About Gestalt Coaching
About Gestalt Coaching
Championed by Master Certified Coach Dorothy Siminovitch, Gestalt Coaching is a presence-focused approach that seeks to identify critical choice-points for actions that exist “in the moment” but promise long-term effects. Gestalt coaching mastery requires an “awareness intelligence” that simultaneously—intuitively and accurately—tracks both self-awareness and client awareness throughout the coaching encounter. And it enables the coach to be ready in-that-moment to offer the meaningful observation or intervention that moves the client forward.
A Gestalt coach brings the gift of an integrated presence to the coaching encounter: expression, behavior, and use of self are aligned with core values and with full access to cognitive and emotional life. The coach’s presence empowers clients to share their interior, and to have the experience of being heard through the avowed premise that they are already healthy, whole, and resourceful.
Gestalt Coaching Meets Today’s Challenges
When you work with us, you will:
- Learn experientially and experimentally.
- Identify your own goals to guide your change and development processes.
- Understand your resistances and habits that interfere with growth and change to change.
- Recognize moments of awareness that can lead to deep knowing and transformational change.
- Learn how to take small steps to manage and achieve big projects.
Our Mission
- To provide excellent and transformative Gestalt-based coaching and consulting services to individuals, teams, and organizations
- To provide world-class leadership training and development through coaching for awareness intelligence
- To create a cross-cultural, broad-based network of intellectual exchange with outstanding leaders and thinkers in coaching and consulting to help evolve Gestalt theory, concepts, and practices.
As the first ”integration” theory to successfully oppose widespread reductionism in the behavioral sciences during the 1950’s, Gestalt is an organic model that focuses on bringing into conscious awareness and choice one’s exterior and interior reality in order to achieve personal coherence and satisfaction (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1951).
Gestalt Concepts that Describe and Support These Organic Processes of Integration are:
- Paradoxical Theory of Change – A paradox is something (a statement, a situation) that appears to be self-contradictory or absurd, yet is actually valid or true. The Gestalt understanding of change was developed by Arnold Beisser, who defined the process this way: The Gestalt practitioner “believes change does not take place by ‘trying,’ coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpretation, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when the [client] abandons, at least for the moment, what he would like to become and attempts to be what he is.” That is, authentic change begins with full acceptance of and investment in one’s current state of being rather than the dogged, cognitive pursuit of a desired future state.
- Cycle of Experience – The Cycle of Experience is a core Gestalt conceptual tool for tracking correspondence between awareness, choice, and self-responsible action.
- Resistance – Whether with or without awareness, sporadically or chronically, our Cycle of Experience may be interrupted. Any change, even if desired, provokes resistance as a natural response.
- Experiment – Although change is an inevitable part of life, people sometimes intentionally or unintentionally continue patterns of behavior that do not serve their desires or goals.
- Unit of Work – Unit of Work is a Gestalt procedural frame of reference, used in conjunction with the Cycle of Experience, to organize coaching interventions around client issues that present habitual or chronic patterns of frustration (themes).
- Presence and Use of Self – Gestalt-based coaching can be called “transformational” coaching in that it seeks to elicit client change through awareness, choice, and integration in ways that are profound, liberating, and self-sustaining. Presence and use of self are the integrative concepts that drive all competencies and ways of being.
Learn More about Gestalt Coaching and Gestalt Concepts
Read my book, A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path Toward Awareness Intelligence – 2nd Edition.
