I sent a brief summary of my research paper to Laurene Vaughan and she answered saying that it seemed like a very interesting subject, but asking me what references will I use to support me in this…. and it is not a bad question.
My proposal reads like this:
Changing your Mind — A survey
One of the main difficulties for SME owners, professionals and solo-preneurs is to actually awaken their entrepreneur’s mind, stop thinking like the professional they were before going into business, and start thinking like the entrepreneur they now are
Developing this perspective requires changes, both small and large, in how the entrepreneur approaches his or her business, and him or herself. Besides lack of experience, an important hurdle is that their professional comfort zone tends to be completely enclosed in their previous perspective, so while their stated objective is one of acquiring sills and control, there are other factors at play which prolong or make the change difficult (UAC’s).
This paper aims to explore different change models, specially those implying a change of perspective and an increase in complexity, and how coaching can benefit by taking them into account when helping a client that, literally has to change her mind.
I have thought to rely mainly on Robert Kegan and his idea of “orders of consciousness”, and also Watzlawick with his idea that a problem cannot be solved at the same level of complexity that created it. I started to read “In Over Our Heads” again (3rd time in my life!); this time more specifically the latter part, where it talks about learning, healing and leading — although I think that I will really be wanting to read the whole thing again. It is actually quite a complex book. Or rather, as it progresses and describes more complex orders of consciousness, the text itself becomes more and more complex.
In what I have read so far, there are many, many, felicitous comments, metaphors and analogies that I think can be really helpful to orient the paper. The thing to do is to focus on coaching, and perhaps on business coaching, or developing the Entrepreneur’s Mind.
Very important to keep in mind what I want to say, since there are many, many secondary ideas que keep coming to mind. The most important idea is: how does this difficulty in changing a perspective affect the coach? Does the coach need to have gone through this change in order to be able to facilitate it?
