Aspiring to Become: How Values Drive Aspiration and How Parts Work can Resolve the Inevitable Inner Conflict

As a developmental coach, I work with people on who they want to be, not on what they will do or have. The outcome, of course, is that changes in who we decide to be drive corresponding changes in both actions and results. At the core of developmental coaching lies a foundational question of aspiration: Who do I want to become?

This question is built on the foundations of someone’s values. One of the reasons why clients come to coaching is because they feel stuck. Stuck between a set of values that no longer feel relevant and the desire for or struggle with new values.

Consider the example of a successful doctor who realizes their success has been driven by a subconscious need to please their parents.

Due to some rupture or change in their life, this person has decided that pleasing their parents is no longer what they should value. They feel a call toward something else, and so commence the difficult search for new values that feel more appropriate.

What makes this search difficult, and often why someone comes to coaching, is the uncertainty of how to act in the face of the new values they now desire. There is an imbalance between the embodied, understood way of participating in the world based on their old values and the disembodied, mental conception of how their life might be otherwise based on the new ones.

Aspiration, Ambition, and Becoming

Philosopher Agnes Callard describes this difficult search for new values as aspiration. The aspirational person, according to Callard, seeks a new value for its own sake, whereas the ambitious person satisfies a value they already have.

Callard uses the example of the aspirational doctor who goes to medical school to become a doctor for the sake of the role itself, whereas the ambitious counterpart doctor pursues medicine to attain more from an existing value – in this case, the approval of their parents.

Unfolding Conflicting Values With Parts Work

The challenge for clients, often the reason for seeking developmental coaching, is that they feel stuck between parts of themselves that value the status quo and parts that aspire to new values.

We all recognize different parts of ourselves even if we don’t use the language of ‘parts.’ For example, we often feel torn between wanting and not wanting something. There is a part of us that wants to eat ice cream, and there is a part of us that wants to diet and get in shape.

Parts work is a process of dialogue with these aspects of self, aiming to release the rigidity and reactivity characteristic of a partial view of ourselves and our world. Originating in the popular therapeutic technique called Internal Family Systems (IFS), the premise of which is that we are a multiplicity of parts that have developed in response to our early social environment. Engaging with these parts during a session can help a client develop a more holistic view of themselves and become what IFS founder Dick Schwartz describes as more self-led.

Developing Self-Leadership and the 8 C’s

The coach’s role is to encourage this self-leadership by supporting the client to enter a dialogue with their parts and unfold the conflict between them. A parts-trained coach functions like a mediator in the client’s conflict. To illustrate, consider a scenario where Part A wants the client to quit their job. Part B is terrified by the prospect of being unemployed. Part A feels threatened by Part B’s fearfulness, and Part B feels threatened by Part A’s recklessness. Subsequently, the client feels frozen between these competing values.

The coach aids the client through this polarization by helping them build a trusting relationship with each part. Rather than trying to change the parts or take sides, the coach encourages the client to value the parts intentions as they are, entering the dialogue with no agenda to change them. This attentive, non-judgemental engagement by the coach evokes a sense of release in the client. In response, parts respond in a similar manner by beginning to release and dissolve. Through this dialogue and over time, the client gradually works through and releases these inner conflicts, becoming more confident, calm, creative, clear, curious, courageous, compassionate, and connected – what Dick Schwartz describes as the eight C’s of self-leadership.

Whether the client is aspirational and struggling in the face of the mountain they must climb, or previously ambitious in a way that has initiated a search for new values, parts work, guided by a trained practitioner, is a valuable technique for unraveling the inner conflicts that inevitably arise during periods of aspirational development.