How Practitioners Can Get In Their Own Way
Bob Tannerbaum pointed out that there are a number of personal of often unresolved problems can haunt practitioners. No consultant is confronted by all of the issues, but all are plagued by some of them.
Feelings: It gives colour and dimension to our thoughts and actions.
Feelings can be powerful, exciting, or disturbing and most of us experience some problems with them - and so, we become unaware of them.
When that happens, we compromise our ability to work with clients - e.g aware of subtle, minimal cues, drawing inferences, and doing sensitive hunching.
Self-Esteem & Self-Worth: Self-esteem refers to positive feelings about self that often are generated by external inputs - rewards, recognition
Self-worth is rooted in positive feelings that we have for our inner being. We feel good about ourselves. We like what we experience within ourselves. We sense that we are reasonably whole.
How do we know that we are ok, with or without external input?
Insecurity about Insecurity: Low self-esteem and low self-worth are often referred to as selfdoubt or insecurity.
Having self-doubt is natural, but allowing ourselves to be trapped behind our own facade, hiding our own insecurity from ourselves and others without doing anything with them, that will affect our work.
Blindness to One’s Strengths: Sometimes, by not owning our strengths, we can also be unaware of additional potential strengths within ourselves. By not attributing our success and competency to self, we cannot build on them.
We often can not accept praise/recognition in a straightforward way, e.g “I am so glad you like that.”
We might be readier to share our gaps and deficiencies than our strengths, but when people agree with us, we feel hurt.
Discomfort with Intimacy: How close can 1 let myself get to this other person?
Many factors can get into consultant’s preference for or dislike of intimacy, knowing what the factors are can give us a better understanding of ourselves and our choices in our work with others.
Anger: In many cultures, the experience of anger within a person, and its expression or its control involve frequent challenges for all of us. Many of us are fearful of anger. We either surpassed or deflected our anger. By doing so, we can not come to the root cause of such powerful emotion and hence stop ourselves to gain greater insights on self and others.
Tolerance for Ambiguity: The need to be in control in the first instance, and the intolerance of ambiguity in the second both impel us toward meeting our own needs, rather than making it possible for the other party to be where they want to be.
Being unaware of our own needs, yet unconsciously being driven by them, can lead us to ineffective behaviour.
How comfortable are we with the complexity and ambiguity of client interactions?
Awareness of One’s Biases: Seeing accurately is central to a consultant’s effectiveness. Much of the work of consultants requires that we accurately perceive the data available to us so that we can act appropriately considering what the data tells us.
Data collection and diagnosis - whilst useful and necessary - still need interpretation by the consultant. We are the intermediary between new data and emergent meaning. Our role in making meaning can be distorted by faulty lenses, blind spots, biases, and prejudices. It is this that can be our undoing.
