Voice Dialogue
Get Clear. Reconcile the Competing Voices in Your Head.
We are all complex people navigating a complex world. Making sense of the challenges of life and leadership requires managing a multitude of competing desires, needs, interests, and concerns. We need tools to help us recognizing our patterns of thinking and explore our mental models about ourself and the world. Voice dialogue is a helpful tool that can be used by a person seeking to reconcile the conflicting parts of their feelings, beliefs, behaviors in the situations they face. This powerful process can help a person get clear, get congruent, and get unstuck when making decisions.
Voice Dialogue
How it works: We all have different parts of ourselves: The part that reflects a piece of our inner-child, part that people-pleases, the part that’s responsible, the part that’s adventurous, playful, rebellious, hedonistic, self-protective, or conservative. Voice dialogue was developed by Dr Hal Stone and Dr Sidra Stone, in the l1970’s and the tool is useful for generating self-awareness about the relationship between the different parts of a person that show up when making decisions. The process involves a client labeling and personifying conflicting emotions, roles, or “voices” in their head. The coach then interviews the client as they role-playing the persona of a particular “voice” as though they were a different person from them.
The voice dialogue process enables a person to access different sub-sets of their personality that they may not be conscious or perhaps have subconsciously disowned. The process supports them in recognizing, evaluating, integrating, accepting or limiting them. It can be useful when a person is at a crossroad and trying to make a decision or if a person would benefit from understanding their feelings, beliefs and behaviors. The tool works best when the client has named the voice themselves and fully stays in dialogue with different parts of themselves that they engage with during the processes as if they were a different person.
Limitation for consideration: If the client is trying to unpack a challenge that they know is traumatic and may require significant level of vulnerability to unpack, this may be more appropriate to use in a therapeutic practice. When using the tool to explore a sensitive topic, I prefer to use this tool when baseline level of trust has been established in the coaching relationship and the dilemma has been explored in the coaching experience before.