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Whether you are an Integral Coaching Canada (ICC) Integral Coach™ or a coach trained from another ICF certified school, knowing how your client shows up in relationships is an important aspect to take into account. Relationship is an essential facet of our personal development. Even if a person is highly individually focused, the manner in which she engages relationship can play a crucial element in her personal growth.

In the context I am speaking of – relationship – refers to all forms of being with other people. This includes family, work, and friend relationships, as well as with your intimate chosen person. And, this also includes being with strangers, associates, and people in any context. Even standing in an elevator with people you do not know is considered to be in the “relational domain”.

Relationship provides us a means to make sense of our own reality. For some people relationship is the primary source of making meaning – he requires some form of relational engagement to determine how to be in the world and in his life. Being part of a group, with shared activities, and congruent ways to engage each other is the way to know thyself and be in life. For others, the same time spent with people has more of an interaction or transaction quality versus deeper engagement. These people do not require relationship in the same manner to be in their lives. However, neither way of being is more accurate, right, or true than the other, this is simply how different people exist in the world. Some folks are right-handed while others are left-handed. They both engage the world, simply from a different point of view.

As a coach, the value in knowing your client’s relational orientation allows you to understand how your client interprets their experiences. Without that crucial bit of information you might create a program and practices that asks your client to engage his topic as if they were left-handed, yet inherently he is right-handed. While there might be a very valid reason to have your client learn how to work with both his right and left hand, this must be sourced within the scope of success for their coaching topic; otherwise, you’re unknowingly trying to put a square peg in a round hole, and that has the flavor of ignorance, and could be considered subtly abusive.

Regardless of your client’s relational orientation (making meaning with people or distinctly as an individual) each person can also develop the skills to be better in relationships. Even the most highly individualized and recluse person can have a very powerful capacity to be in relationship. Alternatively, someone may be in relationship all the time, yet still lack some skills to accomplish certain tasks. She may not be able to listen that well or clearly speak her mind with others around. As a coach we name this to be relational capacity versus relational orientation. How skillful and competent is somebody within the “WE-space” of relationship, versus, how much meaning do they derive from that WE-space.

Rochelle Fairfield, Professional ICC Integral Coach™ with a MA in Integral Theory, takes us a little deeper into understanding the relational context – both orientation and competency.

Rochelle:
Have you noticed how even though you might be coaching a single client, the work you do with them touches on various people in their lives: their employees, colleagues or boss, their spouse, maybe their kids, or teachers, students, etc? While you might be coaching them alone on a topic that is solo focused, do you find you’re working with the client’s social world? Sometimes this is quite direct, like when a client has a conflict with someone and they want your help with how they deal with it. Or, it could be that they simply desire closer, deeper or more authentic relationship with someone in their lives. Perhaps, he may want to access more of his own personal creativity, yet is constantly comparing himself with others. Whichever the case, understanding the difference between how a client orients to social interaction as compared to their skill level in it can lead to you seeing richer and more impactful ways to work with your clients.

If you’re using some form of the Integral model or ICC’s Integral Coaching methodology, you’ll be aware of the two perspectives – termed the Lower Left Relationship Quadrant (or LL for short) and the Interpersonal Line of development – that are used in order to work with a client’s social context and abilities, or as James has termed them here – orientation and competency. For those not familiar with the Integral model, the LL and Interpersonal line are essentially two complimentary ways of understanding and working with a client’s social context. For more information Click Here

I’ll be more specific about these two perspectives with an example.
If a client has a relational orientation (ie from the LL Quadrant), she innately orients to the group first and find what’s meaningful for herself through being part of that group. An example to illustrate this in action would be how someone goes about choosing a movie at the video store. Someone who orients with a relational focus (from the LL) will tend to orient to the group to make a decision, so they might look for which video has the most copies rented out, since that’s the movie that the group (in this case, movie renters) are watching. Note, that it’s the method the person automatically goes to that is key here: they naturally orient themselves to the group, so they naturally look to attune to the group first when faced with a decision. Another person however, somebody who orients from an individualized perspective (UL in Integral language), this person finds what’s meaningful to himself based on plumbing his own inner world, his own purpose, not the zeitgeist of a group. So, he might chose a movie by who the director is because he is currently intrigued by that director’s body of work – it is meaningful to him, and his purpose is to take in more of that director’s work. Both people could end up picking the same movie, even, though each arrived at the decision from very different ways of orienting to it.

That’s great Rochelle, a very clear example of how somebody makes decisions based on their orientation. For a profound coach this is important client information to be clear on. To take this a step further, if your client is highly developed in his relational orientation then he is going to be able to not only decide what movie to rent based on the most popular rented movie, yet also who he is watching the movie with, what mood does he want the group to experience, will the time length of the movie work for everybody who is watching, as well he might even be considering when he can return the movie so other’s can watch. With this degree of relational sophistication your client is making a vast amount of meaning through the WE-space.

A mature person with such an extensive capacity in relational orientation can take that all into account and still stand on his own ground in making choices. An individual who may not be as developed within their relational orientation may feel obliged to go with the group’s wants. In the attempt to take “them” into account, he may lose himself and not know what he wants. Known as merging, this type of client would benefit from some development in knowing himself and being able to set boundaries within the relational space.

Thus, the two aspects we have detailed out here so far are:
1. Relational Orientation – client makes meaning of his or her life through relationships (versus individually)
2. Relational Capacity –the degree in which your client takes into account and is affected by relationships

Knowing the degree in which your client is affected and engaged in life through relationship provides a significant means to assist your client in making choices and gaining new moves. There is also one other relational variable that can be measured which is relational competency or skill. As I mentioned earlier, a person may be highly individually focused and make meaning from his own sense individuality (versus through relationships), he might even not like to spend time with people, yet he may be very skilled within the interpersonal space. As Rochelle stated, within an Integral context this is called the Interpersonal Line of development.

More from Rochelle:
While the LL – Relational Orientation is considered someone’s ‘go-to’ way of being, the Interpersonal Line describes a person’s social or relationship skill level. Whereas orientation is pretty much hard-wired, likely from birth, the Interpersonal line can be nurtured or learned. Since you grew up in a social context of family, religious group, friends etc, you’ll have learned various social – also called interpersonal – skills by simply being in relationship, observing and copying the people around you. So even though these are learned skills, some clients seem to ‘come by them naturally’, perhaps because they grew up surrounded by role-models who were interpersonally skilled. Others may have made a deliberate effort to learn these competencies at some point later in life.

Examples of interpersonal skills include things like making a point to remember and use people’s names when talking with them, making eye contact, asking after the person’s family, asking about their work projects, how their health is, as well as knowing when it’s good enough to just talk about the weather with someone. It’s also having a sense of how much personal information to give and ask for in a given relationship, having the capacity to notice others, to tend to the space, and the types of relationship between others, as well as between self and others. These are all skills that can be learnt regardless if you make meaning of the world through relationship.

And, that’s the third relational variable that a profound coach needs to take into account:
1. Relational Orientation – client makes meaning of his or her life through relationships (versus individually)
2. Relational Capacity –the degree in which your client takes into account and is affected by relationships
3. Relational Skill (Competence) – communication skills, how many relational perspectives can be taken into account and worked with, the style of relationship (focused on getting, negotiating, receiving, or inspiring), catching nuances and energetic parlays in the social realms, being able to navigate social and cultural differences, etc.

Everyone is affected and involved in these three aspects of relationship. However, each of us has a different degree in which those three aspects are part of our current way of being. A profound coach will assess these three relational aspects for her client and make program recommendations that include these. Practices may include:
- developing a wider capacity to understand how to see one’s life and the world through a relational orientation
- developing a wider capacity to understand how to see one’s life and the world through a relational orientation
- developing a greater range of interpersonal skills that can be used to further one’s projects, goals, or purpose

Of course, the specifics of what you will include in your clients’ programs and practices will always be determined in alignment through their coaching topic – the reason they are working with you in the first place. Which leads to a subtle, yet important point…

As a profound coach you too have your own relational orientation, capacity, and skills. As always when working with a client, it is vital to ensure our personal tendencies or biases are not woven into our clients’ programs. Too easily we can lead with our own ideas of what is best for a client based on the scope of our own self – and this must consistently be at the forefront on any profound coach. Be aware of your preferences, leverage them to serve your client, yet ensure what she needs arises from a fuller palette of possibility, not just the colors you yourself like to paint with.

Thus, in your move to become a profound coach relational context is substantially important. Without taking relationship into account there is a high chance that you will be prescribing technique and providing service instead of connecting to the client’s actual life reality and engaging in the fuller craft of true coaching. This leads us to a final great insight from Rochelle about the relational context – culture.

Rochelle:
It helps to remember that your client is also culturally situated – he or she was born and raised in a particular culture or possibly several cultures. So some of what you are working with in a client’s ‘personality’ is not just their individual personality, but also their cultural influence that can show up in different ways. As a coach, knowing there’s a cultural context, you can use this to guide your questions and also the courses of action you take with a client.

For example, say you’re working with a client who comes from a more collective, relationally-based culture, like many Spanish speaking regions typically are. If one of your client’s goals is to be more able to stand on their own feet, having more autonomy in their life – [the means in which they would achieve this] would look quite different compared to a client who is from an individualist culture. With someone from a communal culture you might respect their tendency to do things in groups, and look for ways for them to act more autonomously while still staying in relationship with their group. This might look like giving him a practice where he takes the lead about what his group does in a given situation, such as planning the family holiday, or suggesting a different park to go for the regular Sunday family picnic. By contrast, many English speaking cultures tend to be more individualistic. Working with such a client with the same goals, you might encourage autonomy by giving him an exercise to accomplish something on his own, like taking an adventure holiday or going to a movie by himself.

Thanks Rochelle, this is definitely another important relational aspect to take into account – the cultural context. Depending on where you client is from and where she is living, cultural context may be a primary window your client sees her life through, or perhaps simply a subtle overlay that permeates her life. For example, many Americans and Canadians have a mixed ethnic background. The Jewish New Yorker or Chinese Vancouverite may only be two or three generations in North America. Their cultural background is an aspect of their essential being that even they most likely take for granted, yet subtly affects their beliefs, actions, choices, and relationships. A profound coach will stay alert to this context and enquire into this relational element if it appears potentially relevant to the client’s coaching topic.

Relational Orientation, Capacity, Competency, and Culture – these are aspects of each of our lives, including your clients. Profound Coaching requires you to take these into account and bring the scope of their relevance into your client’s programs and practices.