How to explore & rewire a limiting behavioral pattern instead of merely managing or suppressing it?

As a facilitator, you may face challenges when working with highly intellectual people who tend to "live in their head" and are less attuned to their body and emotions.

Some coaches or psychotherapists attempt to change their clients' limiting patterns by highlighting the negative consequences and teaching them alternative responses. While this approach can be beneficial in the short term to mitigate damages in the client’s (work or personal) relationships, it relies on the client's ongoing willpower to suppress their unconscious defensive reactions and choose more constructive responses.

To facilitate effective and lasting change, I believe its crucial to first explore why the client has developed a “limiting” behavioral pattern. As I describe in more detail in my free TK Taster Class, each "unwanted pattern" has been developed as result of an evolutionary neurobiological adaptation to stressful life experiences in order to to fulfill essential needs such as safety, security, acceptance, validation, and love and thus to survive.  

Let's consider the example of my client, Eric*, a successful financial director in an international company who desires to improve his relationships with colleagues. Initially, he was unaware of any defensive reactions since there was no visible conflict between him and his colleagues.

However, through an in-depth conversation, we discovered a limiting pattern: he often employs humor to trivialise potentially heated conversations and avoid conflict. As a consequence, his colleagues don't take him seriously, and he fails to gain the trust he deserves.

While I could have directly coached him by emphasising the negative outcomes of his pattern and by creating an action plan for adopting a more constructive response, it is likely that he would easily relapse into his old habit when tired or stressed. Also, it may require excessive energy for him to continuously suppress this pattern and to exercise mindful self-discipline in choosing a more constructive response, such as expressing himself more directly. This type of change is called counteractive change, because a new desired pattern is counteracting or competing with the old limiting pattern. This is not my favourite way of facilitating change. 

To unleash the power of deep lasting transformational change rather than counteractive change, I utilise the 4 skills of the EXPLORE key from the Transformational Keys model to uncover the underlying emotional truth behind a limiting pattern. An emotional truth of a pattern is a combination of learnings about how to perceive and interact with the world. It reveals the emotional necessity for the client to rely on that specific pattern in order to fulfil some essential needs and thus to survive. In Eric's case, the emotional truth that was driving his pattern of "trivialising with humor" was expressed as follows:

"When the sales director proposes something I disagree with, I perceive potential conflict and disconnection. If I speak up, I will be isolated and no longer belong to the team, just like I experienced during childhood when speaking up led to exclusion from my group of friends for over a week. The unresolved pain from that experience is still too overwhelming. To avoid feeling this pain and ensure being accepted and included, I have to trivialise conversations with humor whenever I disagree, even if it means not being taken seriously by my colleagues and lacking the trust I deserve."

Once the emotional truth of a limiting pattern is made explicit and is fully embodied by the client, the rewiring process of the neural network driving the pattern can commence. Using the 4 skills of the REWIRE key from the Transformational Keys facilitation model, the limiting pattern can be updated into a more constructive response. The beauty of this method lies in the fact that willpower is no longer necessary to exhibit the desired behavior.

If you're interested in getting a taste of how to explore and rewire a limiting behavioral pattern, rather than simply managing or suppressing it, I invite you to watch the FREE TK Taster Class.  

note (*): The cases I present in my blogs and newsletters are inspired by real client sessions, but I have made changes to ensure confidentiality by altering information such as names, gender, roles, and/or details of past experiences.