Haiko WandhoffProfessor of Older German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, works as a freelance coach, counsellor and trainer. In 2016, he published his 10 historical forays through the history of counselling under the title "What should I do?" - a comprehensive historical work on the history of counselling.

Well through time.

The podcast about mediation, conflict coaching and organisational consulting.

Summary of the conversation

In this podcast episode, we once again welcome Prof Heiko Wandhoff, an experienced coach and trainer who gives us an insight into the world of process consulting. The conversation sheds light on, how counselling can function as a process without direct advice, in that the Self-reflection and Personal responsibility of those seeking advice.

Prof Wandhoff and the moderator, Sascha Weigel, discuss in detail the theoretical foundations of process counselling, including systemic approaches and the influence of theories such as those of Niklas Luhmann. The importance of trust and creating a safe space in which clients can develop their own solutions is particularly emphasised.

A central point of the dialogue is the discussion of a historical experiment by Harold Garfinkel, that shows, how people seeking advice can generate meaningful perspectives from seemingly arbitrary answers. This emphasises the ability of those seeking advice to benefit from interactions, even if these do not initially seem directly applicable to their situation.

This episode is a must for anyone working in coaching and counselling or interested in innovative methods of conflict resolution and personal development.

Complete transcript (with minutes)

[0:00] Good, 1, 2, 1, 2. I've practised it so far. If you can make a quick sound… Yes, hello, test, 1, 2, 1, 2. Yes, it… s loud enough. Right, I can make this a bit louder and then it'll be fine. Exactly. And of course I'll record this directly with the tool. Here it is. You'll probably get a hint now. Last chance, the data protection regulations. All right.

[0:39] Good, so you also survived the pandemic well. Indeed, yes. I don't know, when was the last time we actually spoke? That was hot too. That was, I think, in the summer of 2021. 21. 21. And you were in Portugal. I think you were in Portugal. No, in Spain. Or Spain. That's where I am right now, yes. Ah yes, then that's, yes, exactly. The air conditioning is just as hot and quiet, but I don't think you can hear it. No, it's filtered out here, I can't hear anything. Very good. Nope. Yes, the hot countries are, yes, for holidays, so you have to make sure you find shade and coolness. Otherwise it's really too hot. Yes, at the moment. So it's also surprising, but somehow not surprising, that most people come when it's so hot. But then of course it's also the holidays. Yes, but it's a bit hot at the moment. But at the end of August, it will be fine at some point. In September it'll be a bit warmer again. And then there are many months where it's very pleasant that it's not so cold.

[1:49] Yes, so yes, and somehow it seems to be particularly hot every year, but summertime in general is always, I think, a time when you can actually just sit there quietly and wait until the afternoon. Yes, that's true. That's where the siesta traditionally comes from here. So you can do it in the morning and then between twelve and five or six you should stay in the house and close everything up.

[2:26] Exactly. Good. Shall we get started, Mr Wandorf? Do you need anything else for the debut? Nope, I was a bit surprised that you got in touch again and then wanted to continue, and then of course I took another look at Mr Garfinkel and, And that's one of my favourite examples, I'm happy to tell you, but we can do that in the conversation, we can do that. Yes, well, I mean, exactly, that was also the reason for me to discuss yours in more depth, also because they also work practically in the profession and now not only analyse from an observer position, but are also in training and probably also directly in counselling and coaching. And so that was quite fitting. Well, I always have a little introduction, and that hasn't changed much. And then, once I've introduced the topic, I come to you. So, let's get the files ready.

[3:35] Right, good. Welcome to the podcast Gut durch die Zeit. The podcast about mediation, conflict coaching and organisational consulting. A podcast by Inko Fehlmann. I'm Sascha Walke and I'd like to welcome you to a new episode. Today we're talking about counselling in a very general sense, counselling. The episode is entitled Counselling without advice, counselling without competence? And we will be looking at findings that are no longer the latest, but are always enlightening for counsellors, coaches, mediators and, above all, for those who follow the idea of counselling without advice, i.e. assuming that the power of the solution lies with the clients themselves, and there are some very interesting findings from other disciplines and I will be discussing these today with Professor Heiko Wandhoff, who has found his way back into the podcast studio after a long time and at my request. Hello Mr Wandhoff. Mr Weigel, thank you very much for getting in touch and for bringing us together again. I'm looking forward to it.

[4:52] We did three episodes on your historical outline of counselling here some time ago. And the topic we're addressing today is also covered in this book and was already a, I've already ticked it off, a little reminder that I need to go into it in more depth. And the fact that this is now possible again in a podcast conversation is all the better, because then the thoughts can be reorganised. But first, how are you, what are you doing? I think it's hot weather again, we're back in summer. Yes, I'm doing well.

[5:33] I just had to think again, when we last spoke, we were still in the late phase of corona, which is now so far away that it's hard to remember. At least that's how I feel, even though there are now commissions working on it. But yes, it's warm again, it's summer. I'm still on my summer break right now, next week. It's back to work and I'm up and I'm looking forward to talking to you about this topic again. Yes, and we're really going to take another look at the topic of coaching and mediators, who ultimately follow the same approach, because we do have a strong tradition of counselling and advice, it's already in there, so you go to an expert for specialist advice.

[6:32] We said at the beginning, advice without advice, advice without expertise, so I swallowed a little. Exactly, I added a question mark, wrote it down. I'm also a coach trainer and if I were to say in our training courses that we train coaches without competence, I'd be stoned to death. Of course, that's not possible. But you have to explain it a bit. Yes, exactly. That's where we want to go, so to speak. Yes, exactly. Maybe, so I'll take that as a starting point. The starting point, so to speak, we go to someone who knows about the matter. Of what someone seeking advice sees as a problem. If my car breaks down, I go to someone who knows about cars. They don't have to know about other things. For example, why I haven't learnt how to do it yet or something like that. I just want them to fix it. And if I have problems with my eyes, I go to an optician, because I think, "Jeez, he can give me the best advice.

[7:41] But we still have other approaches. Perhaps, if we categorise this, how is it that we also carry out counselling without or with the approach that you don't have to know anything about the subject, about the discipline itself, perhaps it's even a hindrance, i.e. you have to be an expert in it.

[8:06] So my approach would be that I'm a systemic coach and I train systemic coaches. And this idea of the systemic can perhaps be derived a little from that. It goes back to systems theory, especially Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, which says that people and their consciousness are psychic systems that are self-contained, they control themselves from within, we can't influence them from the outside. This means that when I give someone advice to do this or that, it is based on my own thoughts, on my inner map, on what I think is right for this person, but it is quite possible that it is not right for this person at all. And the idea now in systemic counselling, in systemic coaching, is that it is more helpful and more sustainable if I first ask myself about this person, about their beliefs and what we would call their construction of reality. What is actually up and down for him or her? What is good or bad? What is good and what is wrong? And that can be very different to me. And that's why I don't try to give advice from my own map, but instead look to see where my counterpart's resources are, from which he or she…

[9:27] solutions to current problems. That can also help, of course, if you've gained a bit of life experience. You just said that when my car breaks down, I go to the garage and look for someone who understands cars. In contrast, the thought just occurred to me that we are actually about understanding people. So it's about that, but people are all different. Some topics are similar and if you do this for a while, then of course you already have hypotheses about what might be going on. Or it can also be completely wrong. And that's why it's more about finding out how our counterpart can find a suitable solution to their problem themselves. And we can help with that. We are not incompetent, but our expertise lies in the area of process design. That's why a distinction is made between process consulting and expert consulting. We are expert consultants and can manage a process, a coaching process. But we have absolutely no idea what a good solution is for our counterpart.

[10:36] Before we go into this in more detail, our starting point, so to speak, was this historical observation. What explanation do you have for why this came about? It wasn't always the case, at least not so explicitly, whereas you can always find specialist or factual advice.

[11:01] It seems to me, or that's how it came about in the book, that it only emerged in the 80s, explicitly as counselling without advice, and that it was then professionalised. Yes, but of course it goes back to both, I would say, all the counselling.

[11:18] Systems theory and also communication psychology research, by Paul Watzlawick, for example, who we know quite well from his book Anleitung zum Unglücklichsein. That was written in the middle of the 20th century in the 1940s. And then there's the other side, which is actually about no longer thinking of communication as a linear process with sender and receiver, but rather looking at paradoxes and recursiveness and so on. But I think the other thing is Karl Rogers and counselling therapy. So it's no longer about lying down on a couch like in psychoanalysis and the psychiatrist is the one who has the specialist knowledge, but instead you sit face-to-face, four-eye contact and at eye level in the truest sense of the word. I believe that the whole setting in which counselling and coaching takes place today is, I think, fundamental, this talking therapy, where it's no longer about the therapist knowing what's right, but rather asking questions of the other person and trying to understand them and see where they are.

[12:29] Where is there perhaps such suffering, but where is there also great happiness and what can be helpful to grow and develop in life somehow. This idea of development and growth is still very much part of counselling therapy. In coaching, I think that's scaled back a bit, because coaching is often about individual issues and we don't spend an endless amount of time with someone.

[12:54] But I think the approach is very similar. So in this respect, I would say that it developed in the middle of the 20th century, but that it is then called coaching or counselling without advice or systemic coaching, systemic coaching comes very much from systemic family therapy, i.e. looking at a family as a system from a new perspective, no longer treating individual symptom carriers, but actually understanding the entire family as a communication system, where abnormalities are also communications. The child who is conspicuous does not necessarily have a problem per se. Perhaps it's a matter of drawing attention because something is not going well in the whole system. In other words, even before the 1980s, i.e. several decades earlier, we can detect a change in how the counsellors conducted their counselling and then see the patient or client differently, see them at eye level. You can perceive it in the room, so to speak, that it is different, as well as the type of therapy or counselling is different. So we can notice differences there.

[14:15] The question was, so to speak, before we look at the side of the clients, the people seeking advice, why this also works, because it seems to me to be undisputed that it works. What was the reason for doing it in a different way? Was it more that the previous counselling was inadequate or were other things required? What kind of picture do you have of the fact that there were such changes? Yes, well, in my book I tried to describe it in such a way that the phenomenon that emerged in the 1970s with all these psychological trends, i.e. what we now call humanistic psychology, suddenly became very widespread. Suddenly, counselling in terms of, well, counselling has always existed as specialist counselling, as expert counselling. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was already something like socio-psychological counselling with regard to population development, illness, in this whole area. Health counselling. Which was then pretty much perverted by the Nazis.

[15:32] But the fact that counselling can now also relate to a life, to a human life, that's something relatively new. For a long time, I can still remember 15 years ago, when someone came to coaching, they usually kept it to themselves because it was a bit of a stigma. If I go to coaching, it means I can't cope with my life on my own. Yes, that still has something therapeutic about it. I give a lot of examples in the book, like in the entire transition to modernity, 17th, 18th, 19th century. So the fact that you seek counselling is actually a sign of weakness. And the subject, Kant's definition of enlightenment, the exodus from self-inflicted immaturity, that's how he formulates it. That implies that I am a subject, I can cope with my life. And I can shape it. Even now, no one is patronising me. So counselling was described more as paternalism. There are some very nice quotes from Goethe. Goethe writes that anyone who advises someone else is arrogant. And those who seek advice are somehow unable to cope on their own. So that contradicts this image of the enlightened subject.

[16:54] I think that's what we had in classical modernism. And then comes psychoanalysis, which thoroughly clears it up. So thoroughly, in fact, that it actually says that none of this works anyway. We are controlled by our unconscious and this whole enlightened subject can be forgotten. And what humanistic psychology then does is basically a synthesis of the two. It is methodologically linked to psychoanalysis, but returns to this old humanistic view of man. We are subjects, we are adults. Enlightenment as a pedagogical programme.

[17:35] And therefore also as a self-educational programme. Exactly, but now combined with this impulse that it is sometimes helpful to seek counselling or therapy if you get stuck somewhere. That doesn't mean that enlightened people can't control themselves. It's about striking a balance between the humanistic view of man, the enlightened self and the possibility of seeking counselling and therapy without it being seen as an admission of incompetence and immaturity.

[18:14] A colleague of yours, the religious scholar Höscher, also emphasised this, which also seems to me to be an important aspect, that it was only at this time that the idea that the future is open, so to speak, got through to the people. And this sign of modernity, that I can influence the future. So this is also part of the coaching or self-counselling field, that I develop the idea that my life is not my fate, but that I can steer it. I am even the helmsman myself and can influence it along the way. It is not just given to me. And that's another idea that is also emphasised in coaching, that you don't feel at the mercy of your employer or your parents, but that you can a. free yourself and b. shape it. Mmm.

[19:15] That brings us to the focus on those seeking advice, who are not only experiencing, perhaps not even first-hand, that advice is now being given differently. And that still causes irritation today. When the person giving advice somehow makes it clear that I only have sentences with question marks. There are now no, you should, you must, and why haven't you learnt that yet? So it's a transitional question, but it's still not an immediately intuitive or accessible way of getting advice.

[19:58] Indeed. And yet, it seems to work. So it works. Coaching is always growing, so the counselling market has grown. People at least leave so satisfied that they often come back. And that's what they also picked up on in their book, what works there, why it's effective, when this simple linear idea that I pass on knowledge and if you apply it and apply it correctly, then you'll feel better, this giving of advice in the form of a piece of advice, but that this stimulating, questioning, contextualising topic is helpful for those seeking advice. What happens there and what do we know about this process that helps?

[20:47] So perhaps it's not the case that I've completely shifted my advice from one pole to the other. There are many areas where it's still like you said. Someone tells me what I should do if I go to a nutritional counselling service. Then someone tells me, based on their expertise, what I should perhaps eat more of and when and what to start with and things like that. That also exists. But I think what we're talking about here is what I just mentioned, the area of lifestyle. So coaching usually comes from a professional context, but our experience is that coaching is always about the whole life and the whole person. Because even when you work, you live. These are also issues that you may bring with you from your private life and so on. We can also look at it from the other side. The classic specialist counselling of doctors and medical practitioners, the machines, whose big debate is to listen more and involve them more and not to see them as machines somehow. And you could come from a different polarity and say, yes, it's not always about the advice, but also about how to get the person to participate.

[22:08] Yes, and you can see that very clearly from the fact that homeopathic medicine, which is currently under a lot of fire because its effectiveness cannot be scientifically measured, but what they do is that they take much more time.

[22:24] I don't know how long in the anamnesis, I've never done it myself, but what I hear is that it's really much longer than a normal doctor for a patient with health insurance. Just dealing with someone and asking questions and so on. And that alone, that's where we're actually already on the subject of feeling that I'm in good hands somewhere, that I feel understood, that I can talk about myself, that someone is listening who I trust, that it activates something in me. And that would be another vivid example of what systemic theory says, the self-organisation of psychological systems, which control themselves, but which react to external interventions by first receiving them as irritations and then somehow trying to interpret them as a stimulus or sometimes as a disturbance. In any case, this is crucial from within. We control ourselves from within. We have a stubbornness. We are fundamentally wilful.

[23:26] And that's also the idea behind systemic counselling, now in systemic coaching, if we start from individual people, that the most important thing is first of all. And we always say in training that 50 per cent of coaching success is that there is a protected space, that someone feels comfortable, that someone has trust and can open up. And finally I can tell someone all the crap that's bothering me. And to someone who isn't even involved. He listens, he asks questions, maybe even questions that my best friend wouldn't otherwise ask me. A bit of strange questions or appropriately unusual questions, as we call them.

[24:05] And that helps me, after an hour I realise that someone hasn't told me what to do, but they've led me into a conversation in such a way that I suddenly have a lot of ideas myself. Yes, to develop a new meaning so that my mental system can find meaning again or satisfying meaning or explanatory meaning. Ultimately, that is already reality. And perhaps homeopathy wouldn't come under so much fire if it ended up saying, here, but you have to take the pellets, that's what's in them. Instead, if they simply didn't do it, they would probably be working in a very similar way to coaches, just not with the claim that the information was shaken up somewhere hidden. Of course, that's another question. I don't want to comment on that either. Even if it is a placebo effect, that can also be proven. So in this respect, you would still have a benefit if you simply believe in it.

[25:13] But I think this attention, this appreciation, so if you go to normal doctors, we all know that, then that's something that's often missing. You're somehow channelled through because they only get so and so many euros for 20 minutes for patients with health insurance, after 5 minutes you're out again and you don't feel valued, you don't feel comfortable. And that's the crucial point. And what comes to mind is Umberto Maturana, one of the Chilean natural scientists who, together with his colleague Varela, developed this autopoiesis concept a long time ago, that living systems generate and continue themselves from within.

[26:01] He later developed a biology of love and actually says that what makes us human is that we speak and that we love. So by love he really means that we cannot exist alone, we have to be related to someone, to a social being. And the basic prerequisite for this love is that we love ourselves, that we recognise ourselves, that we value ourselves. And from this he develops a counselling approach that is all about radically creating a protected space in which we can reconnect with ourselves, you could say. That we can rediscover our self-love.

[26:46] Because the coaches who come into coaching usually have a problematic situation from which they come, in which they no longer manage to experience this self-esteem, this self-love. And in coaching, you enter a space where all of that is excluded, where you are recognised, where you can say anything and where, in the end, it's all about reconnecting with yourself and your resources in order to go out and face life with confidence again. And that shows once again how little intervention is needed. So interventions in the sense of certain methods that I have to use in coaching in order to be successful. That's the kind of thing... Yes, and with all the approaches you've listed, it's always clear to me that it's not just the counsellor's side that's important, what they do or don't do or how they do it or on what theory, but it's a process that requires the other side, the side seeking advice.

[27:57] A certain constitution, a certain acceptance, an engagement or whatever you call it, is needed for the commonality to work, the common process of giving advice. So that's where the real change is, so to speak. I no longer see the other person as someone who needs knowledge or who needs a shot from the bow or who needs information, but I have to create something so that they do something that is within their sphere of influence. Yes, or even better, we have to create something together. Because I can't create something for them. That's also the case now, when someone comes to me for coaching, we are already forming a new system, a coaching system, at that moment. Because at the moment they are sitting opposite me, they are interacting in a way that they might not otherwise. He behaves towards me the way he thinks he should behave towards a coach and I react to him the way I think I should behave towards a coachee. And in doing so, we are once again creating a very unique, stubborn and peculiar communication structure. But we create something together. And you just mentioned that in a subordinate clause. So we are creating a process together.

[29:22] Yes, and I'm sure she knows that too. So it's happened to me both in teaching, as a lecturer, but also with Yato or in coaching, when it becomes clear in the feedback process that I said something or did something or didn't do something. I usually can't remember it. It wasn't done because of or for the client or the trainer or the students or something like that, but something completely different. But he takes that and says that was the decisive moment for me. Something clicked for me or they looked over or they looked away and it wasn't an intervention on my part, but it had that effect and it was perceived that way. And that's why I emphasised, so to speak, that the client needs something for themselves in order to be stimulated or to gain new perspectives. And sometimes…

[30:23] So we do a lot of what we want as an intervention, but it fizzles out in an empty space when you look at what consciously comes across to the other person. Yes, I know that very well too, that someone then says what you said there and there, that was the eye-opener for me. And you don't even remember when I said it. Maybe it was someone else or something. And that's why we say that we also have interventions, of course, we try this, this and that. We also form hypotheses, but only ever as offers, because just as you say, we don't know what our counterpart can connect with. So we offer as many different perspectives as possible. Another of our guiding principles is that everything could be completely different from what I'm currently thinking. So I try to loosen up a bit inside and exercise my hypothesis muscle and think in different directions and make offers. And in the end, I can't know beforehand what will fit and what will be accepted. And you can only observe that when you can observe it. And then when someone suddenly says, yes, that's it.

[31:36] Yes, and it doesn't matter either. It's not as if we can say that we'll just write Coach on the office space and then it doesn't matter what we do. We do have an influence on the process that happens with the client, with the person seeking advice.

[31:55] But, and now I'm coming a little bit to this series of experiments that..., the name that Harold Garfinkel made for a completely different reason and that we wanted to take a closer look at today, that something happens, although it is not linear, objective, verifiable, that it also leads to this. In other words, we are irritated by the idea that it is important that we plan and carry out interventions, and it is important that this by no means leads to what we want in a linear way, but that it remains an offer, the intervention.

[32:38] Yes, and it's often not the case, as you say, that the coach says, oh yes, that was it, but sometimes they don't know that either. That's how I experience it, there are coaching sessions where even as a coach you have the feeling, I don't know if that was so helpful today. The coach here also leaves with a somewhat brooding face and you don't know what has happened now, because the most important thing happens afterwards.

[33:06] The remembrance continues and sometimes you get an email a week later saying that this and that was really helpful for me. So that can happen, sometimes it doesn't and then you have to live with the fact that you don't know what it was like. It's simply an open process and we can't look inside the other person and that's something we have to live with. And that's also the beauty of this experiment by Garfinkel that you're talking about, that the clients were asked to think out loud, so to speak, so that you could follow exactly what they were thinking. Because Garfinkel wasn't so much interested in counselling, he was more interested in the sociology of knowledge and was actually interested in how people in communicative situations come to a common understanding about some lifeworld knowledge, how they orientate themselves. However, this has actually been a very revealing series of experiments for counselling, especially for systemic counselling, for the counselling without advice that we are talking about. Perhaps we should briefly describe it again. Yes, I'll start and then we can see. So the clients were the people seeking advice, the test subjects were the people seeking advice, so to speak.

[34:35] They should think about their problems out loud, talk and formulate questions.

[34:41] Which had to be answered with yes or no.

[34:44] So should I get a divorce? Or I don't know if I want to keep studying this. Should I do that? So then focus on what we might see today as a counselling assignment and as a key question. And that should be a yes-no question. And the person giving the advice, in this case the experimenter, answered yes or no in a sequence of ten questions and decided beforehand when to say yes and when to say no. All the test subjects answered the same yes-no questions. All test subjects were given the same yes-no sequence.

[35:18] That was done over a telephone or a microphone. The counsellor saying yes/no was in the next room. And what I find very important is that the whole thing took place at a university, at the University of California. I think at the end of the 1950s it was already a place of science where you could have confidence. I think that's very important. Where young people were interviewed? Young people were interviewed and they were told that there was a new method in the Department of Psychology, an alternative to psychotherapy. So this was really integrated into a scientific framework. The counsellors were introduced as counsellors in training and then they were asked to describe their problem and had ten questions that had to be answered with yes or no and the yes’s and no’s were predetermined.

[36:16] And the fascinating thing is that after these ten questions they were all somehow a good deal further on with their problem, because although these questions were actually gaga, they had nothing to do with the content, the machine asked these questions, gave these answers and, The interesting thing is then to see, because, as you said, we were also asked to do their thinking out loud, speaking, monologuing, so that it could be recorded and then evaluated, you can see very nicely what this then triggered. Yes, the process of making sense, so to speak. If it was irritating at the beginning, why now? He doesn't even know my girlfriend or something, my wife. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I looked at one example again. A young man, a Jewish young man, who has a non-Jewish girlfriend. I slipped up a bit, it had something to do with my gesture, that the camera was zooming in on me.

[37:24] So a young Jewish man is dating a non-Jewish girlfriend and has the feeling that his father doesn't approve, although he hasn't said anything about it yet. But he hasn't said anything encouraging either and that's what's being described, that's the problem. Should I keep dating her, is the question. And then he clarifies this and asks quite openly, do you think I should keep seeing her? And then the counsellor says, my answer is no. Okay, then he thinks to himself, yes, okay, I can understand, he's now thinking about the father and so on and then, now he talks a bit more about the father and explains what he's like and whether he should have a conversation with him and then the answer comes, yes, and then he thinks about this conversation and yes, but maybe nothing comes out of this conversation and I still have the feeling that he doesn't want it, should I continue to meet them anyway and then he suddenly says, yes, yes, where he said no at the beginning and then the respondent says, I would have expected a no now. But that's amazing now. But then he starts to explain it to himself, to see a meaning in it. What could he have meant by saying yes now and encouraging me, so to speak, to keep seeing her? So he has something, it must have something to do with the father. So he's starting to make sense of it. That's actually the exciting thing.

[38:46] You could say that it doesn't really matter what kind of irritation comes, it makes me think about my topic again from a different perspective. And I don't need to now, what advice should someone give me? It's a question, you can't just say do this or don't do that, it has to come out of me. That makes it clear to me that, conversely, it is not at all harmful to give advice without giving advice. No, not at all. It can sometimes be helpful. I have nothing against giving advice.

[39:25] It's also very much used in mediation in training contexts, just don't make a suggestion.

[39:34] Hold back there. This is also very strongly propagated in mediation, there are other reasons for this, but the foundation is precisely this idea. After this experiment, you should at least think about it, that's not the crucial problem, that a proposal is made. No, of course that depends on other things. That's what I call hypotheses in coaching. And hypotheses are not suggestions in the sense that I make it very clear that this is an idea that has just come to me. It may be that it fits, but it may also be that it's total rubbish for you. Then we'll just let it fly by. So in this respect, I think it has to be clear that I'm not the expert who's now diagnosing this, so to speak, but that I'm just a person, an observer like many others, and that this is what's going through my head. And I'm allowed to say that. So that's natural and that's also, I don't know, when I'm facing someone and I see that they're totally unhappy in the situation and then I sometimes say in coaching, well, from my point of view, that's just my point of view, I think you should get out of the situation. This is such an extreme case, but I don't forbid myself to speak when I realise how much someone is suffering.

[41:01] Then I do something like that. Of course, I'm not the one who has to decide that. I'm also not the one who knows whether it's right for you. But from my point of view, that's just my feedback, my perception that I'm providing, from my point of view it's not good for you in this situation.

[41:24] And that brings me to the second aspect that has now become clear to me again in the setting and in the implementation, that the person who answers, even if they are initially irritating or devastating or limiting, who has to take in or absorb the form, that they continue to work with it, that they continue to reflect on it and take on further perspectives or points of view on this question. You need to have confidence, so to speak, that this is the right thing to do, that this is now a no. In other words, this is also a form of social authority that must necessarily be created for the person seeking advice to embark on this labour-intensive and time-consuming process.

[42:21] Yes, authority. So I think I would rather emphasise the concept of trust here. So trust, that's why I just mentioned again that this Garfinkel experiment took place at a university, the University of California, in a setting where you could actually be sure that this isn't some kind of hocus-pocus, but something serious. Yes, it's something serious and solid. And it's the same in counselling. And especially in coaching. Coaching is very much a referral business. There is an initial meeting, a preliminary discussion. So it's very important that I somehow have a good rapport with the person, that I can build up trust. And then, I find this interesting again in the analysis of these Garfinkel experiments, where this concept of trust or basic trust also appears. The first point is that I have the basic trust to develop a common and consistent pattern with my counterpart. So in a good sense, we want to get something good out of this together. In this respect, I don't question the fact that he now says no and he's crazy, but assume, that's what I mean by trust, that he has thought of something in terms of our joint process that we have here. Yes.

[43:50] And that's what Garfinkel was primarily concerned with from this sociological perspective of knowledge, that we also agree on social structures, that there is a basic knowledge, a basic consensus on how social structures function, so that we can even move together in such a field, although my counsellor only ever says yes or no. So I assume a lot, I interpret a lot of no into it, and I assume that what he says is reasonable, that it has a basis in fact and so on. So I make a lot of assumptions, I interpret a lot of no into it, and I assume that what he says is reasonable, that it has a sound basis and so on. And I think that's important for it to work. And that's why I believe that if you just did it somewhere on the street, grabbed someone who didn't know you at all, it wouldn't work. It needs this framework, I'm a coach, I'm a professional, I have a protected space here, I take you on in an appreciative manner, there's an introductory meeting and so on and so forth. Maybe you have a recommendation to come to me. And then it works in such a way that I first take every intervention as a suggestion, even if it irritates me at first. I take it as a suggestion. There must be something good and positive in it and I start to think about it.

[45:10] That's why you can't ask the wrong questions in coaching. Sometimes in training, participants ask, yes, what if I ask the wrong question? There's no such thing, as we don't know what the right questions are anyway. We can only ever try it out and observe what happens. And that's actually quite encouraging, because I think this experiment, that's why I like to talk about it, especially when a topic like this comes up again, and you may also know from your training courses that the participants often need to know a lot of interventions so that they feel confident and are good coaches or good mediators. And where we would actually tend to say that in systemic counselling, the attitude is actually much more important or at least just as important. And then I always talk about this Garfinkel experiment, where the interventions consist of a machine determining in advance when it is yes and when it is no. That actually shows very nicely that it's about other things. Yes, so…

[46:20] It's also very helpful for that. So this fear of me now the right question comes to mind. With all the hundreds of thousands of new possibilities. How are you supposed to find the right one at the right moment? And it all looks so playful or like that with others. I think it's very useful for that, but also to make it clear what you have to do to be recognised as a coach by someone seeking advice. So I think that's a very demanding situation for mediators who are not so established with their product, with their process, and who want to convince two people at the same time who are also fundamentally opposed to each other. It is a more difficult starting point to convince both of them, so it makes sense to enter into a dialogue with such an advisor.

[47:20] So it's also structurally difficult there, but what you have to do there is something that mustn't fall by the wayside in training. So how do I manage to be recommended, because recommendation is actually a very strong trust factor for people seeking advice, that people seeking advice say, no matter what he says, it will help me. I'm going to do something with it. That's not a conscious process on the part of the coach, but it's a situation that is full of preconditions and you can't influence that in a linear way either. Yes, and that's also the case today, nowadays word has got around, so it's..., it hardly ever happens that someone comes to coaching and you ask them, what can I help you with? And then he says, I thought you knew that.

[48:25] Sometimes that comes up if you formulate the question incorrectly. But the fact that coaching is about working on yourself with support in private, so to speak, but ultimately a kind of support for self-reflection, that has got around a bit. It's a counselling format in its own right and I think it has also spread a bit to other counselling formats. I believe that this idea that you don't need to know anything about the client sitting in front of you. Now we're almost back to the topic of doctors. And how much do I actually ask them about their lives and how they're doing? Or do I just look at any parts that are broken and need to be fixed, like I would with a car?

[49:14] So I think that has already diffused a bit into other counselling formats. That people are now also looking at people a little bit and so on. Well, I hope so anyway. Yes, so I can confirm that as far as mediation is concerned. Mediation can draw on a lot of the experience gained in coaching, as well as the fact that the development of coaching is an experience that benefits mediation. At the same time, however, the same overemphasis on one's own methodology is also carried out in training and the framework conditions that you need to build up trust or social authority, that this needs to be in place, are not underestimated. So that someone makes the enquiry in the first place. And that is naturally less because less referral management is possible in purely numerical terms and not so much is happening yet.

[50:26] So much is in social circulation, good experiences. That is the case. But I also think the basic situation is more difficult, that two people who are very much in conflict with each other.

[50:40] They have to be convinced that this person will help. And that's simply not easy with one person, but it's much easier today than it was 30 years ago. In a conflict situation, in acute mediation like this, it's almost impossible. Which is why I think, just as an aside, that the structures have to be put in place before the conflict arises. An agreement has to be reached if things don't go well for us. What I think, or I'm not an expert, but I imagine that it's difficult not to have this impartiality now, to live it, but I can imagine, I know this a bit from couples counselling, that very quickly one or the other is of the opinion that they are on the side of my conflict partner and not on mine. He or she is somehow one-sided or biased and suddenly you don't feel seen anymore. And then you drop out. Of course, we don't have that problem in coaching. So when mediation comes about, that's the most difficult situation, because you don't always actually realise it. Because most people don't immediately shout out that they're on the other side, but it's also a bit of a taboo.

[51:58] Yes, and they realise that because only one person comes back or no one else at all. That would be fatal. Sometimes you can notice this during the lesson and address it, but it requires this active enquiry from the third person, that they say, I've noticed something, what's it connected to? In other words, an invitation. It is permissible to tell me that I have been found to be unfair or not biased. And that, of course, is a challenge for the mediator. That is the case. But mediation has already begun. Of course, the situation is delayed. The biggest hurdle is getting two conflict parties into mediation in the first place. And I think that also has to do with building trust.

[52:51] Where do we stand now with this experiment by Harold Garfinkel, who wasn't thinking about counselling at all, but whose notes and test results... have led or can lead us to interpret, yes, it's not so much what the counsellor does, but it's much more important that the person seeking advice is in a state where they are willing to reflect, where they can take things in, even if they are irritating. What does this mean in practical terms for coaches? What can they do?

[53:33] So where are we now? I described this in my book by saying that counselling actually always triggers a process of self-counselling, this self-reflection. And I just had to think about it again, Garfinkel's experiment. You can go back 3,000 years and think of the oracles in Greece. People went there with very similar questions. Should I marry him or her? Should I get divorced? And the oracle was incredibly trusting because it was a god who spoke through it. People travelled for weeks to ask a question. And the answer was a riddle.

[54:17] So there was no clear message, do this or that, from some enigmatic saying. And during the three weeks you needed for the return journey, you could then think about what it meant. It was clear that it meant something sensible, because it was a god who said it. So that's really nice. Trust in the situation, trust in the competence of my counsellor and so on. But what I do with it now is something I have to decide for myself and I have to make sense of it somehow. And I'll have enough time to do that on the journey back. Yes, I think that again, I actually find the time aspect of the oracles very interesting. And then the problem was at some point, you had so much time to think about it that at some point it was clear what you were doing now. But that's also really nice, counselling is always about pausing, taking time out and taking a break from the situation. With the oracle, it was actually clear that it was going to be a puzzle what I would get. I'm going to get a puzzle.

[55:23] We would, so to speak, whether we see ourselves as subject matter experts or process experts, at least with our way of asking questions, cause irritation and certainly question marks. What does that mean now? Why should I think about it now? What does the person have to do with it?

[55:46] So it was made quite explicitly as a riddle and I think it was well attended, the oracle. Yes, of course, because it was a divine riddle after all. And the fact that a god is dealing with my question is an incredible advance in…

[56:06] Yes, in well-intentioned energy. And what that means for us as coaches and counsellors today, well I, that's actually, if we come back to the training context, that the biggest challenge for the participants in our training is to get out of this advice mode first. These are mostly people who somehow have leadership roles in their jobs and where in normal life they are expected to constantly solve problems and tell other people what to do. And in coaching, they first have to get rid of that and unlearn it. And yes, that is perhaps the challenge for coach trainers in this context, to actually invite them to trust in the self-organisation of their counterparts. And also to trust that I can be a good coach without pulling a thousand interventions out of my hat and setting off a firework display of interventions, but simply by being there and being attentive and asking interesting questions, I am already incredibly valuable and important and helpful.

[57:28] I think that's a very fitting conclusion, because it's reassuring in this initial search for the perfect intervention. Yes, so it is, exactly, so it reassures me. And if you can somehow pass this on, if you can transfer it to those who aren't yet so sure and don't yet have the experience, then that's also a question of practice. You realise that when you do it and what comes out of it. And also the experience. And you also have really great ideas for the other person and they say, no, I can't do anything with that or I've already tried. Oh yes. Resistance. It's not me who has resistance here.

[58:21] No, I think it's also a question of experience, of experiencing this effectiveness. And as a coach, you also have to accept that without your own preferred solution or proposed solution having been expressed and implemented, we have to expect, so to speak, that coaches or clients will experience improvement, happiness and that they will feel helped. And it is important to actually fabricate this and not take it away by somehow trying to sneak in a proposed solution at the end.

[59:03] Mr Wandhoff, unfortunately time is up for us today. I'm at the end of both the questions and the topics that have brought this attempt by Harold Garfinkel back into the podcast today, so to speak. And thank you very much. Yes, I'd love to. It's been a lot of fun. We've been able to share our experiences as coaching instructors, as coaches and also as dialogue partners for the fourth time now. Thank you very much, it was very interesting and enjoyable. Thank you. Well, that's the end of this. I'll wrap things up now. We've already talked for another hour. I have a follow-up appointment right now, so I've used this as a conclusion. I don't know how we handled it the first time, whether you wanted to hear it again beforehand or whether you simply listened to it afterwards and saw whether it suited you. There was nothing for you to cut out in terms of content or anything. Didn't something happen to you that made you want to say, no, I'd rather not?

[1:00:25] There are with some, so I can't remember exactly, but I think we have that relatively… no, I don't need to hear that beforehand. I'll send that to you. And let's send that when it's ready. Exactly. I'm looking forward to that. Right, I'll definitely send it to you again. But with some people it's sometimes the case that they want to hear it again beforehand, especially if they're in the public eye a bit. Yes, that's fine. Yes. Good, Mr Wandhoff. Good Weigel. I wish you a cool breeze, even in Spain. I've just switched off the ventilation here for the podcast. I don't think it makes much difference any more. It's also hot in Germany right now, isn't it? Yes, it's a very hot area at the moment and the thunderstorms are starting now. So it's clearing up now after several days. Well then. So take care. Thank you very much and have a nice day and a good time.

[1:01:24] Counselling without advice. Today we looked at Harold Garfinkel's experiments again with Professor Heiko Wandhoff and focused on this side effect, this side realisation. That is and why it is that advice does not have to be given and yet people seeking advice can experience helpful conversations and develop a solution for themselves and their questions. How this is connected, what the possible reasons for this are and what this means, both for us as coaches and as trainees on coaching and mediation training programmes, and therefore also what it means for coaching trainers, what priorities can be set and how. I would like to thank you and all of you for taking part again. Please feel free to leave feedback and a star rating on your podcast catcher or send any questions or suggestions by e-mail to s.weigel.inkofema.de.

[1:02:42] Feel free to recommend the podcast and subscribe if you haven't already done so. I say goodbye with best wishes. See you next time. Get through this time well. I'm Sascha Weigel, your host from IncoFEMA, the Institute for Conflict and Negotiation Management in Leipzig and partner for professional mediation and coaching training.