How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Seite 396
Tracking
According to Minuchin, tracking is where the therapist, “follows the
content of the family’s communications and behaviour and encourages
them to continue… In its simplist form it means to ask clarifying
questions, to make approving comments, or to elicit amplification of a
point.” (Minuchin (1974). With maintenance the therapist’s message
seems to be, “I see you, I support you in this, I validate you and don’t
judge”, in tracking the therapist’s message seems to be, “let me see if I
am understanding correctly…can you help me by clarifying that last
thing you said”. Tracking lets the therpist check with the family that she
is understanding correctly, and at the same time she is allowing the
family members to make clearer and more explicit the implicit feelings
and thoughts of the members.
Mimesis
According to Minuchin, “A therapist uses mimesis to accommodate to a
family’s style and affective [feeling range]. He adopts the family’s tempo
of communication slowing his pace, for example, in a family that is
accustomed to long pauses and slow responses. In a jovial family he
becomes jovial and expansive. In a family with a restrictive style, his
communication becomes sparse.” (Minuchin (1974)) The task with
mimesis is to join the family, to be engage in mutual acceptance with
them. To be taking into the confidences of a family in difficulty (or any
family for that matter) and be of help requires a lot of trust. Minuchin
mentions that mimesis can happen without the awareness of the
therapist as she endeavours to “tune into” her client family. When I
read about mimesis I thought of the concept of building rapport as
outlined in NLP.
Although a coach is not a therapist, the concept of joining coachees in
their world is very valuable when we want to fully understand how
they function and to accompany them through a process of change.
The therapist needs to discover what is going wrong and then plan how
to put it right. Only after the therapist has joined the family will she
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