Markéta Hamrlová is a personal coach with more than ten years of experience in the field. For many years she has been helping victims of violence at national and international level. She has co-founded several non-profit organizations and managed one of them. Today, she runs her own AKOR-certified coaching courses and trainings . It was with Margareta, as a specialist in the field of personal development, that we talked about a topic that is very resonant in society today - psychological resilience and how to increase it not only in the workplace.
You have been a personal coach for several years. What brought you to it?
I took my first comprehensive coaching course in the Czech Republic more than 13 years ago. Prior to that, I had the opportunity to learn about coaching on short courses abroad when I was looking for something that would help me lead multi-person teams during my then involvement in helping people who had been abused.
Without this being my initial intention, coaching became my love from the very first moment, I continued to educate myself, train, and devote more and more time to the practice, until it gradually became my main professional activity and completely displaced my original profession.
After 6.000 hours of coaching I stopped counting the practice, since 2014 I have been conducting coaching trainings in my coaching school, in 2018 these trainings were accredited by the Ministry of Education.
How does personal coaching differ from a traditional session with a psychologist? What are the main differences? And how do I distinguish when it is more appropriate for me to turn to a psychologist and when to a coach?
Let me answer very simply. At first glance, it may seem that there is minimal difference between current modern solution-focused therapeutic directions and coaching, but this appearance is deceptive. The most fundamental difference is the demands placed on the professional training of psychologists, which is much longer, more demanding and more specific than that of coaches.
Coaching is a methodology designed for working with mentally healthy people (its boundaries end where the realm of psychiatry begins), oriented towards the future, built on a contract and equality of relationship between coach and coachee. In this relationship, the coach is not in the role of an expert on the client's problem, and his/her basic task is not to evaluate, advise or impose solutions that the client finds from himself/herself and the resources at his/her disposal. It is therefore appropriate to turn to a coach, especially when the client's mandate is to implement a future goal.
Psychologists should be approached for past-oriented assignments (the desire to come to terms with the past, to understand what happened, etc.) and to support treatment in dealing with a psychiatrically diagnosed problem (such as depression).
The coach focuses on the future, the psychologist on the client's past.
Your focus in coaching is (among other things) increasing the psychological resilience of your clients. What can be imagined under this term?
It is now a very common client commission to learn to better manage pressure and uncertainty, driven by a desire to feel better.
In a general sense, mental resilience is the ability to pick oneself up after a fall, shake it off and move on. The degree of psychological resilience is different for each person. Some people can cope with an unbelievable number of objectively challenging situations with a smile on their lips, others can be almost derailed by the slightest deviation from the stereotype.
The good news is that mental resilience can always be trained and strengthened.
Do people come to you in this context more as a preventive measure or only after they have experienced some unpleasant experience that they have not mentally overcome?
The most common order is a state of long-term or short-term, but intense discomfort, when the client does not feel comfortable under pressure, wants to change his reactions and responses to external stimuli and wants to find his individual recipe for coping with permanent stress.
Very often the last straw before seeking a coach is the psychosomatic demonstration of the negative consequences of stress in the body (e.g. abdominal pain without a physical cause, etc.).
How do you work with a client who comes to you interested in increasing their mental resilience?
The focus of the coaching work is always to create an environment and framework in which the client finds the most appropriate solutions for themselves from their own strengths and resources.
The answers to the questions: what do you really want? What do you want it to look like? It is only in the zone of very detailed answers to these questions that real change (often of long-fixed patterns of action and thinking) is born on the basis of conscious decision-making, creativity and competence.
Mental resilience can always be trained and strengthened.
If a coach finds working with a particular client challenging and is thus unable to maintain a framework of non-judgment and non-evaluation of the client, is it appropriate to terminate the coaching process and refer the client to another coach?
Here I refer to the answer see above. The coach's job is to connect to the client in a communicative way, that is, to create an environment for the client to think in which he or she can relax into creativity and the ability to find his or her own solutions. Creating this framework (not solving the job for the client) is an integral part of the coaches remit. In my opinion, whether the client is more impulsive, more unstable, or completely psychologically consistent does not play a role in this process. The coach's job, by definition, is not to judge the client's temperament or disposition.
Can you mention some basic tips on how to work on increasing mental resilience?
Among the easiest things to incorporate into life right now is respecting evolution and creating the external conditions for our being so that we don't sabotage ourselves. In other words, our psychological resilience will benefit from regular exercise, quality food (not too much, not too little), sleep, closeness, and purposeful relaxation of the mind (e.g., through meditation).
Further, in this context, it is useful to learn to focus our attention not on the problem (how it came about; why it came about; who is to blame; how badly I feel about it....), but on the solution (what does it have to look like to make it work; what do I want instead of what I don't want; what do I need to get better; what can I see that the situation is starting to improve...).
Strengthening an optimistic attitude (in the sense of seeing hope), believing in one's own abilities (e.g., by purposefully realizing what I have already overcome and mastered), self-acceptance, and gradually realizing the courage to go beyond one's comfort zone can be an integral part of the strategy.
By using the method of visualizing a positive future with details (auditory, visual, olfactory, sensory imagery) we can store the created imagery in our unconscious mind in the same intensity and category as memories. Our mind in this case does not distinguish whether it actually happened, it takes the situation as experienced, as a fact (source).
There are countless methods and techniques for strengthening psychological resilience, for all of them I can mention a technique from the sphere of NLP, which I called KOTVA BLAHA. Its execution is very simple, whenever you feel a very positive state of well-being (peace, joy, melting love...) press the nail of your thumb on your dominant hand with the belly of the ring finger on that hand. Repeat this anytime in the future whenever you feel bliss. After some time, you will develop a conditioned reflex. If you press your fingernail on this spot at any time, a feeling of bliss will flood you.
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