Gestalt Coaching: From Performance to Talent

By Gabriele Baroni

Coaching is an empty word, a word that needs to be filled in with meaning. In gestalt coaching - as we shall see - it refers to imperfection rather than perfection, diversity rather than the norm, one’s own rhythms rather than the performance that has to be achieved.

Gestalt coaching could be defined - borrowing F. Perls’ definition of Gestalt - as “a therapy for healthy people”, a “therapy” for people who are so healthy that they no longer wish to live below their own potential.

The pages you are about to read may change your vision of coaching - if you have only ever heard about it - and if your vision is more traditional, they may integrate it. In any case, they may open the doors to “Gestalt” for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TALENT Edizioni
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220279116

Book preview

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Introduction - From Performance to Talent

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The pages you are about to read may change your vision of coaching - if you have only ever heard about it - and if your vision is more traditional, they may integrate it. In any case, they may open the doors to Gestalt for you.

Coaching is an empty word, a word that needs to be filled in with meaning. In gestalt coaching [1] - as we shall see - it refers to imperfection rather than perfection, diversity rather than the norm, one’s own rhythms rather than the performance that has to be achieved.

Gestalt coaching could be defined - borrowing Perls’ definition of Gestalt - as a therapy for healthy people, for people who are so healthy that they no longer wish to live below their own potential.

The term therapy is used here as a paradox (next to "healthy people''), because coaching has got nothing to do with this field, neither with psychology in its narrow definition. As we shall see, its origins lay within pedagogy.

If therapy looks to bring a pathological situation to normality, gestalt coaching has the objective to accompany clients from normality to exra-ordinariety, bringing up their own uniqueness.

Gestalt-inspired coaching, does not cure anything, gestalt coaching adds value.

If you are looking for techniques, motivational phrases, something that makes you run two-thousand miles an hour or to become someone other than you actually are, then this is not the right path for you.

Often, in fact, we think of a coach as a word preacher, someone who drugs clients to get out of them everything they could possibly be. Of course the reality is different, but surely this isn’t the case for gestalt-inspired coaching.

In a certain way, this methodology, applied to coaching, turns its common definition of pushing towards a perfect performance on its head.

Gestalt coaching is an invitation to explore one’s own diversity and using one's own flaws - using Heidegger in an heterodoxical way - as one’s being-in-the-world unique signature. This means going through life giving meaning to everything we do.

This path gives coaching a more humanistic and at the same time artistic nuance focusing on talent rather than on performance.

Notes to Introduction

[1] In this book, we will use the words 'gestalt coaching' and 'Gestalt-inspired coaching' in an interchangeable way

Chapter 1 - The Gestalt Spirit

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I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.

If not, it can't be helped.

From Gestalt prayer by Fritz Perls

Are we talking about Spirit in a Gestalt context?

That is not so peculiar if we think that Perls actually wrote a prayer, the famous Gestalt Prayer, quoted as opening to this chapter.

It is an awakening prayer; an invitation to take the responsibility of meeting each other on our boundaries, not to invade and above all not to let others invade us.

In this relationship balance, the encounter, which is the most concrete form of contact, can happen "with tact", and truly become the moment when we feel others since we are in a respectful setting with ourselves in the first place. The Gestalt Spirit could be summarised with these two words: Boundary and Contact.

Two words which open to a new outlook: the astonishment that is activated when the encounter comes from a place of choice rather than attachment.

From Gestalt theorists to Gestalt Therapy, until Gestalt inspired coaching

Gestalt is similar to Jerusalem for the monotheistic religions: they all consider it to be a sacred place. When we talk about Gestalt, in fact, we are referring to a set of traditions and approaches which - though entangled - are very different in their intentions, models and above all in their practices. Examples are Gestalt theorists, Gestalt Therapy and gestalt-oriented subjects such as counselling and coaching - here defined as Gestalt-inspired coaching - which is central to this book.

Gestalt is a German word which can possibly translate as shape [1]. It is especially known as Therapy with a psychoanalytic approach; it started with Perls in the 1950s in the United States [2].

Despite Gestalt Therapy being one of the most common approaches - its origins are nevertheless older, and its practices diversified.

In the following pages, the Gestalt concepts and methodology evolution will be outlined and finally, we shall look into how they were translated from a psychological and therapeutical field into a different and more pedagogical one which focuses on expressing one’s potential, such as coaching.

The Gestalt theorists

Gestalt originates as a theoretical orientation. Gestaltpsychologie or Psychology of Shape is a school of psychology which emerged in Germany in the 1920s, thanks to a group of psychologists [3] who were looking to give psychology a scientific explanation. Psychoanalysis - the leading trend at the time - was, in their vision, too full of metaphysical concepts which could not be scientifically proved: the concept of unconscious