Markéta Hamrlová is a personal trainer with more than ten years of experience in the field. She devoted many years to helping victims of violence nationally and internationally. She co-founded several non-profit organizations, and also managed one of them. Today he organizes own courses and coaching trainings with AKOR certification. It was with Markéta, as a specialist in the field of personal development, that we talked about a topic that resonates very much in society today — psychological resilience and its increase not only in the work field.
You have been engaged in personal coaching for several years. What led you to this?
I took the first comprehensive coaching course in the Czech Republic more than 13 years ago. Even before that, I had the opportunity to get to know coaching on short courses abroad, when I was looking for something that would help me lead multi-member teams in my then involvement in helping people affected by violence.
Without being my original intention, coaching became my love from the very first moment, in this field I constantly continued to educate myself, train, devote more and more time to practice, until it gradually became my main professional activity and completely displaced my original profession.
After 6,000 coaching hours, 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 is personal coaching different from a classic session with a psychologist? What are the main differences? And how do I distinguish when it is more convenient for me to turn to a psychologist, and when to a coach?
I will answer in a very simple way. At first glance, it may seem that the difference between currently modern solution-oriented therapeutic directions and coaching is minimal, but this appearance is deceiving. The most fundamental difference is the demands placed on professional training with a psychologist, which are much longer, more demanding and more specific than that of coaches.
Coaching is a methodology designed to work with mentally healthy people (its boundaries end where the sphere of psychiatry begins), future-oriented, built on the contract and equality of the relationship between the coach and the coached. In this relationship, the coach is not in the role of an expert on the client's issues and his basic task is not to evaluate, advise and support the solution that the client finds from himself and his resources at his disposal. Therefore, it is advisable to turn to the coach especially if the client's order is the realization of some intention in the future.
It is advisable to approach a psychologist for assignments oriented towards the past (desire to come to terms with the past, understand what happened, etc.) and when supporting treatment in solving some problem diagnosed by psychiatry (for example, depression).
The coach is oriented to the future, the psychologist to 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?
Currently, it is a very frequent order of the client to learn to better manage the pressure and uncertainty that is driven by the desire to feel better.
In the general sense, resilience refers to the ability to pick yourself up after a fall, shake yourself up and move on. The degree of psychological resilience is different for each person. Someone copes with an unreal number of objectively challenging situations with a smile on their lips, another person is derailed almost to the point of collapse 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 regard rather preemptively or only after they have experienced some unpleasant experience that they have not mentally stopped?
The most common task 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 stimuli from outside, and wants to find his individual recipe for coping with permanent stress.
Very often, the imaginary last straw before seeking a coach is a psychosomatic demonstration of the negative consequences of stress in the body (eg abdominal pain without physical cause, etc.).
How do you work with a client who comes to you with an interest in increasing their psychological resilience?
The focus of coaching work is always the creation of such an environment and framework in which the client, from his own strength and the most suitable resources for himself, finds the most suitable solutions for himself.
The basis is the answers to the questions: What do you really want? What's it supposed to look like? It is only in the zone of very detailed answers to these questions that real change (often 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 it difficult for him to work with a particular client and he is thus unable to maintain the framework of not judging and not evaluating the client, is it appropriate to end the coaching process and recommend another coach to the client?
Here I refer to the answer see above. The task of the coach is to communicate with the client, that is, to create an environment for him to think, in which he relaxes into creativity and the ability to find solutions. Creating this framework (not solving the contract for the client) is an integral part of the coaches' competence. In this process, in my opinion, it does not matter whether the client is more impulsive, unstable or mentally completely consistent. By the nature of the matter, the coach's task is not to judge how the client has it, what its nature and foundation are.
Can you mention a few basic tips on how to work on increasing psychological resilience?
Among the simplest things that can be incorporated into life right now is respecting evolution and creating external conditions for our being so that we do not sabotage ourselves. In other words, our psychological resilience benefits from regular exercise, a good diet (not much, not little), sleep, closeness and targeted relaxation of the mind (e.g. meditation).
Further, in this context, it is advisable to learn to focus your attention not on the problem (how it arose; why it arose; who is to blame; how terrible I feel in this...), but on the solution (what it should look like to make it work; what I want instead of what I do not want; what I need to feel better about it; how I can recognize that the situation is starting to improve...).
An integral part of the strategy can also be the strengthening of an optimistic attitude (in the sense of seeing hope), belief in one's own abilities (e.g. a focused awareness of what I have already managed to overcome and master), self-acceptance and gradually realized courage to go beyond the comfort zone.
Through the method of visualizing a positive future with details (auditory, visual, olfactory, feeling), the created image can be stored in our unconscious mind in the same intensity and category as that of memories. Our mind in this case does not distinguish if this really happened, it takes this situation as lived, as a fact (source).
Methods and techniques for strengthening psychological resilience can be listed incalculably, for all of them I can mention the technique from the sphere of NLP, which I called the ANCHOR OF BLAHA. Its execution is very simple, whenever you feel a very positive state of well-being (tranquility, joy, unraveling love...) press on the dominant hand with the thumb nail the ring finger on this hand. Repeat this at any time in the future, whenever you feel good. After some time, you will develop a conditioned reflex. If at any moment you press this place with your fingernail, a feeling of well-being will overwhelm you.
