Intersections and differences between coaching and psychology: interview with João Sevilhano for Mais-Psi
He has a considerable curriculum, proven experience in various components of psychology and beyond, a solid and diverse training with a remarkable balance between protagonism, humility and altruism. How do you analyse your career?
First of all, I really appreciate the invitation to share with you and the users of MaisPsi some ideas.
I generously welcome the words introducing this first question of yours, which made me feel, I confess, a little embarrassed.
My path has been guided by a genuine curiosity. I try to adopt a constant posture of authentic interest, involvement and investment, while striving to maintain a sufficient distance that allows me to constantly criticise what I do, that enables me not to take for granted the current practices and the status quo of the contexts where I move. Sometimes I feel it is difficult to maintain a balance between affective proximity and a more distant or critical analysis. It is a kind of "open-minded scepticism". However, I have learnt to live better with this characteristic, or way of being/being, to realise that the benefits outweigh the costs and that the latter are part of a continuous learning process. On the other hand, I believe, or at least I like to believe, that this attitude allows me to work in diverse contexts because I am permanently critical and seek to justify my judgements and prejudices.
Deep down, I always try to take advantage of the experiences in which I am involved or see myself involved, knowing that this attitude often brings me frustration and suffering. This outcome is inevitable, it is part of the learning process.
On the other hand, there is a very clear purpose, which is also very old in me, which is to add value, somehow. It may sound pretentious, but I work to make a difference, to show new points of view and new angles of approach. You can intuit something of an altruistic spirit here, but deep down there is an obvious personal motivation - to enrich myself through this process. I learn a lot from helping to learn.
How did coaching come into your life?
Coaching came about unexpectedly and in an unexpected context. After my degree in Psychology, where I completed my curricular internship in a hospital environment, my first professional experience was in a completely different area. I worked for a year in the human resources department of a large Portuguese company. It was a painful experience because it was very different from what I had idealised for my path, apart from the issues that emerged from the confrontation with a new reality, which included entering a new phase of life. On the other hand, it was an extremely rich experience at various levels. I understood well, I think, how a large organisation, a large company works, I came into contact with the issues faced by people in companies and the difficulties organisations have in integrating, satisfying and mobilising their people. I often remember something a family friend, a person I consider brilliant, said to me when I had to choose between the organisational branch or the clinical branch of my degree: "Go into clinical practice. Even if you work in another context, understanding yourself and people will always be an advantage." Here, even before I had finished my degree and started working, I began to look at psychology, namely the clinical side, as something with scope beyond the "clinic".
After the "bittersweet" experience of working in that context, even with "interesting" perspectives and a concrete invitation to continue working there, I decided to leave and invest my time and energy in creating conditions to work in a clinical context. After a few months, many interviews, many doors knocked on, many meetings, some projects designed and presented (all of them unanswered until today!), I began to realise that it would be a waste to leave out the experience I had had.
During these months I also decided to start my psychoanalysis.
Coaching runs in the family. At that time, the European School of Coaching (EEC) was being launched in Portugal by a group of colleagues which included my father. They managed to explain to me what coaching was and at the time I thought it could be an interesting way to apply my skills and my will to introduce (clinical) psychology in the organisational world, which was, and still is, very impervious to its introduction and application.
That was the beginning. However, my perspective has changed a lot in these eight years.
Given the paradigm we are going through of "crisis" in other sectors of society, what are the importance and advantages of Coaching for individuals and organisations?
My perspective on this subject can be seen as ambivalent or even paradoxical, I admit. I believe that the great "advantage" of coaching also contains its greatest weakness.
Coaching appears, from the historical point of view, in a very summarised way, as a response of humanist and eclectic inspiration to human development; it sought and still seeks the conjugation of ideologies, theories and techniques which aim at learning in a constructive perspective, turned to the "design" of the future and to action.
In thesedays - which are marked by immediacy, in which there is an obvious desire, often blind, to obtain rapid, effective and supposedly long-lasting results - coaching appears as a very seductive and attractive solution, since it promises significant changes, in a short space of time and with visible results. On the other hand, as coaching is an approach that seeks to "give back" and/or develop the notion of responsibility to the individual, making him/her the "author, director and protagonist" of his/her life path (clearly of phenomenological and existentialist inspiration, at least in the theoretical-technical approach that I follow), it also seems to be easily linked to another of the current paradigms in society and culture which is that of a "return" to an anthropocentric vision that, in turn, feeds a context that excels in stimulating and valuing individualism and narcissism.
This is where, I believe, some of the limitations and risks of coaching are to be found. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that the solutions to today's problems, at civilisational, cultural, social and individual levels, can be found by practices such as coaching. I even find contradictory aspects in the proposal presented by coaching. On the one hand, as I mentioned before, it seeks to "humanise" development and learning. On the other hand, it is easily associated with the paradigm, which I usually call "effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, happiness and profit", very evident in the political and organisational contexts, among others, in which more relevance and importance is given to quantitative and tangible aspects and the qualitative and subjective dimensions of human nature are relegated to second place.
There is also the issue of theoretical and technical eclecticism. Coaching, in my view, does not have its own body of knowledge and, therefore, the techniques used result from a mixture of influences. This openness and flexibility would, in theory, allow a more personalised adaptation to each case, free from theoretical models and rigid and fundamentalist technical guidelines. However, in practice, this is a very difficult, not to say impossible, issue to resolve. The lack of limits, or the absence of solid epistemological foundations, leaves each coach with the responsibility/duty to find them and take them into consideration in a consistent and serious way in their professional practice.
Linked to the previous point is the question of the regulation of the activity. Today we are witnessing a banalisation of the word "coaching" and the proliferation of training programmes and certifying entities. Although I recognise that the market is better able to understand what a coach is and what a coach is for, the diversity of approaches, perspectives and practices is so disparate that it leaves any potential client confused. I myself have to confess that, even today, I have to play a pedagogical role when it comes to explaining what coaching is. It is very difficult to find consensus among colleagues and entities that seek to regulate or provide guidelines for self-regulation are often cornered by other interests. I imagine that for readers who are psychologists it is easy to find a bridge here with what happens in psychology...
However, I still believe that coaching, when framed within certain limits, can be a very useful and effective vehicle. I would argue that one has to be more realistic and objective about the promises one makes with regard to an approach such as this.
I do not believe that coaching is robust and sophisticated enough to be adopted as a "philosophy of life" or as a "body of knowledge". However, the greatest added value that I recognise in coaching is the search for integration of various sources of knowledge, which is reflected in a particular attitude and posture of those who practice this activity.
I could associate other ideas here but I end this reflection saying that, more and more I am convinced that the determinant factors for the success of an intervention of a coach will be found in his technical quality, in his theoretical knowledge (I am still amazed at the number of coaches who do not know the history of the activity they practice) and, above all, in his human quality.
Do you conciliate Clinical Practice and Coaching professionally? Is there a direct relationship or are we talking about divergent practices and methodologies?
This is a question I am often asked. My answer has become progressively simpler: in my opinion, they are different practices and methodologies, with different scopes and purposes, which are inevitably linked. They are not, however, comparable.
I think it is worth explaining this point of view.
I start by saying that I have had the opportunity to talk about coaching with psychologists and with non-psychologists in different contexts (coaching training, in an academic context in the field of psychology and others, groups of people from companies and other types of organisations...). This experience has allowed me to observe the initial reactions of these two groups of people and to identify two trends. At the risk of generalisation, psychologists usually react with expressions such as "but we already do that (coaching)". Non-psychologists distinguish coaching from psychology with arguments like: "here we don't treat pathologies" or "this is future and action oriented" or even "here we don't try to solve the causes but to design solutions". I believe that both reactions/expressions make sense and, at the same time, make no sense at all.
I can empathise and sympathise with psychologist colleagues who feel a kind of "revolt" or indignation towards coaching and coaches. In fact, coaches and coaching came to occupy a space where psychology and psychotherapy already "lived" (also psychiatry, but I will not go into that). But, in fact, this space is also shared with psychics, healers, gurus, astrologers, motivational speakers, etc.
Still in line with the previous idea, I also see that coaching becomes an attractive area for many people to "play at psychology", as I have heard from several psychologist colleagues, without having to go through the process of being trained as professionals in the area and/or not having to undergo the complexity and incessant investment that the study, research, intervention and understanding of human psyché imply.
I also detect an idea, wrong in my opinion, that sees coaching as a kind of light alternative to psychotherapy. In fact, I myself have had and still have some people in psychotherapy, and I have referred others to colleagues, who were looking for coaching rather than psychotherapy, but who clearly felt that the latter approach was the most appropriate for their case. I have even had requests from people who wanted to try a coaching process, exactly because they had gone through a psychotherapeutic experience whose results had been considered unsatisfactory or even disastrous. On the other hand, I am also aware of people who went on to psychotherapy during coaching processes.
I have had the opportunity to accompany many psychologists and psychotherapists who want to become coaches, precisely to increase their offer, to join the "fashion" or to enrich themselves as professionals. It is curious that people trained in psychology, the same happened to me, find specific difficulties in the learning process to become coaches. This difficulty can be translated by a greater resistance to abandoning the theoretical-practical paradigms that they bring with them. In practice, this means that the similarities and points of contact that exist between the two approaches are, at the same time, areas that are difficult to integrate and accommodate.
It has also been evident that coaching also serves as an escape from the stigma still associated with the "psi" areas. Coaching can create the illusion that people can be helped on their pathways of learning and change without much work, as if things happen by sheer willpower, insistence and persistence alone. In this way, in some cases, it becomes a way to avoid or circumvent the fear of psychopathology.
One of the criticisms I make to the coaching world is the search for superficial explanations and recipes with the pretence of solving very complex issues. Although I recognise the value of simplicity, something I consider extremely complex, I also see that in many situations one finds instead a simplism, a superficiality and an ease that are not in line with the complexity of human nature.
I do not believe that they are divergent approaches and methodologies, but they are certainly different. Moreover, I believe that coaches, whether psychologists or not, will have to know how to explain this difference in a well-founded way.
How do you characterise Mental Health in Portugal?
I believe there is still a long way to go. I don't think this is a path exclusive to our country, but in Portugal, concretely, I still see a lot to do and many paradigms to change. I am still surprised by the excessive number of psychology courses on offer and the number of psychologists being trained every year. On the other hand, professionals within the NHS are overloaded and rarely have the necessary resources and/or recognition that would be fair.
I am still disgusted by the "tone-deaf war" between the various "psi" professionals in which each faction, school and approach fights to affirm itself as the most correct, the most effective or the holder of the "truth" about human functioning. I believe that complementarity, interdisciplinarity and the necessary abandonment of sectarian and fundamentalist positions are essential.
I still see, with regret, that the stigma associated with psychopathology, lato sensu, leaves its marks and limitations on professionals, services, public and private, and all areas of society. It is almost like a "discrimination" that is observed between physical and mental health. The quantitative paradigm has overlapped and has been overvalued in relation to a quantitative approach, which contemplates the ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity, typical of human nature.
In your opinion, what does Psychology lack?
Some time ago I wrote a text, "seriously joking", about this subject. I believe that there are "many psychologies", which makes my answer difficult. However, if I make the effort to look at Psychology as an independent area of knowledge, I come to the idea that what is missing are aspects such as the following:
A greater openness to conversation between the various "schools" and approaches;
A better integration between the "art" and the "science" of psychology;
A detachment from the medical model, assuming a specificity and finding new bridges with complementary approaches;
A better integration of distinct epistemological approaches;
A closer connection to Philosophy
Looking at the list above, I realise that what I think Psychology is missing is not just confined to this discipline. I believe that we lack some evolutions as a species. The creation of richer, deeper and more fruitful dialogues between the different areas of knowledge is necessary. The valorisation of the qualitative, subjective and affective aspects is fundamental to compensate the quantitative and economical vision that is so impregnated that it extends to the understanding of the human being as such.
How do you evaluate MaisPSI?
I congratulate MaisPsi for its comprehensiveness and intention to gather in one portal resources and useful information both for psychologists and for anyone who wants to enjoy the contact with this discipline, in its multiple aspects. I foresee a great challenge ahead for MaisPsi. I wish the project every success.
How do you see the future of João Sevilhano?
At this moment I look to my future with enthusiasm and tranquillity. I would like to continue doing what I do, to finish my training as a psychoanalyst. I believe psychoanalytic thought has many applications, particularly in contexts where it has not been considered or used. I believe that I will continue to be connected to organisations, that I will work with companies and their people, helping them to acquire new perspectives and ways of relating. I would love to learn to write better, as written expression is something that brings me great pleasure. Teaching is another point I would like to explore, making use of my experience as a trainer and facilitator.
Otherwise, my resolution for 2015 was not to make any big resolutions. The only honest answer I have regarding my future is that I am absolutely convinced I have no idea what will happen, intentions and wishes aside. And, frankly, I like that perspective.
Interview conducted by the MaisPSi team published on 13 May 2015, a project that has since gone offline.
