Mainstream coaching views you as an acorn and aims to unfold your enfolded potential. This is a good thing but is based on particular ideas about the undeveloped self. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and other humanistic psychologists support such quests for development and maturity.
Andrew Lee (ch7, Complexity & the Experience of Leading Organizations, 2005) regards identity as socially created rather than as a seed waiting to be developed. This means our identity is formed more than discovered, and it changes when our relationships change. In coaching he therefore attributes transformation and change not so much to the use of coaching skills (developing the embedded potential of others) but to shifts in power demonstrated within coaching (co-creating within alternative, appropriate relationships).
If identity is socially created, I can expect to facilitate transformation and change within others by relating well within relationships. Rather than merely using my skills to release your potential, perhaps I can improve my behavior and co-create good things with you? Leadership (and coaching) is not as simple as one first thinks.
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Hmmmm…can identity be formed?? Or can it be revealed/discovered and then lived out?? If it is indeed formed or created socially then what happens if those things that form our identity are removed? Do we loose who we are?? Does our identity change from relationship to relationship, circumstance to circumstance? Or once we have discovered who we are does the process of learning how to live in and out of that identity look different at times?? I wonder? Hmmm.. In whom do we find our identity??
ReplyDeleteIn the Hegelian tradition, knowledge and identity are socially based. Kant had a different view of the self. I am undecided.
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