4. Co-coaching and self-liberation

Songs are often a dialogue with the emotional side of life. I really like the song Father & Son by Cat Stevens. This song is about the wonderful openness of a son who very sincerely explains to his father that he wants to become a revolutionary rebel. But his father is not to be found. So, according to all expectations, the son wanted to take up arms as a resistance fighter and the father asked him to think twice about it.

This is not an easy situation. Often parents have a hard time entering into an equal dialogue with their rebellious child. They avoid dialogue by imposing authoritarian precepts or, quite the opposite, by letting their child go completely free.

Talking about our feelings with our loved ones, with our parents, our children, our life partner, can be confronting. At a distance, we encounter (quasi-) impossibilities, at pain points. Our own feelings and those of the other do not always match. What evokes positive feelings in me, sometimes does the opposite for others. This is inevitable. But when I and you come to a real dialogue, a meeting, there will be an exchange, an interplay of my and your self-coaching, or: co-coaching.

That is why dialogue about our feelings and introspection is so important: to come to an encounter. This is part of self-coaching. It should not be experienced as a burden. It should provide inspiring learning moments. Because, what is self-coaching? Knowing yourself with your possibilities and pushing your limits: you analyze your capacities with the aim of increasing your possibilities for yourself and the other.

Self-coaching in the form of co-coaching is liberating because it brings collective life insights. However, it is not advisable to use this without specialized help when you are confronted with serious psychological limitations. We must respect the principle that no one can just heal themselves. But, that aside, there are always things that you can do better on your own because only you know yourself best to realize this. So this is the core of self-coaching, where you will sometimes choose to also go through counseling (working on your deeper blocks - eg fear of failure). In other words, in order to achieve dialogue through self-coaching, we sometimes also need the vision of an expert.

To give a final insight into how self-coaching in dialogue (co-coaching) best starts from our emotional world, allow me to give a daring example. It is that of the religious extremist who wants to change, or: the subject of deradicalisation. There is much disagreement on this theme. Particularly about the question of whether extremists can be deradicalised.

I am not going to make a definitive statement on this last, difficult issue, even though I have conducted years of academic research in this field. But for the sake of comparison, let me start from the case of a radicalized person who is able to gain insights through self-coaching in dialogue in order to renounce extremism. The comparison, we'll see, shows well that you don't have to do self-coaching alone. What's more, that each of the participants in the dialogue comes to self-coaching. This is co-coaching.

Extremists are not loved by the masses. Radicalized believers are portrayed as unfeeling and unscrupulous when they take up arms to wage a holy war. However, the opposite may be true. I experienced this years ago as a special education teacher among my students who had a so-called 'disordered' sensitive nature. You know them, these difficult characters who are often - rightly or wrongly - feared. Well, I still have social media contact with my first generation of ex-pupils who are now in their full thirties. And what do I notice: many have shed that stinging character bolster. What can I say: they did this all by themselves. And why have I always believed that many of them would one day get on their feet even if at some point there was nothing to do with them? Because when someone's radical corners are nibbled, it's often the person's own work for the most part. You have to come to a sense of self.

“The process of self-coaching becomes co-coaching. It is, among other things, a crucial step towards liberation from an emotional world of hurt.”

This self-liberation is a lesson for all so-called deradicalisation officials. Because deradicalisation is done by a person himself, or not at all. You can only guide this as a process. But you are not the coach of the event because this is the deradicalizing person himself. She or he is your own coach and will dig into the motives that have led to a slip into radicalism.

The facilitator remains on the outside of this process. She or he is sort of a "devil's advocate," but a good one because she or he is role-playing. It is the role of those who feel as a victim of radicalizing activism.

And also the self-coaching radical who is looking to leave her or his dangerous extremism behind, gets into the role-playing game. This can be done by confronting one's own feeling of being a victim (of the so-called anti-religious society) with that of the group of people/society undergoing his or her extremism.

Finally, one can ask whether the idea of ​​victimhood is not better redefined here to a shared victimization that develops specifically in extreme contexts that cause people to group in hostile blocs in order to react from a radical attitude and thinking (e.g. the religious vs. . anti-religious bloc). In other words: through self-coaching one can place one's own victim feeling against that of the other. The process of self-coaching becomes co-coaching. It is, among other things, a crucial step towards liberation from an emotional world of hurt.