“I’m suprised why people treat their jobs so deadly seriousely.”
Albert Einstein
Driving lesson
“I had an extraordinary driving instructor. I’m extremely thankful for his skills and I still recall with a smile his efficient style of teaching. I remember particularly one event. At the beginning of third or fourth lesson I was trying to start the engine so that we could set out for city. When the car stalled for the third time in a row, I rememberd all the stories about broken clutches in cars used for driving lessons and I thought to myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I had been doing everything right but the car was simply broken. I told it to Sławek Moszczyński (that was my instructor’s name) and I asked: ‘Maybe this car is broken?’ To my great surprise and relief, he replied: ‘Yes, you’re right. It is broken’. But after a second he added: ‘It’s broken every time you get into it’. It was quite a very quick teaching. It was my responsability to learn and his responsability was to take car of the car. He was doing his job with full commintement and I…from that very moment on, I was concentrated on what I was supposed to do and what I had influence on. Thank you.”
Provocative style is a powerful combination of brave humour, creativity, confrontation, empathy and kinddness. It is a little like playful teasing and badinage with friends. It engages emotions into change. It unmasks stereotypes, unrealistic assuptions and false convictions. Thanks to it, one can look at problems from a different perspective, very often in a completely new way.
Provocative Coaching
Provocative coach uses reaction for a challenge which is natural for his client. From provocative coaching clients can expect that:
- They will learn to distance themselves from their own problems and even laught at them in a healthy way.
- They will be able to find on their own new solutions by objecting to “crazy’ provocative coaching.
- They will get to know and accept the very parts of themselves that the were afraid of talking about.
- They will look at life from a more realistic point of view.
- They will become more assertive, even if they don’t consciusely try to achieve it.
- They will discover power and force which was blocked by fear.
- They will stop looking for explanations and start working on change.
- They will start looking for new solutions.
Clients experience their relationahip with provocative coach/therapist as an extraordinary adventure.
Provocative therapy
Therapist uses humour to sinsitize, but also to desensitize his client to cognitive emotional and behevioral patterns, that cause troubles. Client is provoked by therapist to:
- Manifest self-appreciation – both verbally and nonverbally.
- Behave in an appropriate way in both actions and relationships.
- Protect himself in a realistic way.
- Engage in realistic testing of psychosocial reality and learn to distinguish things that are necessary to react in a flexible way. The gerneral pereption leads to generalized, stereotypical reactions and to perceptional recognisitions accounting for flexible, appropriate reactions.
- Engage in personal relationships associeted with risk and particularly to manifest in spontaneous and direct way one’s real emotions and tenderness towards people who are important for him or her. The words which are the most difficult say in relationships are usually: ‘I need you, I miss you, I care about you’ – the words expressing our divotion towards others. (“Provocative Therapy” Frank Farrelly, Jeff Brandsma.)
See also: Erickson Coaching