Gestalt Coaching for Awareness Management: The Elements of Mastery

Figure 1.1 Awareness Dimensions and Choice Points

Dimension 1: Self-Aware Alignment with Embodied Values

Understanding and knowing yourself means knowing your values and beliefs, and knowing when you’ve been derailed from your core identity. Your values, and the clarity and consistency with which you communicate those, somatically or verbally, are seen by others as signaling trustworthiness. A 2016 Harvard Business School survey of leadership learning and development programs reveals that “demonstrating integrity” is the top-ranked leadership capability. The demonstration of one’s values through consistent language and behavior is perceived by others as authentic and inspiring. When volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity arise, we are supported by our aware values and goals, and we learn how to return to our core identity when we’re thrown off course. Self-awareness entails tracking your sensations, thoughts, emotions, resistances, and mindsets to keep them aligned with your identity during disruption. Gestalt coaches understand how to track values, how to identify resistances that derail clients, and how to offer practices to manage them. (Figure 1.2)