Working with Archetypes in Coaching

Most of us are familiar with personality profiles from MBTI to Insights, etc. These can be very useful in understanding our preferences and styles. Within a team context, they can also help us to understand different preferences in the team and how those different styles can work together to bring out the best in everyone. And such profiles can provide my coaching clients with some valuable insights as we start our coaching work together.

However, despite their obvious value, I always find these profiling methodologies rather limited - they seem at the same time overly complicated, one-dimensional and cerebral. They can also be limiting, for example when people over-identify with their profiles, to the point of excluding the possibility of change or building range.

I have always been drawn to the idea of archetypes, and not just because I am an old hippie who spent too much time watching and reading Joseph Campbell in the 1980s. I’ve been using archetypes in my coach-training work, and with coaching clients for decades.

The main appeal of working with archetypes for me is that they are embodied. Each of the four archetypes I work with - Sovereign (Queen/King), Lover, Magician and Warrior - bring with them an embodied expression. Rather than just providing an intellectual concept, the archetypes allow us to picture how a particular energy might show up physically, and invite exploration about what it might mean to adopt a particular energy.

One way to think about the four archetypes is how they might show up in leadership.

The Sovereign brings stability, calmness under pressure, gravitas, and a connection to ground, but too much of this energy can be rigid and uninspiring.

The Warrior takes action, and also allows us to fight for someone or something we care about, standing up to injustice. In excess, this can be bullying or tyrannical.

The Lover encompasses qualities of openness, connection, engagement, enrolment. Too much of this energy can lead to people-pleasing, or giving up on my goals or values because I sacrifice them to the need for connection.

The Magician is all about inspiration, playfulness, flexibility and bringing vision and possibility. In excess this can show up as a lack of commitment or a lack of gravitas.

In my coaching work, although I don't explicitly work with the archetypes, they are always in the back of my mind, and there will often come a point in the coaching where the coachee wants to bring forth a quality that isn’t easily available to them. In those moments, I find it helpful to think about an archetype that might represent the energy they want or need to develop to be more effective in addressing their concerns.

For example, I had a coachee some years ago who had recently been promoted to lead a team of people who had been his peers. He talked about the difficulty in making requests of his team because of his need to be liked and his dis-comfort with not being “one of the gang” any more (too much lover energy). We started to explore what energy he might want to draw on to have more gravitas when making requests of his team, and in being less driven by his need to be liked, and we talked about how King energy might help him develop gravitas. As we talked further, we discussed which embodied practices could support him in extending his range towards King energy, and together we landed on a practice of ballroom dancing as a way to develop and embody this energy. After some months of going to ballroom classes, he was more able to communicate clearly and effectively with his team, and to be taken seriously.

For each of the four archetypes, there are some embodied practices that can support the development and building of those energies.

For example, to develop Sovereign energy, we might practice ballroom dancing or Iyengar yoga; for Warrior energy, we might play squash/tennis, or practice kick-boxing or aikido; Lover energy can be developed by receiving massage, being led in a partner dance, playing with pets; salsa, vinyasa yoga and improv are good ways to develop Magician energy.

One very simple way to explore these archetypes is simply to move to music that represents the different energies. If you want to try this at home, you can try using the following as starting-points.

Sovereign - Pachelbel’s Canon or “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves” by the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin.

Warrior - Queen’s “We Will Rock You” or “Lose Yourself by Eminem”

Lover - “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton or “Samba Pa Ti” by Santana

Magician - “Santa Maria” by the Gotan Project or the theme from the Muppet Show.

Rather than thinking about whether or not you like the music, just allow the music to move you and see what happens. It’s often the case that one energy will emerge as more comfortable than the others, and one as less comfortable (sometimes very much so).

If you want to take the enquiry further, then you can enquire as to what you might gain from extending into the energy you are less comfortable with. For example, I am very comfortable with Lover and Magician energy, but much less so with Warrior and King - and I know to my cost that this can make it hard for me to speak up and challenge when I need to, or to follow-through on all the ideas and possibilities that my Magician can so easily conjure up. Iyengar yoga has helped me to build my capacity for ground and focus. It’s always a work in progress, but practices can help us to build competence even if we will never own the energy with the fluency of someone for whom it comes naturally - I can build capacity so that I can have it available to me when the situation needs it.

Of course, it’s not just our coachees who might benefit from using archetypes to build range. We as practitioners need to be able to draw on these energies as we work with our clients. If I don’t have strong King energy for example, then it will be hard for me to be clear in my contracting (often the case with me!) or in keeping to the time boundaries of the coaching session. And, when we seek to challenge the coachee’s thinking, or to interrupt, or even to say “we’re coming to the end of our time together …”, we are drawing on Warrior energy. The ability to connect, to listen and to be empathetic to our coachees requires Lover energy. And Magician energy brings with it intuition, asking questions that enables a coachee to come to new insights.

Further reflections

Which of the above archetypes do you most resonate with? What are the strengths and potential pitfalls for you as a coach? Which archetype do you find more difficult to access? What might having more of that energy available to you bring you? What practices would support you in developing more of that in your being?

Don’t be so Coachlike!

When I first started coach training back in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of emphasis placed on the coach being ‘coachlike’.

There were – and still are – lots of discussions about what this might mean, but I still vividly remember the Clean Sweep programme that was at the heart of my first coach-training programme with Coach University. Devised by Thomas Leonard, this was a 100 point checklist that coaches (and their clients) could use to check how well we were doing. The checklist was remarkably prescriptive and created much angst amongst the coaches I knew in those early days. One coach I remember from a coaching workshop talked about how relieved she was that the trainer drank coffee – she had read in the Clean Sweep that we should use caffeine no more than three times a week. And I remember myself feeling embarrassed and less than most of my peers at the time because I was in a very difficult relationship (not the ideal happy relationship coaches were supposed to have).

The profession may have become more accepting of the coach’s humanity as it has matured over the last three decades, but in my work with coaches over the years as a supervisor and trainer, I repeatedly come across the concerns that some aspect of the coach’s life or way of being isn’t ‘coachlike’.

From trainee coaches asking how they can be a coach if they haven’t resolved all their personal issues, to experienced coaches talking in supervision about how ‘bad’ it is that they are judgmental of their clients, or feel drained when they think about a particular client.

Don’t think for a moment that I am immune to this. There are still things about myself, and about how I approach coaching, that can make me squirm in embarrassment or feel aren’t how I should be as a coach. Even my most judgmental friends will comment on how intolerant. I’m also remarkably arrogant at times (and equally feel very anxious about what people think of me at other times), and there are clients whose attitudes or ways of showing up make me feel quite antipathetic to them.

What all the work I have done on myself over the last forty years has helped (and is still helping) me to do is to recognise that the work is
not to fix all my personal issues and characteristics, but to learn to live with them – and to hold them with lightness. I remember being enormously helped, for example, by my therapist telling me years ago how anxious he still was after decades of work on himself. That observation on his part gave me so much more permission to be me than any ideas on overcoming anxiety,  or so-called coaching questions about what I would do if I weren’t an anxious person, could ever have done.

And isn’t that what our clients really want – permission to be who they are, messy imperfect and flawed as they are – as we all are. Indeed, one of my supervisees told me a while ago that one of their biggest ‘takeaways’ from our work together was more comfort with and acceptance of themselves as they are.

And it goes without saying that the more we can accept ourselves as we are, the more space we can give to our clients to accept themselves as they are.

When there are parts of me that I can’t or won’t accept, then I cannot be fully present with my clients who have those parts in themselves. If I despise or try to hide (from myself and others) my intolerance or my arrogance then when I meet those qualities in a client, I will in some way be closed to them.

More simply put, how can we ever hope to have anything like the unconditional positive regard for our clients to which all practitioners aspire when we are unwilling or unable to hold ourselves in that regard.

I say that like it’s easy. It isn’t.

It’s a lifetime’s work – as I said, even afte all this time, there are still things I not only find difficult in myself, but also find difficult or embarrassing to acknowledge. This is, I think, what Sir John Whitmore had in mind when he said that the difference between a good coach and a great coach had nothing to do with coach-training and everything to do with on-going work on ourselves. If we are to be of service to others, then we simply have to face ourselves in all our messy difficult selves.

One of the ways forward is to develop the capacity to sit peacefully with, and to bring some lightness and curiosity to, the bits of ourselves we don’t like or try to keep hidden.

That is, I think, a big part of the function of supervision (and something Robin Shohet – whose supervision course I am attending – continually speaks of). There’s nothing sweeter for me than talking to my supervisor about some ‘uncoachlike’ attitude I might have or some element of myself that I still struggle with (and to which I might have been reluctant to admit), and then both of us laughing about it.

It makes it a lot easier to move forward when we bring the difficult stuff out into the light in safe spaces – like supervision.

I’ll end with a quote from Hassidic wisdom that I’ve always liked:

“If you want to raise a someone from the mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reaching a helping hand down to them. You must go all the way down yourself, down into your own mud and filth. Then take hold of them with strong hands and pull them and yourself out into the light.”

When we do our own work like this, then we can begin to help others to come out of their depths into the light.

On Being Unprepared

“Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” - Leonard Cohen “Come as you are.“ - Nirvana People who know me well will know that preparation is not one of my strengths. I’m much more likely to try and wing it, then to follow a script - it’s not always a good thing; my lack of preparation can cause me to panic or to fluster when I realise that I don’t have an answer to a question asked by a student or workshop participant. But my ADHD brain just can’t do it, no matter how much I’ve tried. But it’s not always a bad thing, either. I’ve been having some conversations with colleagues about designing some coach-training workshops and courses, and inevitably the subject of preparation comes up. Recently, in one of those conversations, I was advocating for being unprepared, and how that might be of value both for the workshop itself, but also as a metaphor for how we might approach coaching work. Maybe being unprepared is not always something to be fixed or corrected, but could actually be an asset. I’ve always liked this quote from Wilfred Bion, the group analyst: “The first point is for the analyst to impose on himself a positive discipline of eschewing memory and desire. I do not mean that ‘forgetting’ is enough: what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.” There is a paradox here, of course. It’s not really about failing to prepare; it’s about not being governed by what we already think we know, or by what we want to happen. I do, and we do need to, care about the work we do, and work to create a sacred space for coaching. Coaches will often speak about the importance of preparing for coaching sessions by, for example, reviewing client notes, reflecting on previous sessions, taking a few moments to recentre before the conversation begins. And, of course these practices can help to ground us as we get ready for the conversations with our clients. But, at the same time, that preparedness can get in the way of being in the moment. When I deliver coach-training sessions, I’m often asked questions about what to do if a client says x or presents y issue — as though there were a correct response for every scenario. Similarly, newer coaches often ask for a list of “powerful questions” that they can use in coaching conversations. Beneath these questions is a desire for certainty or a need to know what to do if things go ‘wrong’ when we make an intervention and the client responds differently to how we expected. Although the need for certainty and knowing what to do next is understandable, it’s a bit like trying to date and relying on great chat-up lines! And of course you can find chat up lines and powerful questions (and what to say when a client says x ) on Chat GPT! And, as this article shows, people are using Chat GPT to help them carry on conversations in dating apps, with all-too-predictable results if and when an actual date happens! In both dating and coaching, that desire for certainty takes us away from being present with the other. If I go into a session (or a date!) already ‘knowing’ how to respond or what intervention to make next, I am not really with the person in front of me, but rather I am attached to how I think things should unfold, rather than open to how they actually are unfolding. The reality of coaching — or indeed, of any meaningful relationship — is that the road will sometimes be bumpy. There will be moments when neither party knows where the conversation is going. Part of our responsibility as coaches, I think, is not to eliminate that uncertainty but to bear it, and to contain our own anxiety about it. When we cannot tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, we are tempted to rush toward solutions, interpretations, or advice. The bumpiness becomes something to fix rather than something to stay with. We can make a distinction here between expertise and mastery. The expert wants to find the answer as quickly as possible. The master, on the other hand, wants to stay in not knowing as long as possible. In that space, there is room for something fresh to emerge — something that the coach could not have predicted or designed in advance. There’s another dimension to this. I often hear coaches talking about the need to be centred and resourced in order to work effectively, and of course this is a good aspiration to have. At the same time, I frequently hear coaches wondering how to manage their state if they are going through a difficult time, or if they haven’t slept well. When I started coaching, there was a lot of pressure on coaches to be ‘coachlike’ at all times, and I’ve heard many coaches feel that they can’t really be a good coach, because their lives aren’t perfect. But what if, instead of asking how to fix or manage our ‘imperfect’ states, we became curious about what they might make available? If I am feeling sad, for example, that might make my coaching more tender. If I am tired, then maybe I am less defended and less polished. And, of course, the more we accept our imperfect humanity, the more able we are to hold space for our clients to show up as they are – and heaven knows, all of us are under so much pressure to be at our best in most areas of our lives. Coaching is, for many people, the one place they can go where they are able to connect to their real, messy and imperfect, selves, and speak honestly about their struggles in life. And, we can only be a space for them to do that, when we are willing and able to be who we are, without having to be sorted or always in a good place. These strands of unpreparedness can lead to us being more present in the moment with our clients. And it can also take the pressure off. In one of my recent supervision sessions, a coach was talking about a very senior client and how she felt a strong need to prepare by reading and rereading her notes, and the heaviness she felt in the days before each coaching session with her. In our conversation, we explored how she might approach this differently to ease that sense of pressure and eventually she came up with the idea of watching her favourite comedy show before she next met the client. A few days later, she emailed me to report that she had gone into her meeting with the client feeling so much lighter and that she was able to be more present and work more deeply with her client. And, as a final - meta - note, I often use Chat GPT to help me organise my thoughts when I’m writing. I tried it with this piece, but whilst the result might have been more polished, it wasn’t my voice any more. So I decided to go with the raw unpolished version. Make of that what you will. Reflections How might your preparation get in the way of your being authentically present with your clients? What might unpreparation look like for you?