PACING AND LEADING: MATCHING AND CHANGIND WORLDVIEWS

The client enters counseling or therapy with a distinctive view of his or her situation. You, as
counselor, have your own distinctive worldview. You may have intentionally selected a specific
theory of therapy to which you are committed, or you may be oriented toward eclecticismo r
general theory. Regardless, two people with two views of the world are encountering one
another. What is to happen? Whose view will prevail? Will both be accommodated and/or
enhanced in the process?

Consistently in this book, listening to and understanding the client has been emphasized as
critical to the change process. This process of client understanding may also be termed pacing,
the term used bye Lankton (1980) and Richardson and Margulis (1981). These authors also talk
about leading, which is somewhat parallel to the influencing skills of Chapter 3. However, pacing
and leading have special uses that may be of value as you try to understand and help clients
develop and grow.

Pacing. The term pacing may be defined as a more general concept than attending, rapport
development, or empathy- yet it is closely related to all.

Friends pace aech other naturally; they have rapport of some sort, they understand each
other, they speak the same language.

Dancing could also be described as a form of pacing: in dancing two people learn to move
together in time; if the lead dancer does not pace the partner well, moving the two together
smoothly becomes almost impossible.

Your task as therapist is to learn to pace or match the client as closely as possible. Pacing
involves entering the clients worldview and experiencing things as the client does. The literatura
on pacing, however, provides some very specific things you can do to ensure solid pacing or
matching with your client:

1. You may asume the same body postureo r use similar gestures, as indicated earlier in
the section on movement synchrony
2. Your may match attending behavior patterns of eye contact, body language, vocal tone,
and verbal following with those of the client. Some advocate deliberate matching of
breathing patterns as well.
3. You may use the key words of the client. As noted in paraphrasing and reflection of
feeling skills, it is critical that you use the touchy, main words that the client uses to
describe the situation. Understanding key words of the client will, of course, be
facilitated by understanding of the Surface and deep-structure language concepts of this
chapter.

Central to pacing, of course, is noting the major conflicts, incongruities, and discrepancies of the
client. You will find that if you deliberately pace clients, you can more easily enter into and
understand how their worldview is constructed.

Useful pacing is deepening the clients experience of the problema or concern. This may
be done through the use of perceptual systems.

Perceptual Systems. The term perceptual systems refers to how we all take in data through our
senses. We gain our worldview through our eyes, ears, and kinesthetic senses. (In addition, taste
and odor enrich our perceptions as well.) You will find that you can enhance and deepen your
experience of a current or past event by specifically using your main sensory modalities of sight,
hearing, and feeling. For just a momento, think back to your experience in high school. Take the
time necessary Remember a specific experience, the first one which comes to your mind
Now see yourself in the situation. Note the look of the roo mor open space. Notice colors,
objects, and/or people around you. Gather in as many details as you can Next, what do you
hear? Can you hear the voices or sounds around you? If you take a momento you can see and
hear the voices or sounds around you? If you take a momento you can see and hear much of
what transpired in the past Finally, stay with the scenes and sounds. What do you feel in that
setting? What is going on in your body? What are your emotions? Take some time to experiencia
what you see, hear, and feel from the past.

This brief exercise is oriented to helping you recreate a situation from the past. If you
were successful, you moved your total attention to a past situation and now could describe it in
some detail. In counseling and now could describe it in some detail. In counseling and therapy,
clients often talk about situations from the past, and you may desire to recreate them again in
as much detail as you can. Through the usea of an exercise such as the one above, you will find
your clients can deepen their feelings and become more in touch with what happened
specifically in the problema situation, be it 10 years ago or last week. If you watch the work of
most experienced therapists and counselors with their clients, you will find them frequently
using the words see,hear and feel, and their variations. Experiencing the concreteness of
an event seems to be enhanced when the bodys senses are involved. In some cases using these
sense modalities will bring out a dramatic reliving of prior events and should be used carefully.

You can help your client experience a problema with a spouse, a child, or to relive a past
experience through careful use of perceptual systems and pacing. Different people seem to
respond differently to parts of the perceptual systems. Most respond best if all systems are used,
but some people seem to respond best to the visual portion, others to the auditory or feeling
parts. For example, consider the following statement by Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental
theorist, on his own perceptual systems:

For example, I am absolutely not visual. When Im out walking, I pull out my watch and
sometimes say the time out loud, or I whisper it. If I say what it is and recall the sound
of my voice, I can remember the time. If I say nothing, and its purely visual (I forget)
A minute later I pullo ut my watch and then I realice its still the same time. I was
conscious the first time, but I completely forgot it.

Similarly, some of your clients will not be able to see events from the pasto r hear the
associated voices. The feelings may be detached from old experiences. The separation of
perceptual systems may be a habitual learning style of your client or may represent emotional
trauma from childhood. For example, individuals who have been in an accidento r have been
raped may often be unable to bring back anything from the trauma except a vague feeling, which
itself is not attached to the situation. In such cases, one of the tasks of the therapist may be to
work through the issues around the trauma and gradually allow appropriate expression of affect
and later reexperiencing of the event. In deep trauma, the event itself may be repressed or
forgotten.

At the more basic level, pacing is aimed toward helping you enter the clients frame of reference.
If your client has a difficulty with his or her spouse and the Surface structure sentences seem
vague and inconclusive, you may ask the client to describe a concrete situation using seeing,
hearing, and feeling words. With many clients, the experience will be relived and you, as
counselor, will have a much clearer hearing of how the situation feels for the client.

Pacing is obviously closely related to empathy and the attending skills. It is also a useful construct
as you seek to enter the worldview of the other person.

When combined with the several concepts of the book presented thus far, pacing provides a
useful, integrated method of diverse ideas for relating more closely with the client. Pacing
provides the basis for understanding that can lead to change.

Leading. Once an effective pace has been established, you gracefully begin to lead the client
into a new experience. If you understand and empathize with the clients experience and the
client is aware of the relationship, the possibilities for leading or influencing change in the client
and the clients map of reality (and eventually even the clients worldview) are now more open.

Gracefulness, as Lankton notes, is critical. Understanding and pacing are not enougth; the
transition to new movements, thoughts, and behaviors must be donde judiciously, thoughtfully,
and ethically. Techniques for intentionally influencing and directing the client are perhaps what
make different theories of helping different from each other; they are virtually infinite and range
from sharing your opinin and giving advice to complex theories outlined in beginning form later
in this text. The degree of attention that different theories give to pacing (although few would
use that word) varies extensively. Rogerian theory gives primary attention to pacing and
understanding the clients world. Freudian theory may give some attention to pacing, but the
prime effort is influential, to have the client jon the therapist in a psychodynamic view of the
world. Despite these differences, if you observe the behavior of these two often antagonistic
theories, you will find them using see, hear, and feel perceptual systems plus many of the
consgtructs of pacing in their work.

Leading requires you to acto n the world of your client through influencing skills and will often
require you to use the techniques and theories of counseling and therapy discussed in later
chapters. The more polarized or opposite the incongruity, the more likelihood there is of its
being an effective source of information. Each theoretical approach deals with incongruities with
different counseling techniques. Having identified one polarity or incongruity set, the Gestalt
therapist may have the client role-play the situation to an empty chair; the client-centered
counselor may simply reflecto n the mixed feelings; the Freudian may search for the unconscious
childhood determinants of the Surface incongruity, etc. The techniques of therapeutic work in
the counseling interview vary, buta ll systems are centrally concerned with examining and
resolving incongruities. Again, each language or representational system of therapy approaches
the same situation differently, often with different results in client representational systems.

Your effectiveness with identifying and working toward resolution will often be immediately
apparent. Four possible responses from the client may be noted. The first is denial. Here the
client may refuse to acknowledge that a contradiction in thought, words, or behavior exists. Your
task, most likely, is to recycle the interview to another rea where you can work more effectively
and return to the denial later. Second, slightly more promising results occur when the client
acknowledges the conflicto or discrepancy but only Works on a portion of the issue. Pace this
partial examination and work later toward a full resolution of the conflicto or discrepancy. Third,
the client may acknowledge a conflicto exists and work on both sides (or more) of the conflicto.
Here you can use a variety of therapeutic approaches and move toward a successfull synthesis.
Fourth, the situation occurs in which nota ll conflicto, incongruity, and discrepancy can be
resolved. After exploration, your client may decide to live with the situation as it is. This itself
represents a higher level of client thinking and should not be regarded as a failure on your part.

This four-point outline of possible client responses has more than theoretical importance. You
can monitor the four modes of client response in the interview and change your pacing and
leading style accordingly. You may, for example, be working effectively with a client in terms of
pacing, listening, and empathy. At that point you may confront the incongruity in the client
(leading). If the client denies the confrontation, it is time to return to pacing again and use
listening skills to once again join the clients worldview. If the client Works on a part of the
confrontation, you may continue; but you must notice that your lead has only been partially
successful. The other two modes of client responding suggest that the client is accepting your
leading and you may be at a new level of communication and possibility.

Figure 5.4 presents an example situation in which client discrepancies are confronted via a
variety of techniques. It may be seen that (1) identification of discrepancies represents both
problema definition and pacing, and (2) action on discrepancies represents problema resolution
and leading. In the figure, the central concepts discussed in this chapter are presented in an
action sequence.

The models of language and communication presented here should help basic understanding.
Counselors and therapists have problems with their own personal discrepancies and
incongruities. Most give mixed messages, at times, to clients. Sometimes this can even be done
deliberately for therapeutic benefit. A counselor needs awareness of her or his own limitations.
This requires an openness to self-examination, the use of videotape and audiotape recording of
interviews, and the sharing of her or his own work with colleagues under appropriate ethical
conditions. One must never forget that there are times when the client is more intentional than
the counselor. The questions are: How well is the counselor able to handle her or his own
deficiencies? Are the incongruities and limitations of the counselor such that it becomes difficult
to assist the client? Can the limitations be used as data themselves as the counselor engages in
a continuous process of growth, development, and change?