The first question in The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead is known as The Kickstart Question: “What’s on your mind?” I think it is a near perfect way to start a therapeutic session with any client. Most managers now know that coaching is valuable and proven, but many do not attempt coaching because they do not know how to start. Opening statements such as, “How’s it going?”, “I just wanted to check with you on how the new position is going.”, or, my personal favorite, “Is there anything I can do for you?” are a bit like passing someone in the hallway and greeting them with, “How are you?” Each of the above openings begs for a brief response that “all is well.” The answer is reflective and social norms generally suggest that answering the question with real life concerns is inappropriate. People will quickly learn to stop asking that question if you really answer. Hopefully, therapy and/or case management is different but old habits die hard.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with small talk, when a client is paying a fee for the session or you have a caseload of 25 clients to meet with in a week, why not minimize the warm up and get down to business. “What’s on your mind?” doesn’t easily lend itself to a reflexively positive socially appropriate response. It makes you think. It surprises you. It expresses genuine interest and sends a strong message that the client will be controlling the agenda. It assumes that there is something that you are burning to discuss. Imagine the difference between, “Is there anything specific you’d like to discuss today?” versus “What’s on your mind?” especially for a resistant client. It respectfully places the burden of the responsibility to guide the direction of the conversation on the client, where it belongs.
I am a fan of “homework”, tasks to be completed between sessions for offenders. It keeps them focused and engaged in the treatment process and sends a strong message that change doesn’t take place in the practitioner’s office. Change happens in life in between sessions. The homework assignment should logically flow from the session’s discussion and be a collaborative agreement between client and practitioner about what the next step should be in the real world. While it may be helpful for you to begin a session with that continued focus, the client may have a different agenda, something that really matters to them. While pursuing follow up about the homework assignment makes for good cohesion in progress notes, and compliance auditors love the logical progression of it, it does not serve the change process very well. Most clients will go along wherever the practitioner leads them, but unless that is where their mind is, it will be an exercise in behavioral compliance, not self-motivated change.
I noted above that I think the question is a near perfect way to start a session. I say “near perfect” because I would slightly amend the question to the following: “What’s on your heart and mind?” My concern is that only focusing the question on the mind, can lead to intellectualization and/or rationalization, particularly in offenders. Emotions drive anxiety. Emotions wake you up in the middle of the night. Emotions dominate your day dreams. What makes your sad right now? What excites you right now? While there is often an overlap between what is on your mind and what is on your heart, sometimes they are distinctly independent. Offenders are typically pretty good at talking…talking about the importance of change…talking about their gripes…talking about their history…talking about the ups and downs of life. However, they are not skilled or comfortable identifying or discussing their own emotions.
Alexithymia is the inability to identify and verbalize one’s own emotions. My experience is that most offenders have level of alexithymia. This may be due to drug induced numbness during childhood and adolescence, physiological shut down due to psychological trauma, and/or a sense hopelessness that they can actually change their lifestyle enough to stay out of the criminal justice system. It is likely a combination of these factors for most offenders. Typically, if you ask them to verbalize their current emotional state, you will get “good” or “bad” as the answer. These answers express the valence of their emotional state, but don’t distinguish between various emotions. Learning to label one’s own emotions is vital in conflict resolution and other social skills, like reading emotional cues from others.
My goal in adding the “heart” to the Kickstart Question is to help offenders tune into their emotional state and how it impacts their behaviors, their urges, their desires, and their tendency to avoid negative emotions with alcohol and drugs, sex, mindless behavioral compliance, and/or apathy. Teaching them to understand how feelings (i.e., heart) impact mind (i.e., thinking) and vice versa is vital. To paraphrase Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, emotions are like an elephant, unbridled energy and passion with little rational thought or future consideration. If you want to enhance motivation, get to the heart of the matter, the client’s emotions. It is indeed difficult to tame the emotional elephant if you don’t recognize the signs that the elephant is getting ready to charge.
To be clear, learning to identify and label your emotions does not automatically lead to behavioral change. Few things lead to behavioral change like behavioral risks and experimentation. However, tapping into emotions provides the energy for long term self-motivation as well as sends a strong message that you do not simply care about behavioral compliance, but you are also interested in the person and their well-being. Learning to be attuned to your emotions early in the process will provide a solid foundation for later in the practice model when we focus on emotions regulation and distress tolerance (stay tuned…).
Whether you choose to ask, “What’s on your mind?” or “What’s on your heart and mind?”, try the Kickstart Question to start your next five sessions. It will feel awkward initially but gets easier. It will certainly lead to a richer, deeper discussion in a fraction of the time. Talking about the local sports team never changed anyone’s life. Discussing the weather is what you do when you don’t know what else to do. Now you do. Get there quicker.
Do not accept the first response to the question of “What’s on your mind?” as the agenda for the day. Learning to ask “And What Else?” is the topic of the next blog.
