The Cycle of Experience is a core Gestalt conceptual tool for tracking correspondence between awareness, choice, and self-responsible action. The Cycle models how needs and wants are ideally sensed, articulated, engaged with, acted upon, satisfied, and assimilated through meaning-making processes. Particularly when a change is needed or desired, successfully integrating internal and external reality requires moving “full circle” through the Cycle. The Cycle has 6 phases: Sensation, Awareness, Energy, Action, Contact, and Closure (or Withdrawal). When movement through the Cycle is blocked or interrupted, the client does not reach satisfaction or closure.

The Cycle of Experience is a core Gestalt conceptual tool for tracking correspondence between awareness, choice, and self-responsible action. The Cycle models how needs and wants are ideally sensed, articulated, engaged with, acted upon, satisfied, and assimilated through meaning-making processes. Particularly when a change is needed or desired, successfully integrating internal and external reality requires moving “full circle” through the Cycle. The Cycle has 6 phases: Sensation, Awareness, Energy, Action, Contact, and Closure (or Withdrawal). When movement through the Cycle is blocked or interrupted, the client does not reach satisfaction or closure.

Although change is an inevitable part of life, people sometimes intentionally or unintentionally continue patterns of behavior that do not serve their desires or goals. Experiment is a masterful concept and structure that sets Gestalt-based coaching apart. Gestalt experiment allows the client to fully explore and experience existing behavior or to “try out” alternative behavior to see what new possibilities for choiceful action emerge. The power of Gestalt experiment lies in its challenging but “safe” learning boundaries—the coach guides the focus and process of the experiment, but the client is always a collaborative partner and incurs no professional consequences. Coach and client mutually agree on an issue that is significant for the client (a “figure of interest”) and mutually pursue a “what-if” exploration of that issue to determine new choices of perception and/or behavior. Experiment requires that the coach learn how to identify and work with the client’s resistance(s) and to artfully assist the client to risk engagement with new learning.

Unit of Work is a Gestalt procedural frame of reference, used in conjunction with the Cycle of Experience, to organize coaching interventions around client issues that present habitual or chronic patterns of frustration (themes). The UOW is an energetic structure that guides the transformational work of change and learning in four steps:

1. Assessing the “what is”: Heightening client awareness around current specific needs or wants
2. Engaging the choice: Choosing what to attend to from the figures that emerge in Step 1.
3. Acting on the choice: Experiment design and implementation
4. New “what is”: Reflection on and integration of new learning

A successful UOW creates energy that is sustained and purposeful. It allows the client to “close out” unfinished business and chronic thematic issues, and to unleash new choices and possibilities.

Gestalt-based coaching can be called “metamorphic” or “transformational” coaching in that it seeks to elicit client change through awareness, choice, and integration in ways that are profound, liberating, and self-sustaining. The coach’s work is to inspire and support clients’ capacity to access courage, energy, hope, and perseverance on their journey to new possibilities. The coach’s presence and use of self are key variables in that work which exceed any particular conceptual model or procedural tool. Presence is a quality of self-identity that embodies our visceral, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual learnings, and the values and wisdom we have accrued. Use of self is knowing when and how to best leverage one’s presence in service of the client’s learning and goals.