Research Paper By Riccardo Mereu
(Business Coach & Career Change Coach, ITALY)
When I was at secondary school, I used to attend a course called Industrial Technical Drawing which mostly consist of hand-made drawing from a different point of views of progressively complex solid objects, and called orthogonal projections.
I clearly remember that I always enjoyed this class, and besides not being very good at hand-drawing itself, I really liked the exercise of watching a piece from different angles, to see the same piece, represented in different ways.
When the piece is complex this exercise can be really challenging and it definitely required a lot of mental openness and visualization skills.
Here below a simple example:
When I joined ICA and I started learning about the power tools I became very interested in the concept of Reframing Perspective and immediately my memories went back to the orthogonal projections.
If you think about it, the concept is in fact exactly the same.
When you have an object in front of you, you might think it has a certain shape, but in reality, watching it from a different angle the shape might change.
In coaching the same concept can use when defining an obstacle.
Considering my engineering background another interesting thing popped-up on my head while reading the Action vs Delay power tool that says:
“Delay works in opposition to action. If we look at the action as an accelerating force that moves or pulls us forward, we can also look at the delay as an accelerating force that pulls us back and keeps us stuck”[1]
Beside the mere concept of this sentence, what came to my mind is that in fact this statement holds something that it is not exactly true, in fact the acceleration itself is not a force, instead is the result of the application of a force and it is regulated by Newton´s Second Law of Motion which states:
“The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object”[2]
This means that the acceleration depends upon two variables: the net force acting upon the object and the mass of the object, and therefore:
- As the force acting upon an object is increased, the acceleration of the object is increased
- As the mass of an object is increased, the acceleration of the object is decreased
Getting to a more practice statement, this means that if we want to move an obstacle, either we apply a greater force, or we reduce its mass.
So how do the Orthogonal projections, the second principle of Newton and the reframing perspective tool come together?
Well, the answer is quite simple:
Suddenly she told me she understood that the right decision was to leave him immediately and that even every second more could have been crucial considering she had the urgency to find new business partners.
She told how foolish she had been for so many months, that she should have left the guy much earlier but for some obstacles were preventing her to do it.
When I asked her about the obstacles, she said it was mostly about the lack of confidence in herself, the courage to drop this little island of financial security and the fear of losing the good connection with other artists and event organizers that Mark was able to provide.
Yet, eventually, she realized that her talents and her art were making her feeling very confident, that after all, she was earning money also from other distribution channels, and that after all, all the other artists she now knew could have been her new support system to help her reaffirming herself.
When I asked her when she wanted to do it, she said:
“Immediately Riccardo. I cannot wait any longer, I have to go, now!”
She was on fire.
Our time together was almost over but she didn’t even want to wait for a second more, she told me that the session was over and she closed the call.
Less than 10 minutes later I received an SMS.
“Riccardo, I did it, I dumped him, and I feel awesome! Thanks a lot for your support!
Conclusions
Since I started my ICA journey I had about 15 clients and I covered around 45 hours of coaching. Obviously, I am a newbie but this case really helped me to understand the power of reframing perspectives.
My coaching model is called SWELL and it focuses on the recognition of one’s potential, identification of obstacles and challenges the client to face reality, acknowledge excuses, seek for new perspectives and pushes to consider what could possibly happen if nothing really changes.
During the process used my model and I noticed that Anna’s awareness increased in between the first and the second session thanks to the help of the personality test and even more important about the value-based test.
If I was to do the session from zero again, I would definitely propose to complete the test after the discovery session instead and surely, I will do it with future clients.
In this case, I believe that an earlier introspective exploration would have helped Anna to speed up the process even faster.
What I learned is that Anna was really resourceful and what surprised me the most was the result of our journey together which to me was totally unexpected.
Personally, I thought that Anna would have proceeded in a different way, perhaps trying a more diplomatic approach and trying to re-establishing a connection with Mark.
Instead, something really big happened inside her, and suddenly everything was clear. She made her obstacle become so small that eventually was almost insignificant and with literally no effort she took her final decision.
Resources
[1]ICA-PowerTools-EBook.pdf- page. 53
[2]https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/Lesson-3/Newton-s-Second-Law