Coaching and counselling connected: How the Fusion Model works in practice

The next Diploma will run from September.

At the moment I am holding a waiting list. If you would like to be on that list, please contact me at [email protected]

I am also, for administrative reasons, offering the Distance Learner Skills Certificate at a reduced price for the next 24 hours. You can access the offer on this link.

The Skills Certificate workbook is an NCFE accredited programme in its own right and is also a key part of the Diploma programme. The purchase price is deductible from the Diploma should you later enrol.

The workbook outlines both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical skills of the integrated model. The Diploma, going forward, will focus on filling the theory-application gap by closely following the Fusion five-session coaching system with clear outlines of just how and why the model is so effective; based as it is on 30,000 hours of my own professional practice.

In updating the working manual for the Diploma, I’ve been looking at some of the articles I have written over the last ten years and I came across the one below which I think was for a BACP Coaching presentation I did a while ago.

If you are a BACP member, you can access the film of that presentation on their CPD Hub.

Meanwhile, here is one of the clearest descriptions of the model in practice I think I have ever written.

I hope it helps…

The Fusion Model in practice: A case study

The best way to illustrate the Fusion model is with a case study. So let’s take a look at Jo who came along with panic attacks and loss of hope about her future. Jo is based on a true client, anonymised for ethical compliance.

In outlining what happened with Jo I will be able to give a brief illustration of how the model moves effortlessly from counselling into coaching and provides a blueprint and toolbox of skills that allows practitioners to safely and easily integrate two previously separate paradigms.

Jo

Jo was a successful makeup artist with her own business but, as she started to tell me her story she broke down as she recounted increasing anxiety and panic attacks which now dominated her life, effectively taking away her ability to work.

Problems began after her mother unexpectedly died of a stroke whilst driving to work. Now Jo found that, whenever she got behind the wheel of her own car, her head pounded, her breathing got tight and she thought she would pass out. She’d had several dramatic trips to A&E but all the tests revealed no physical problem and no issues with her brain, heart or blood pressure. However, she was now having up to 8 episodes a day, avoiding driving and putting off family outings and holidays. She feared for her health, her sanity, the future of her business and her relationship.

The starting point for working with Jo was to ask her to fill out Fusion’s Continuum of Wellbeing feedback sheet, which links innate needs to subjective wellbeing, giving an ‘ok or ‘not ok’ overview that helps the practitioner quickly assess whether the work is likely to have a stronger counselling or coaching bias.

The Model

Based on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the Fusion Model acknowledges that all human beings have a range of physical and emotional needs and, if those needs are met in balance, life feels good.

The Fusion SAFE SPACE algorithm used on the Continuum of Wellbeing feedback sheet cites Safety and security, the receiving and giving of Attention, Fun with family and friends, Emotional intimacy, Status, Privacy, Achievement, Control and Engagement with life as essential for emotional wellbeing.

Jo’s feedback clearly showed she was currently in the ‘not ok’ zone. She did not feel safe in her own body, was not giving attention to others, had stopped having fun with family and friends, lacked her previous status, had little sense of achievement and felt she had lost control of her life; all because of the endless anxiety and distressing daily panic attacks.

The sessions

The Fusion Model aims to pace, turn and lead the client even in the first session using essential counselling skills to uncover the story before moving into truly solution-focused, coaching territory. The Fusion manual offers a series of questions and work sheets that begin reflectively and move seamlessly to more interactive then proactive interventions with the provision of psycho education, goal setting and visualisation.

Jo’s goal was to try and reduce the panic attacks to something more manageable.

Case conceptualisation

The essence of the problem was that Jo had been traumatised by her mother’s sudden death and also by her own experience of frightening panic attacks which her brain had interpreted as a life threatening situation. She was now misusing her imagination with cognitive distortions and playing horror films of a bleak future.

The subsequent high anxiety was severely restricting her life and preventing her getting her needs met, resulting in the depression often associated with long term, chronic anxiety.

Although not meeting the full criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there was sufficient ongoing pattern matching to keep her emotional centres on red alert, making her hyper-vigilant and keeping her base stress level high, with little spare capacity (emotional resilience/poor vagal tone) so that she was never far away from a full blown panic attack.

The essence of the solution was to break the trauma pattern, put tools in place to calm the anxiety and restore the vision and hope of a preferred future.

The focus for the work would be to relieve trauma symptoms with the Rewind Technique and help her control her anxiety with The STOP System. She would then be guided to construct a detailed picture of a positive future life in the absence of the pathology, using the holistic wheel of life as a helpful passport to communication.

The setting of detailed SMART goals would stimulate her brain’s Reticular Activating System to be open to supportive habits and opportunities. Visualisation would be used to form new neural pathways, embed positive self talk and promote insight through therapeutic story, imagery and metaphor.

Pattern breaking

Jo had been pattern matching her symptoms to those of her mother and, more to the point, once she had had her first panic attack whilst driving, every time she got into the driver's seat of her own car, she now had an unconscious negative expectation. The trauma-focused guided visualisation technique known as Rewind and detailed in my book ‘PTSD Resolution’ would be able to quickly dissolve the pattern match, allowing the emotional centre of the brain to settle and feel safe once more.

This would help restore the sense of safety so essential for the cognitive brain to activate and as underpinned by the new understanding of the ventral vagal nervous system cited in Dr Steve Porge’s Polyvagal Theory. 

The STOP System

The Fusion Model’s STOP System accesses controlled breath work, mindfulness and scaling to allow the client to take a psychological step back into the Observing Self buying essential time between a super-fast emotional reaction and a slower, and more moderated, rational, response.

On the first session, Jo’s trauma was swiftly resolved and she returned one week later having had no further panic attacks at all. She was very relieved but naturally wanted to keep her remaining sessions in place until her confidence in her recovery returned.

Fusion clients are generally recommended to book 5 or 6 sessions to have a block of support in place to allow sufficient time to implement the full holistic coaching programme. Jo would certainly need some help with refocusing on a problem free future as she had been struggling with anxiety for so long, she said, she’d lost sight of who she really was and what she wanted from her life.

This is real coaching territory and the Fusion holistic wheel of life is perfect for the task. The client is encouraged to scale key areas such as work, health, partner, family, friends, learning and environment before considering what the perfect life would look like if failure was not an option.

Jo’s outcome was excellent. She was a highly motivated client and worked collaboratively to quickly resolve her presenting inward, downward, backward viewpoint to a more psychologically healthy and robust outward, forward, upward mind set.

Practitioner skills

Although the underpinning theory is simplicity itself; there are an extraordinary range of skills, tools and interventions available to the Fusion Therapeutic Coach.

It’s precisely because there is such a range of professional skills and tools that the session manual is so useful, with its intervention check-lists, outcome monitoring forms, psycho educational hand outs, visualisation scripts and interactive work sheets. The session manual frees up cognitive head space for the therapeutic coach, allowing for more opportunities to make the work super creative and bespoke for the client.

Some therapeutic coaches choose to stay close to the structure offered by Fusion and achieve the same positive client outcomes achieved by the author of the programme.

Others choose to integrate the tips, tools and techniques acquired in the training into their current working practice, making Fusion either an open or a closed model; whichever fits most comfortably for the integrating practitioner.   

Do you want to take your skills to the next level?

Here is a link to the course contents.

Here is a link to purchase the workbook direct.

Take a look. You might be surprised by the extensive range of the training. The Fusion Model is an organically developed, tried and tested, fully integrated coach-counselling approach that will elevate your skills to the next level.

The 2021 Fusion learning pathways are a direct response to the professional demand for:

• Effective, practical and bespoke integrated training that meets growing client needs
• Training that provides a direct and easy to follow path to accredited coach status
• A flexible programme that can be completed at your own pace, in the safety and comfort of the home or workplace

Note: If already purchased, the cost of the Skills Certificate is fully deductible from the Diploma programme.