Neuropsychology for Coaches: Understanding the Basics

Neuroscience is revolutionising coaching: it helps us understand the biological basis of our behaviour. This includes the behaviour of the coach and the client.This practical and much needed book explains basic brain functioning and offers a guide to using this knowledge to advance our coaching and make our practice more effective. It builds extensively on the fact that we do now know that feelings underly all decision-making and focuses coaching on helping clients establish intelligent emotions as the basis of their own decision systems. Using a systemic model of emotions, energy and change, Paul Brown and Virginia Brown show coaches how to integrate the client's life experience into coaching and create change. This is a must read for all practising coaches."This book is scattered with insightful, thought-provoking and occasionally beautiful analogies and metaphors, which any reader would be hard-pressed not to be challenged by. The (unrelated) Browns absolutely illustrate the importance for coaches of having an understanding of how the brain works."
Coaching at Work, March 2013"The OU coaching series always provides a reliable read for the coach and this is no exception ... The authors have kept the neuroscience refreshingly simple, choosing to focus on key evidence based principles of relevance to coaching.The key message for coaches is that our work is undamentally about being in relationship, using our own 'self' to create safe attachments for our clients in which they can recognise their habitual patterns of response, move to wondering and active experimentation thus creating new connections in their brain which serve them better."
The International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching, Volume X Issue 2, December 2012 "This book is a delicious feast of neuroscience. As coaches we leave the authors' table satisfied and nourished. But when we settle back to savour the delicacies, we realise that the feast is in us now: our coaching can never be the same. We can no longer use neuroscience to honour our coaching. We must change our coaching to honour neuroscience. In this way Brown and Brown move us from smug satiation to a new kind of hunger: for the courage to help our clients change their brains. A coach's job, they assert, is to create the conditions for this change to happen. Bravo!"
Nancy Kline, President, Time To Think, UK"It's rare to find an accessible, engaging book that combines current neuropsychological theory with working examples for executive coaching. At last here is one that brings the two together seamlessly. Well written and informative, the authors delight the reader from the first to the last page, creating rich pictures through metaphor, case studies and highly practical models. Their emphasis on the importance of trust in enabling change and development within the coaching relationship is particularly welcome in these often reductionist times. And their curiosity and wonder is catching - they do not profess to know all the answers, but give us much food for thought about our own coaching practice. This book gives coaches (and in fact anyone involved in people development) a thorough grounding in this increasingly important subject; it really is a must-read for new or experienced coaches alike, and one which I think rightly deserves to become a classic text."
Linda Aspey, Managing Director, Coaching for Leaders"At last, a book that embeds the practice of coaching into what we know of how the brain works - rather than one that tells you about the brain, then leaves the coach to work it out; or one that tells you about techniques, then adds in the brain information as something of a 'P.S'. This book works at many levels: whether for the coach with a fresh curiosity about the neuroscience, or one already using some knowledge to inform their practice, all the fundamentals are there, in a style that avoids over-simplifying, yet makes the complex accessible and 'ready to use'. This is a gem of a resource for the coach who wants to take their practice beyond technique into robust knowledge and understanding of what's going on in the client's brain, the coach's brain and, indeed, between the two brains as they interact. It helps us to understand why what works, works; and what might be happening when what we expect to work simply doesn't."
Ann James, Executive Coach / Director, Thinking Space"At long last, a rigorous book on neuropsychology that is both palatable and practically applicable for executive coaches. I like the way it develops an approach starting from the way the brain works rather than adding in information about the brain to the way the coach works. There has been so much demand for a relevant knowledge base around neuroscience, and I think that most coaches will find this book an invaluable source and aide memoire."
Dr Tara Swart, Neuroscientist, medical doctor and executive coach, Executive Performance Ltd."Introducing the basic functioning of the brain, this book shows that humanity and high performance are indeed fraternal twins. Growing relational resonance is likely to become a core aspiration for readers. Neuropsychology for Coaches is for executive coaches and their clients alike, with its down-to-earth metaphors and examples that make the complex processes of the brain easier to grasp and manage. A most useful guide!"
Anette Prehn, MA in social science, brain-based executive coach (PCC), author of Play Your Brain"In a world of psuedo-theory and airport quick reads, Professor Paul Brown and Virginia Brown offer something most refreshing: hard science married with the intimate relationship between coach and executive. At last the foundation is neuroscience: understanding how the brain operates in the intricate dance between cognition and emotion. Through eminently readable explanations of the brain's critical centers and the chemicals that affect what we do, the authors empower coaches to step beyond the black box and manage the most important tool in the leader's arsenal. Certainly this book will influence how we teach rising senior leaders in the military and government at National Defense University."
Dr. Christina L. Lafferty, National Defense University, Washington D.C, USA"Paul and Virginia Brown have done a great job in reviewing a lot of the burgeoning research and literature on Neuropsychology and making it accessible and useable by executive coaches in their work. Neuropsychology is providing coaching with a richer understanding of how Humans, relate, respond and react as well as the brain's brilliant ways of adapting, changing and rewiring its own connections."
Peter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Bath Consultancy Group & co-founder of Centre for Supervision and Team Development, UK