Existential coaching

What is existential coaching?

Existential coaching is based on the view of the human being held by the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl and on the Existential Analysis that Alfried Längle developed from it. “To exist” comes from the Latin existere: to step forth, to become visible. What is meant is a life that you experience and shape as your own.

This leads to a particular way of working. What is sought is insights rather than solutions. At the center are two questions: what is important to you, meaning what is good for you? And what is right, meaning what does your conscience say? Where the two come together, meaning can arise.

Frankl saw the human being in three dimensions: body, psyche, and spirit. The psyche follows what is pleasant and avoids what is unpleasant. The spirit, by contrast, can take a stand, even against your own moods and habits. Frankl called this the defiant power of the human spirit: you don’t have to put up with everything from yourself.

Life asks

Frankl turned the question of the meaning of life around. In essence, he said: it isn’t we who ask life about its meaning; life asks us questions, and we respond to them. Längle describes this as a dialogue between person and world. A situation, an encounter, a task is an inquiry. What you do is your response, and in this response lies responsibility.

This shifts the perspective. The attitude “I’m content when the world is right for me” makes your own happiness depend on circumstances. The existential attitude asks differently: what is here now, and what question does it hold for me?

What question is your life asking you right now?

The four fundamental motivations

Something can be reasonable and still feel wrong. Längle described why: for a person to be able to inwardly consent to something, there need to be answers to four fundamental questions. If one of them is missing, the consent remains half-hearted.

Only when all four questions find an answer does what Längle calls inner consent arise. It is more than meaning: something can be meaningful without your consenting to it from within.

Can I + Do I like it + Am I allowed + Is it meaningful = inner consent

The four questions are not a questionnaire to be checked off in order. They help you recognize in which area an answer is still missing, and look more closely there.

Inquiring rather than querying

The way existential coaching works is phenomenology: perceiving what shows itself as it is, and finding what is essential in it. Its principle is: inquire rather than query.

Whether a question inquires or queries depends less on its wording than on the attitude behind it. Querying gathers information. Inquiring means being genuinely interested and leaving what comes with the other person. Sometimes no question is needed at all, just an invitation like “Tell me …” or a sentence that’s been started and that you finish yourself.

Often the conversation moves from wide to narrow: what is it about? What is the essential part of it for you? What is the core? And if things move too fast: what do you feel about it? What came before?

Part of this is a threefold openness on the part of the companion: to what you tell and choose, to what resonates in the companion while listening, and to the possibility that everything may still change or be entirely different.

Meaning ensues

Meaning can’t be steered toward directly. It often begins as a thought and then becomes a feeling, in individual moments in which you experience that something is right.

There is no direct path to meaning. Meaning ensues when you live what is right and important for you.

The path there leads through values. Existential Analysis distinguishes devotion, turning fully toward a value, from giving yourself away: subordinating yourself to the requirements, rules, and ideas of others. Devotion leads to meaning; giving yourself away leads away from it. Which kinds of values Frankl distinguished is described in the article on working with values.

Success becomes secondary. What matters is that in the end it was worth it.

From impression to your own response

Längle described how a person takes something in from outside, processes it inside, and responds outward. He calls this Personal Existential Analysis. The core existential process follows this path in four steps:

The second step is important. If you jump straight from the facts to a decision, you skip over your own experience. First perceive and feel, then judge. And the stand you take comes from you, not from the person accompanying you.

Längle also put the same movement more briefly, as a way of finding meaning in a concrete situation: perceive what is; feel what is valuable in it; choose; act. The value is felt, not calculated.

Overestimating people

Part of the attitude is an unusual idea: deliberately overestimating people. When someone trusts you with more, it strengthens you, through encouragement, appreciation, and acceptance. Strengthened, you can devote yourself fully to something, and that leads to the best possible result, which in turn lets the trust grow.

That doesn’t mean making light of what is hard. Existential coaching deliberately stays with unpleasant experiences, too. It’s about engaging with them, accepting them, and putting them in context, instead of getting rid of them as quickly as possible.

Common misunderstandings

Existential coaching is not a guide to a successful life and not a promise that every question will find an answer. In acute crises or illness, support belongs in the hands of doctors or psychologists.