On Resilience & The Need for Systems Thinking in Coaching
In the spirit of my recent hyperfocus on fractals — the idea that “what we practice on the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system”1 — over the weekend I returned to Rae Johnson’s book Embodied Activism: Engaging the Body to Cultivate Liberation, Justice, and Authentic Connection. And I’ve been sitting with these questions, posed in the chapter “Bringing It All Home”:
“What if resilience is not a kind of toughness that automatically happens to us when we endure something hard or demanding?
What if true resilience asks us to access and respond to how we’re feeling in our bodies so we can adapt to new challenges?”
10+ years of working in youth development — which overlapped with the period when the research on “growth mindset” (Carol Dweck) and “grit” (Angela Duckworth) hit the mainstream — left me with mixed feelings about resilience. Especially, given how the application of that research has focused so heavily on “under-served” and “marginalized” young people (aka young people targeted by systems of oppression like racism and/or cis-heteropatriarchy).
Yes, I believe there is power in adaptation, flexibility, cultivating the capacity to do hard things, and learning how to “fail forward.” I value all of these practices, which is why I so passionately spent a decade training thousands of nonprofit staff and volunteers in positive youth development — including how to facilitate a growth mindset. However, I do not believe it is possible for individuals to “mindset”, persist, regulate, boundary-set, or otherwise personally develop ourselves free of oppressive systems. Systemic change requires collective action.
For this reason, I really appreciate Johnson’s reframe of resilience from “toughness” and “endurance” (which feel too much like encouragement to just push through the harms of institutionalized oppression) — to “sensing into our bodies and our needs” in order to “adapt” how we respond/resist in a given moment.
All of this also speaks to why I believe it’s critical for individual-focused practices like coaching to incorporate systems thinking — including an understanding of how systemic oppression operates.
In her blog Are you a ‘Systems’ conscious coach?, Rashmi Dixit speaks to the potential unlocked by coaching that includes a strong analysis of oppression. She argues (and I agree), that this potential includes deeper trust, greater capacity for working with systemic power dynamics that are impacting clients and/or the coaching relationship, and the opportunity for impact across multiple levels:
“If a coach is unable to include a systemic awareness lens, they undermine the ability to build trust, conscious agreements and spaciousness in the relationship to bring the -isms that exist.
Additionally, in order to support clients and address the systems, coaches must know their own identity and systemic realities. They must examine where they reside in the systems and the impact of systems on them as well as on the client.
In doing this crucial and deeper work, coaching could create possibilities that can have impact on the systems in which the conversation is taking place as well as impact on the individual.”
Similarly, in their book Love Letter to the Movement: Using a Coach Approach for Healing, Justice, and Liberation Sarah Jawaid and Damon Azali-Rojas highlight an “Analysis of Oppression” as one of three core principles that anchor a liberatory approach to coaching:
“The coach’s compass is curiosity. Curiosity about the context (community, culture, and conditions) of the coach-partner’s world. This involves being able to be present with one’s coach-partner and at the same time invite awareness of systems and cultures of oppression. Supporting the coach-partner to avoid the default patterns that absolve the sins of oppressive historical and present-day systems — the same systems that blame the individual for their own oppression.
[…] The coach also needs to be aware of when the coach-partner is holding themselves small. This shrinking in energy, sovereignty, and action can be a result of the coach-partner being hypervigilant and not wanting to create practices that enforce oppressive systems and culture.”
When coaches continuously cultivate a critical analysis of oppression, we can better recognize where and when systems like white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and ableism/neuroableism are showing up in our — and our client’s — sense of self, relationships, institutions, and systems. And when we make these ideologies visible, it becomes easier for coaches and clients to work together to disrupt them.
For example, let’s say I didn’t understand how embedded neuroableism is in most organizational structures and cultures. I might hear a neurodivergent client venting about the organization they work for and — because I don’t see all the ways that organization was never designed to accommodate, let alone value, the client’s neurotype — I might misinterpret the root of their struggle as a “self-limiting belief” about the organization and/or themselves (a kind of belief that coaches are encouraged to challenge because of how it blocks our “power within”).2 This might then lead me to, predictably, challenge the client to reflect on their perspective or “beliefs” about the situation.
However, oppression isn’t a belief, it’s an embodied experience. And understanding this — and being able to recognize it in action — opens up more liberatory coaching directions. For example, with this knowledge I could instead choose to…
Validate the client’s experience and help them access and respond to how they’re feeling (to echo Rae Johnson’s re-frame of resilience);
Engage them in a conversation about their choice points that’s grounded in their current “spoons”; and/or,
If a challenge felt right, tap into systems thinking and invite them to identify “cracks” or leverage points they might work with to seed organizational change.3
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
This is not to say that internalized oppression might not also be at play for this person. If they were engaging in negative self-talk that would also be something to explore.
In his book Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, Adam Kahane uses “cracks” as a metaphor for signs that a system/organization isn’t working for people, and “leverage points at which we can usefully engage.” And the practice of “working with cracks” is one of the seven habits he promotes in the book:
“Systems [including organizations] are structured to keep producing the behaviors and results they are producing, and therefore often seem solid and unchangeable — but they are not. They are built, and they collapse. They crack and are cracked, which opens up new possibilities that some people find frightening and others find hopeful.”