What underpins the integrative approach?

Previously, On InDialogue…

Last week, I wrote a little about the integrative creative coaching I do and of how valuable an approach it is. Integrative coaching is evidence-based and transformative, it’s holistic and inherently creative. This means it can support both performance-oriented and process-oriented clients. More than this, it helps to challenge ideas around the capabilities of women, which is vital when social attitudes are limiting, personal histories are limiting — often because of the impact of those social attitudes. How does it challenge these attitudes? Well, historic and traditional research is limited in its applicability to women, and other minorities, because they’ve featured so little in the datasets underpinning the research. An integrative approach allows me to weave together a process that can demonstrably support each client. (More about being women-centred in future posts.)

Show Me the Evidence

I suggested I share what theories and models or methods I work with in my practice. These are part of creating the evidence-base for the coaching I do. They’ve been selected and developed and honed over my twenty years’ experience coaching voice, and ten years’ experience coaching executives and leaders in business. Clients have ranged from 5-year-olds to 70-somethings, and have included professional performers, amateur performers, Global CEOs, middle managers, rising talent, and more. I’ve taught and lectured as Associate Senior Lecturer for University of Essex and University of Wales Trinity St David’s, working with post-graduate students across the globe in online, accessible provision.

I have a Masters in English Language and Literature, Postgraduate Diplomas in both Acting and Vocal Pedagogy, and a Diploma in Therapeutic Use of the Arts in Education. I’ve had articles published in the Voice and Speech Review and in Psyche magazine. That’s the study, research and training.

But what about the specific theories, models and methods you work with?

A great questionNow, there needs to be something of a caveat here, in that there’s no single theory, framework, or method that will cover or achieve everything. None. However, there are plenty of navigational devices, ways to travel, and pieces of kit we can take with us. The magic of an integrative approach is that, for example, we can bring along tools developed by multiple and differing companies. Each tool has been tried and tested, and (having passed the trials and tests) can be brought into the coaching space. To slightly adjust the metaphor, with an integrative approach we’re not stuck with one set of software, and unable to integrate it across multiple devices. Which pieces of kit get used will depend on the situation, context, client.

Voice work

There are many wonderful voice practitioners, whose work I’ve leant into, used, borrowed, enjoyed. However, I am hugely influenced by the creative voicework I was trained with, and later went on to train in. Kristen Linklater developed The Linklater Method for Freeing the Natural Voice. You can read her wonderful books on the topic, and they can support as reminders of exercises to practice and food for thought. But this work is absolutely practical. It’s rooted in voice as a bodily experience, a creative experience, and a connective experience. I find this method wonderful for use at the foundations of coaching. It connects clients directly to their breath and their voice in their body. It links these (breath, body, sound) to their idea of their voice, to the authentic potential of their identity, and to how they do/don’t communicate this in their vocal sound. The work is practical, physical, creative, empowering.

Christina Shewell is another voice practitioner, also trained as a Speech and Language Therapist. While Linklater worked primarily with professional and training performers, Shewell has run the gamut of voice users — including training business, executive, and other corporate professionals. Shewell is deeply connected to the medical and physiological process of voice, how to produce the sound and how to do it effectively and safely (as I’ve written previously, the voice is physical and vocal health is vital for professional voice use — whether as an educator, executive, presenter, and more). She is also absolutely committed to benefitting and supporting the psychological aspects of voice, and her work with breath and poetry is particularly impactful.

The Accent Method is rooted in Speech and Language Therapy but has been adapted and developed to enable (re)training how breath becomes sound. This is grounded in research, practical and methodical. Often, the breath and the vocal tone can be disconnected in voice users. When situations of stress or high stakes arise, alerts in the autonomic nervous system and subsequent tensions in the body can make us strain, over-work, and push through the communication we need to make. This almost always creates tiredness, exhaustion, a feeling of low stamina. Over time it can lead to vocal problems, including cysts or nodules. The Accent Method adds to the creation of a sustainable and authentic sound for clients to build a confident voice on. I have experience of the Accent Method both in training and personally therapeutically, having worked over the course of several years with leading voice specialist speech and language therapist Tori Burnay on my own vocal challenges when I was performing.

Identity, Voice, Relationships and Communication

Coaching frameworks and approaches I borrow from and work with include Transactional Analysis Coaching (TAC), Acceptance Commitment Training/Coaching (ACT), and Gestalt Coaching. All three approaches are rooted in their therapeutic counterparts and offer different ways to counter nerves, increase self-belief, problem-solve, expand the imagination, create confident relationships, and more. They enable personal and professional development for every client. In brief:

Transactional Analysis Coaching provides practical, psychologically informed approaches to understanding interpersonal dynamics and behaviour. It offers clear frameworks, metaphors, models and exercises for progressive development.

Acceptance Commitment Coaching works on psychological integration and flexibility. It has been shown to support the down-regulation of anxiety, with a good body of research supporting its use in voice training for performance, presentation and other social anxieties.

Gestalt Coaching is a valued therapeutic approach, relying on creativity and psychological processes and reducing obstacles to being in and working with the Here and Now. It supports an embodied experience, digestion, and integration of change. (You may be aware of The Empty Chair exercise, but a Gestalt approach is so much more than this.)

All three are invaluable tools supporting personal awareness, creativity and confidence: vital to empowered voice use.

The Science Science

Finally, there’s Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach to the study and understanding of social interaction and talk. I love this research method in search of a problem. It begins by examining live conversation, rigorously reviewing recordings for process and meaning. Understanding process and meaning are vital to doing conversation well in the first place, and to reflecting on areas to develop. This approach builds insights into what works in conversation, and what doesn’t, examining tone, pitch, prosody, lexical content (words), body gesture, and more. Even a cursory look at the CA literature is fundamental to a basic understanding of talk in communication. It debunks many communication myths — read on for a book recommendation on this subject.

What next…?

I’ll discuss how you might go about choosing a coach, what to look for, what to avoid, what to try out. I’ll also be returning to the need for women-centred approaches, as well as taking a look at the challenges organisations face if they don’t take seriously the obstacles to women’s voice, which are bound within their company cultures.

If you’re looking for your next read, get yourself a copy of Talk: The Science of Conversation by Elizabeth Stokoe. Digestible, funny, insightful, and an absolutely fascinating intro to what we’re really doing when we talk to each other.

And, if you’d like to empower your voice through integrative coaching, drop me a line any time.