Morpheus Coaching

In an earlier post http://m0rpheus.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/using-neutral-language/ I described the impact of neutral language on a coaching relationship. This has been my most visited post. ’Neutral language’ is also a very common search criterion for people finding their way to my blog. When I ‘did a Google’ on the phrase there wasn’t much there so I thought I would follow up with more of my thoughts and reflections on using neutral langauge.

The main purpose of neutral language is that it avoids evoking strong emotion. This is extremely useful when people interact on a topic that might,  should strong emotions be present, prove difficult. Neutral language can allow those involved in an interaction sufficient comfort to explore all aspects of the conversation without feeling harmfully defensive, judgemental or with tolerances affected by hightened emotional stimuli.

I recently ran a session with a coachee who was in an agitated state over the way he felt he was being managed. He skirted around a number of issues citing one incident after another without focusing on a specific point. I asked him what he wanted to have happen and he didn’t feel he knew. His emotional state, I felt, was getting in the way of rational thinking and changed to using deliberately neutral language. I asked him what respect meant to him. This stopped him short before pausing and then offering words and phrases aimed at the question. I then asked him to think about a word to describe his manager’s (alleged) behaviour to which he replied, almost instantly, “bullying”. Rather than asking him if he was being bullied, I asked him to describe  to describe the ‘behaviours’  the manager was adopting that he considered to be bullying. His answer included being shouted at and only ever listening to things he’d got wrong, not what he’d done well. His body language and emotional state during this part of the session was very interesting. He became less agitated almost immediately and started to take time to think over his responses. He looked calmer and became more articulate. What interested me was that although the topic was still about him being bullied his approach was very different. I attribute this to the neutral positioning of the question ‘what behaviours made that bullying?’. He was now discussing the issue rather than the person (The one who was allegedly doing the bullying).

This difference, as subtle as it may seem to be, is significant as it allows the conversation to go on and robustly, without the personal effects of heightened emotion getting in the way.

What examples of using neutral language do you have?