
Roland: Do you use other models for relationship
coaching?
Martyn: We use a hierarchy of relationship development
to predict the current and future relationship challenges that a person will
face, which was inspired by Annegret Hallanzy. We use
another relationship hierarchy to assess relationship health. Our
systemic
diagnosis can assess relationship conflicts and
transferences; and sometimes predict diseases and deaths.
Roland: Are these psychological theories?
Martyn: Not really. Our coaching is very, very practical. It focuses not on
resolving complaints, but on coaching people to get what they want, including meaning and happiness;
and on helping people define and achieve worthwhile goals. Soulwork can include
finding life purpose, or sense of life, if that is what a client wants.
Roland: Can people use
Soulwork by themselves - or do they need help?
Martyn: Few people can use what they do not understand.
Systemic coaching can help people solve whatever stops them
from solving their own problems. Once those
issues are solved - a person is free to find information, to make decisions
and to act. While entanglements remain active - a person may
make robotic decisions or may be unable to act.
Soulwork is about quality relationships - and it is not easy.
A systemic coach can help people find relationship resources
to accept and acknowledge
their complaints and to identify their goals and dreams. Then people can
solve their conflicts, their anger, fear, sadness and guilt and move on
freely. Without this coaching relationship, most people attempting
self-Soulwork will distract themselves, or get stuck in "poor me",
and in difficult moments they may go to sleep.
A Soulwork coach responds to non-verbal communications
or unconscious objections. Few
people can do this for themselves. Unconscious signals are ... well ...
unconscious. A coach can respond to those communications by gently provoking people to
become conscious of them. This is a BIG step towards the person sorting out their
"stuff" - their objections to their own happiness.
Roland: That makes sense - so
- who will benefit most from Soulwork?
Martyn: Motivated and responsible
adults gain the most benefits in the shortest time. We can also coach
children and childish adults, in a less direct way, with isomorphic stories and
interactive metaphors instead of direct strategic questions and planning.
A more difficult answer is that people who lack
quality relationships are unlikely to realize the depth of Soulwork. People who
cannot maintain at least one quality (stable but not dependent or
codependent) relationship are unlikely to use the resources available in
systemic coaching.
Roland: Would you call Soulwork a
New Age development?
Martyn: Some people complain that the name
Soulwork sounds too New Age. Soulwork is practical. Each step of Soulwork
follows a structured, systemic sequence, without recourse to
intuition or esoteric agencies. We check all answers in three or four ways, to ensure
that a client wants a specific change and the consequences of that change.
Some helping professionals prefer to intuit their clients'
problems. That can lead to dependency and victimization. Clients
have no idea if a New Age counselor's intuition is accurate - and
some counselors and therapists blame their clients if their intuitions
do not produce the desired results.
Roland: Is not Soul an
emotionally loaded word?
Martyn: Many people are not interested in anything
to do with soul, and I wasn't a few years
ago. A better word is integrity, although I like the name
Soulwork. We also call our corporate and organizational work
Systemic Solutions and avoid words with esoteric or spiritual
connotations - although, for me, the Soul of an organization is
an extremely practical and worthwhile topic
to discuss with managers, leaders and CEOs.
We do not ask or require that a client have or develop any
particular belief. If a person wants success in some field, or wants coaching
for
recurring relationship problems or for controlling emotions such as depression or anxiety, that is enough.
Roland: Your demonstrations
tonight were stunning. You make your work look very easy. Few in the audience had no idea
how long it normally takes for people to make those type of changes.
Martyn: Some students ask if
I choose easy demonstration subjects. But most people are easy if they are
motivated and responsible. When I present Soulwork; I
demonstrate whatever I talk about. For my personal pleasure, I prefer to
demonstrate with critics - and there are always critics.
Roland: You said that Soulwork is holistic ... what does
"holistic" mean to you?
Martyn: Soulwork is holistic in that
we attend to all a person's communications; including
emotions, relationships and words, and we offer ways to
change things that don't work or are counter-productive. We ask about thoughts and feelings.
We offer ways to change unpleasant internal dialogue (limiting
beliefs or self-sabotaging thoughts and consequent behaviors).
Roland: Is that always possible?
Martyn: Always is a very long word.
If you are in a relationship with an entangled person - whether the
entanglement is with another person, a substance or a behavior, then you
risk becoming entangled with that person's obsessions or addictions.
Many people say that they want to get rid of unpleasant symptoms but that they don't
want to change the entanglements that cause the symptoms.
Roland: How do you motivate people to change?
Martyn: I don't, or at least not often. I'm much more likely
to provoke people about the consequences of their current actions or lack of
action. I find that a gram of provocation is worth a kilo of motivation, so we
use and teach about 16 types of provocation.
Roland: How do you identify mind-body connections?
Martyn: I ask
questions such as: Where do you hold emotional experiences in your
body? and What are the benefits of withholding these experiences?
Unless the person is dissociated, the answers will describe subjective
experience and we can usually recognize the type of problem quickly. A
large part of our training is about recognizing and responding to nonverbal
communication. But often, some onlookers will ask if we are telepathic or
if we can see a people's souls or something like that.
Roland: Where does Soul come into all this?
Martyn: Soulwork has a basic assumption about the innate
wholeness of people, and people's desire for wholeness and their desire to
connect with other human beings in an experience of wellbeing that is generally
called happiness. We help people experience this as a basis for rapidly
assessing, evaluating and changing personal and relationship problems.
Roland: What sort of problems do people bring for Soulwork
coaching?
Martyn: People often want to control emotions, to end
compulsions or obsessions, to gain communication skills, to change difficult
relationships and to
find meaning in life. Most people come with goals, but want something different.
Our systemic diagnosis is a key to effective life coaching.
Roland: And your systemic coaching includes ... what?
Although Soulwork includes such things as
relationship matrix, systemic solutions and
interactive metaphors, we coach people to resolve
entanglements,
conflicts,
identifications and other forms of
identity loss. This leads to the
experience of integrity and connectedness that we call
Soul.
Roland: Who are your main clients?
Martyn: We have a wide range of clients; we
support private therapists and helping professionals in public health and mental health
sectors, as well as corporate Human Resources people.
Many people who seek Soulwork want to experience
life differently; they want to achieve their goals or end their
complaints. Our systemic tools help people reach their emotional
goals as well as physical goals. This may include helping people
integrate their personality. Most people live fragmented lives
based on conflicting desires, conflicting beliefs and conflicting values.
Roland: Are you
saying that most people - me for example - are split into pieces? That
sounds like multiple-personality...
Martyn: In multiple
personality syndrome, people are amnesic of their actions and
decisions in other states - but few people are so dissociated. Most people
know well the experience of "Part of me wants to ... but part of me
doesn't", and many people make promises in one state and
forget them in another.
People with deep inner conflict may announce important decisions one day
and deny those decisions the next day. People who experience self-criticism
have "inner voices" which can be horribly critical. As Teresa
Mocna said, "Psychosis is exaggerated normality".
Roland: What issues are people
concerned about today?
Martyn: The sources of inner conflict may change but conflicts
remain. Many women suffer grief
and conflict when they postpone childbirth and motherhood in
favor of a career. Many men suffer shame following immature sexual
exploits. Many people suffer from the emotional consequences of
abuse and trauma,
and from lack of acceptance. Although our world is changing rapidly,
our emotional responses to our relationships seem constant.
Soulwork includes effective solutions for cross-generational
entanglements. People can end their suffering. We also deal with
the effects of abuse and the consequences of trauma following
our research into relationship bonds. We can
better recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress
and we can help motivated people rapidly dissolve those symptoms.
Roland: Martyn - I have heard good things about your
results - but - who coaches you?
Martyn: I enjoy exploring other
modalities from a client perspective -
although not many therapists seem to enjoy me as a client. I focus
on results - not credentials - and I am not very
compliant if something doesn't make sense. My life is not a
testing ground for their theories.
Roland: How do you determine what type of coaching is
helpful for what type of problem?
Martyn: Coaching, consulting,
counseling, advising and therapy are words
that are often used interchangeably. In a
consulting role, I work in a focused way in a highly defined
context, perhaps to change the structure of a human resources department. On the other side,
individual client coaching is exceedingly open. Who knows what the next client will
want? Very few people know what they want.
Roland: How long does Soulwork coaching take?
Martyn: How long is a road? A Soulwork coach often works with
time-limits for people who want a fast solution rather than long-term
mentoring. For example a coach may offer 5 or 6
sessions to change a defined complaint or to expedite a specific goal. This
can be in a week, if a person can handle the intensity.
Some applications of Soulwork skills go far beyond
relationship coaching. Some Soulwork coaches provide longer-term changework to
restructure a person's identity and integrate personality. Fulfilling
these goals can be profoundly life changing, but may require 10
or 20 sessions - perhaps over three months or so, although young, healthy
people can often accomplish this much faster.
Roland: You said that Soulwork has a spiritual
side. How do you know whether a person is spiritual? How do you
perceive spiritual evolution?
Martyn: Life includes many distractions,
games and illusions - often self-inflicted or provided by ignorant,
arrogant or manipulative people. Each of us can pass
these distractions to fulfill life and transcend death. Yet these distractions
can be so compelling or so uncomfortable that people may stop moving
forward. It's like they reach a certain age - could be six or sixteen - and not
mature much after that. We expect such people to show age-regressed,
immature behavior.
The Soul of Soulwork
is an experience of integrity
and connection that seems to transcend thoughts and feelings. The
egoistic "I" can merge with an apparently unborn
and undying reality. Age-regressed behavior is
incompatible with this emotional maturity and responsibility for life
- and the stable resource that we call Soul can provide a reference
- a compass - through life challenges.
Soulwork helps people examine their goals, resolve
identity loss, end toxic habits and perceive illusions. We travel
together through the often chaotic wildernesses of the body-mind - to find lasting solutions for emotional and relationship symptoms, and for
life makes sense!
Roland: Martyn, thank you for your time.
(This interview was edited from a longer transcript)
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