The Coaching Two-Step: From Subject to Object to Transformation

Our first digital Master Class, when we launched the Institute of Coaching membership program in 2011, was on subject-object theory. The interviews and content were based on the intellectual heavy-lifting completed over decades by Harvard professor and adult development psychologist, Bob Kegan, later in collaboration with Lisa Lahey at Harvard Graduate School of Education. (Find the 2011 resources below.) Bob, Lisa, and Deborah Helsing have presented their Immunity to Change workshop at eight of our nine Institute of Coaching/Harvard Medical School conferences.

After completing a PhD at Harvard in 1977, Bob mapped out the evolution of ever-increasing complexity in meaning-making, the mental activity of making sense of human experiences and challenges. While Bob’s frameworks, described in two books: The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, are intellectually demanding (I often get a headache when reading and rereading both books), the fundamental shift (what he calls a subject-object shift) is the basis for evolution of meaning-making. This type of shift is familiar to skilled coaches as peak moments in coaching. Of course, these shifts are a natural and normal process of the continuous interplay of the mind and the external world. Coaches enable these shifts to happen faster, more often, and in a grander fashion than can be done alone.

To quote Jennifer Garvey Berger, a mentee of Bob Kegan, in the Appendix to her book, Changing on the Job:

Things that are subject are experienced as unquestioned. They can include many different things—a relational issue, a personality trait, an assumption about the way he world works, behaviors, or emotions. Things that are subject to you can’t be seen because they are a part of you. Because they can’t be seen, they are taken for granted, taken for true—or not even taken at all. You generally can’t name things that are “subject,” and you certainly can’t reflect upon them—that would require the ability to stand back and take a look at them. You don’t have something that’s subject; something that’s subject has you.

Object is the opposite of subject. While things that are subject have you, you have things that are object. While all of us necessarily have many parts of our world to which we are subject (if we gave much conscious thought to our assumptions about gravity, we might not have time to go to sleep at night!), one part of development is about moving more and more things from subject to object. The more in your life you take as object, the more complex your worldview because you can see and act upon more things.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say your client asserts that she is simply not the kind of person who establishes heartfelt connections with work colleagues. It turns out that she is “subject” to an unconscious (hidden) assumption that allowing herself to connect emotionally means she will be weakened and vulnerable. She can’t be both “warm and tough.”  While subject to the hidden assumption, outside pressure on your client has little impact. With your help, she can identify that she holds this belief.  Then she can shift this belief, about who she is and how she must operate, from “subject” to “object.” For example, she might first observe herself making the assumption, and then notice how it limits her and may not actually be accurate.

Eclipsed by the assumption up until now are new perspectives, new objects, waiting to be revealed through open-minded discussion, experience, or even meditation. Maybe you offer that your read on the research on transformational leadership suggests that being warm may improve the impact of being tough.  Perhaps an experiment with warmer connection turns out to feel good and leads a colleague to generate a novel solution to a chronic issue. Instead of feeling weaker and vulnerable, your client feels stronger and more capable.  Freed from being “subject” to her assumption, she finds more options and a sense of choice.

Now you have helped your client transform one “subject” (I don’t do heart-to-hearts with colleagues) to multiple “objects:”

1. I can choose to be warm with colleagues.
2. Connecting with warmth feels good.
3. Being warm catalyzes others to have new ideas.
4. I can be warm and tough together when needed.
5. My impact can be greater when I combine warmth and toughness.

Your client experiences two shifts, first from subject to object. The “subject” has moved from an unquestioned and unchangeable truth to a choice -– I can choose to be warm or not. Then a second shift happens, from object to more objects. Going even further, perhaps she now welcomes challenges as signals to notice and outgrow her “subjects” leading to more agility, flexibility, and wisdom.

In 2016, Bob Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Matthew Miller, and Deborah Helsing published the book: Deliberately Developmental Organizations, which describes organizations where the developmental agenda is every day for everyone, not just in private coaching. Enjoy the video of Matthew’s keynote at our 2016 conference.

Our webinar on January 30th on DDOs will be led by Deborah Helsing, ideal for those who missed the conference or want to keep exploring.

Our featured research paper by coaching scholar Tatiana Bachkirova helps coaches view themselves more objectively as an instrument of coaching. The title is: The Self of the Coach: Conceptualization, Issues, and Opportunities for Practitioner Development.

Need another aspiration for 2017?

Let’s do the coaching two-step. Let’s mosey up to have a good look at our own subjects, with curiosity, compassion and courage. Then let’s nudge the subjects aside to reveal fresh new objects. Now that does feel good!

With warmth,

Margaret Moore, Co-founder & Co-Director