Psychotherapy and Agile Coaching have distinct differences and similarities, lending the professions to become blended at times, sometimes without the realization of the individual who assumes the practice. Discover what makes each position unique, where the lines become blurred, and explore three client exercises that can equally be used between the two professions.

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The Intersection Between
Psychotherapy & Agile Coaching
Integrate Gestalt Psychotherapy
practices into your Agile Coaching
Speaker: Lisa Bradburn
07-29-2021

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Please Turn Your Video & Audio On!

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Hello! I’m
Lisa.
Nice to meet
you!

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3
• Introduction to Gestalt Psychotherapy
• The fine line between psychotherapy and coaching
• The mind/body connection with exercise
• Living in the here and now with exercise
• Discovering the quality of our interactions with
exercise
• Conclusion
Agenda
Value
• Gestalt offers new methods to handle old challenges
• Enables you to show up in your entirety with others
• Strengthen truth telling capabilities to self and others
• Improve the quality of your interactions
• Develop greater presence and availability for others
• De-escalate tension, stress in conflict situations
• Promote deeper team bonding

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4
A Question

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Question
Which scenario best describes the role of a Psychotherapist versus an Agile Coach?
When an individual experiences stress, I listen with curiosity. My role is
not that of a problem solver, rather, to guide the person to find the right solution for
their needs. Through providing tools of empowerment, my client can find greater
accountability and purpose. The process works best when an individual is open
to the process.
Yesterday I facilitated a group to role-play a scenario. The experimentation
uncovered root causes of their challenges and allowed the participants to view their
obstacle from the eyes of the “other”. The experience helped members develop a greater
emotional bond and empathy for one another.

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Psychotherapist
Agile Coach

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Dig Deeper
Profession Description Differences Similarities
Psychotherapist  Offer clients a range of treatments to help with
mental health problems, emotional challenges, and
some psychiatric disorders
 Learn about condition, moods, feelings, thoughts
and behaviors.
 Enables patients to develop a mind-body connection
 Equips people to cope with stressful situations in an
adaptive way.
 Utilize experiential or experimental modes of
treatment
 Sessions may be one-to-one, in pairs, or in groups.
Techniques can include other forms of
communication, such as drama, narrative story, or
music.
• People focus
• Use of talk therapy
• Focus on whole self; mind-body-
spiritual connection
• Do not diagnose clients, rather work
with people once they have been
diagnosed to offer support/therapy
• Promotes healthy behavior
• Reflective observer and truth teller
• Co-create the container with clients
• Experiential
• Experimental
• Sense of play
• Modeler of behaviors and role playing
• Many roles embodied in one: coach,
facilitate, teach, mentor
• Integrates practices from the
humanities; such as “art-therapy” to
express emotion
Agile Coach  Hands-On Expert: has faced pitfalls, organizational
impediments, has become a coach to managers and
other outsiders while addressing them
 Produces products that matter in the real world and
add meaning to people's lives.
 Someone who appreciates the depths of agile
practices/principals and helps teams appreciate it
 Help Management at all levels of the organization to
understand the benefits of agile
 Bring ideas from other disciplines (i.e.:
psychotherapy) for improved conflict resolution,
mediation, facilitation and coaching
• Product and people focused
• Counsellor of organizational friction,
tension, and stress
• Focus on the individual, groups, the
system, enterprise
• Sometimes focus on individual
interpersonal work from
organizational perspective
• Agile Coaches do not delve into
personal trauma however they will
help others to resolve organizational
conflict

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Pause For
Reflection
Now that we know the difference between a
Psychotherapist and an Agile Coach,
– have you ever walked a fine line between the
two?

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Practitioner Qualities of Excellence
 Empathetic
 Holds space for others, patience
 Attitude of respect and sensitivity towards clients with widely
varied backgrounds, abilities, socioeconomic and educational
status
 Servant leader, focus on others, not themselves
 Deep curiosity of others
 High level of self-awareness
 Understand and self-manage personal triggers
 Awareness of reactive and creative states
 Awareness of judgement and personal bias
 Desire for and use of healthy conflict resolution strategies
 Active listening
Psychotherapy & Agile Coaching

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Before We
Proceed…
 Psychotherapists focus on an individual or
groups mental health by promoting healthy
habits.
 An Agile Coach supports the organization to create
value from building products. To achieve this, a
Coach works horizontally and vertically with
individuals, teams and the enterprise to support the
value proposition.
 Effective Psychotherapists and Agile Coaches
require the same soft skills such as empathy,
self-awareness and ability to listen to others.

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11
Gestalt Psychotherapy

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First, let’s start with the word Gestalt.
It’s German, pronounced guh-sht-awlt.
Pronounce

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Definition
The whole is more important than the individual parts

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Gestalt Psychotherapy – What is it?
 One “modality” of many under the psychotherapy umbrella.
 Gestalt is a humanistic, holistic approach to the human experience.
 Stresses individual responsibility and awareness of present psychological
and physical needs.
 Practitioners and patients of Gestalt are called “students”.
 Life-long learners of the practice.
 A particular discipline is required (in that yoga and singing are disciplines).
 Discipline enables willing students to go into a deep, lifelong exploration of one’s
reality enabling the capacity for a full life.
 Concept of the whole of anything is greater than its parts.
 Focus on ‘here-and-now’, the present moment.
 Relational belief - it is only possible to know ourselves against the background of
our relationships to others.
 Aware of significant sensations within the body and environment in order to
respond.

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Experiment
Look at this picture
What feelings are you experiencing
inside your body here and now?
How do you know you’re experiencing
internal feelings?
Where are you experiencing the
sensations in your body?

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Tying It Together
 Acknowledging and identifying emotions
in the moment allows us to ‘be’, to ride the
wave
 When we’re aware of our present feelings,
we make better, more informed decisions
 And when we connect the mind and body, we
are not intellectualizing our emotions, rather
we embody it
 Ultimately, when we tie these practices
together, we are living our authentic selves

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Gestalt As Real Physical Beings

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 We are real, tangible physical beings, not minds
perched on top of bodies.
 We are instinctual beings.
 Our emotions, feeling states, hunger, aversions all have
physical bases.
 And we react to others, whether in fights, sexual
encounters, warm conversations, loving moments, with
the whole of ourselves — physical reactions, thoughts,
and feelings intertwined.
 We are called upon to acknowledge and tune into, our
physical sensations and inner feeling states
 This process allows us to release ourselves into fuller
physical experience and expression.
Gestalt As Real Physical
Beings
Theory

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1. Look beyond your screen and acknowledge your
environment.
2. Take two to three deep inhale and exhales.
3. Stand up, stretch, shift your perspective.
4. Return to seated position with intention of
looking beyond your screen from time to time.
5. Gauge your internal emotions. What are you
feeling right now? Where do you feel it?
Screen Exercise
Objective
Instruction
We are spending more time than ever on our screens. Since
screens are two dimensional, yet humans are three-
dimensional, this exercise allows us to become more present in
the moment of self, others and environment.

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 The mind and body are connected
 When we are aware of our internal state, we can bring our entire selves to others
 Conflict situations can be diffused by bringing awareness to our current state of
being
Before We Proceed…

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Gestalt As Truth-Telling

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Gestalt As Truth-
Telling
Theory
• Gestalt is the cultivation of truth-telling or,
truth-acknowledging, to oneself and others.
• To know the truth of my experience, I must
recognize what I do habitually and without
consciousness (running on auto-pilot).
• I need to attend to my thoughts, feelings, wishes,
heartfelt longings, all my reactions and my
conscious experience, much of it in the background,
or on the fringes of my consciousness.
• As I do this, I become more aware of the ways I cut
off or pretend to override certain inner states,
thoughts, imagined realities.

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Empty Chair Exercise
 Place an empty chair in the room and ask the client(s) to
pretend the person/team/thing etc. is sitting across from
them.
 With the empty chair, ask the client(s) to envision the
person/team/thing they need to communicate with about a
particular issue, situation, or emotion they have been
experiencing.
 The client(s) can move from chair to chair, playing out the
conversation.
Objective
This simple approach allows clients to work through
interpersonal or internal conflict. It helps people see the
situation from a different perspective and gain insight into their
feelings and behaviors.
Instructions

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Before We Proceed
 The empty chair technique is a
method of truth telling by allowing
clients to express truths they may
otherwise be too afraid to
communicate.
 Allows clients to ‘try on’ and
experiment with the feeling of being
in the shoes of the other.
 Tool to discover fresh perspectives of
self and the other in a safe manner.
 Used as an aid to de-escalate heated
situations and helps build empathy
for others.

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Discovering The Quality Of Our
Interactions

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Discovering The Quality Of
Our Interactions
 Gestalt asks us to pay attention to the quality of our
interactions with the world, reality, other humans.
 In meeting you, how do I stop being my full self and
how do you stop yourself?
 How can we meet each other with all our individuality
recognized and incorporated in our meeting?
 When I am fully in touch with myself, I am more in
touch with another.
 When this happens, there is a transcendent moment of
absolute recognition — often, beyond words: I
recognize your intrinsic humanness, and mine is
recognized too.
Theory

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Pick one:
 I Have to – I Choose to
 I Can’t – I Won’t
 I Need – I Want
 I’m Afraid to – I’d Like to
Communicate Intentions
Exercise
Objectives
This exercise teaches us how to communicate
intentions to one another, develop greater
understanding of what is and is not within our
control and to take responsibility for our actions.
Instruction

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 The mind
Debrief…
At the end of the exercise ask your clients:
 Do you have the ability to take control of your choices?
 When you shift your perspective, do you experience a change in your body?
 Did you discover more choice, personal power and possibilities?

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Recap Three
Exercises
Screen Exercise Empty Chair Exercise Communicate
Intentions Exercise
Objectives Clients strive to be more present in the
moment of self, others and
environment.
Clients work through interpersonal or
internal conflict. View situation from a
different perspective and gain insight
into internal feelings and behaviors
Clients learn how to communicate
intentions to one another,
develop greater understanding of
what is and is not within their
control and to take responsibility
for actions
Outcomes  Mind body are connection
 Develop awareness of internal state
with goal of bringing entire selves
to others
 Remain in discomfort builds
resilience, allowing clients to “hold
in” longer
 Method of truth telling allowing
clients to express truths they may
otherwise be too afraid to
communicate.
 Allows clients to ‘try on’ and
experiment with the feeling of being
in the shoes of the other.
 Tool to discover fresh perspectives of
self and the other in a safe manner.
 Used as an aid to de-escalate heated
situations and helps build empathy
for others.
 Clients discover their ability to
take control of choices/actions
 Learn whether more choice,
personal power and
possibilities exist
 If working in pairs, ability to
recognize personal truths in
dialog with partner

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To Conclude
• Focuses on here and now.
• Provides practice of awareness (also called
"mindfulness")
• Reflective observer and truth teller
• In all exercises, the client learns to become
aware of what he or she is doing, triggering the
ability to risk a shift or change.
Align Exercises to Gestalt Practices
• Agile Coaches can utilize Gestalt exercises with
clients for the purpose of developing greater
truths, deeper awareness and resolving
individual, team and organizational conflict.
Final Thought – Agile Coaching

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Contact Gestalt
INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy
European Association for Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt International Study Center
Istituto di Gestalt Italy
CANADA
Gestalt Institute of Toronto
OTHER GESTALT RELATED LINKS
Gestalt Journal Press
The Gestalt Therapy Page
Gestalt Review
Gestalt News and Notes
UNITED STATES NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
BY STATE
CALIFORNIA
Gestalt Associates Training Los Angeles
Gestalt Institute of San Francisco
Pacific Gestalt Institute
LOUISIANA
Gestalt Institute of New Orleans
NEW YORK
Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy
New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy
New York State Office of the Professions
NORTH CAROLINA
Appalachian Gestalt Training Institute
OHIO
Gestalt Institute of Cleveland
PENNSYLVANIA
The Gestalt Therapy Institute of Philadelphia
Pennsylvania Gestalt Center

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Let’s Get Social!
lisabtherapy.com
facebook.com/
lisabradburnpsychotherapy
@lisabtherapy
@lisabtherapy
linkedin.com/lisabradburn

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Coach Much?
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Questions?