Freedom Fighters

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All rights reserved. This article
appeared in Coaching at Work,
Vol 7, Issue 3, 2012 and has been
reproduced in full by kind
permission of the publisher. Not
to be distributed electronically or
made available to public websites
without permission from the
publisher. For personal and
internal organisational use only.


How do you
coach to the positive
in extreme negative
situations? Eric Foley and
Richard E Boyatzis help two
defectors from North Korea
make sense of their past,
and their future
M
r Bae, a North
Korean, sat
in jail for
13 months,
without charge,
as a possible traitor, while the
North Korean authorities
investigated him. As a free man,
Mr Baes fashbacks became less
frequent, but were always
unnerving. Typically, he would be
walking down the street or
reading, when suddenly he would
be back in cell 436, wondering if he
would ever see his wife and
daughter again.
Fortunately, his story checked
out and he was released. But when
his wife frst saw him at the police
station, she said he looked like an
freedom
fighters
old pumpkin bruised and
beaten. He shared how people
had starved to death in the station.
They had all been made to sit on a
cold foor in one position all day
long, from morning until 10pm.
However, the couple were to
learn that, once free, the life of the
defector does not get any easier.
A disproportionately high
percentage of North Korean
refugees suffer from depression,
commit suicide or, in desperation,
enter into lives of crime.
Mr and Mrs Baes families had
migrated to China from North
Korea, then fed back there in
1962 to escape Chinas Cultural
Revolution. A key aspect of their
story was rooted in Mr Baes
grandfathers conversion to
Christianity while in China. It was
from this that they inherited their
sense of purpose.
At the time of Mr Baes release,
their daughter had begun to
manifest skills in healing. Even
though she did not study formally,
she was able to heal through
traditional medicine. It wasnt
possible for her to become a doctor
in North Korea, so the family
decided to leave. After a harrowing
defection across China to a Korean
embassy in Southeast Asia, they
few to South Korea.
Mr Bae is now 52 and his wife 50.
He works at a car wash. They are
regularly asked by the South
Korean governments Ministry of
26 Coaching at Work May/June | Vol 7 Issue 3 2012 | www.coaching-at-work.com
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Coaching at Work 27
COACHING EXTREMES
Unifcation to speak to South
Korean churches and civic groups
about the repression they
experienced in North Korea as
underground Christians. As part of
their socialisation, they receive
coaching as well as intense efforts
to address the basic needs of food,
housing and education.
But freedom has its price. In
North Korea, the couple had
government-provided housing,
jobs and healthcare. And, oddly
enough, much better air quality
than in South Korea.
The coaching
When the Baes came to us, they
were weary. Within fve minutes
of our meeting, they had described
Mr Baes haemorrhoids and
Mrs Baes stomach ailments and
eye surgery.
They lamented that they had to
spend the equivalent of $100 a day
on special herbal treatments for
their health. It was as if they were
nostalgic about North Korea. They
were not only escaping from what
we call the Negative Emotional
Attractor (NEA), yet spent much of
every day living in it, but part of
their work was to get others into
the NEA too.
This may have been why they
sat up abruptly when I began by
asking them a question they
later told me they had never been
asked before: Tell me about happy
memories from your time in both
North Korea and South Korea.
They exchanged puzzled glances
and the briefest of cautious smiles,
before turning back to me with
poker faces. It was as if I had asked
We know that giving someone ideas as to what
they should do and how they should change to be
more effective, often has the opposite effect
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them to share some delicious
secret and that, just by asking, I
had revealed my membership of a
tiny fraternity: those who were
willing to believe that North Korea
was capable of producing
moments of happiness, even
among its most oppressed.
They began to share with me, at
frst with great hesitation and
guarded body language, but
gradually with increasing ease,
including more and more effusive
gestures, about moments of
happiness that might confuse,
rather than delight, Westerners.
Mr Bae talked about becoming a
member of the Communist Party
in his youth, how hard it was given
his familys background, and how
excited he was to be inducted since
this meant he could marry well
and provide a better life for his
children. Mrs Bae spoke with great
animation about how she was
teaching high school literature
about the wisdom of Kim Il-sung.
She would write letters of
recommendation for young male
students from poor families to
help them get selected to serve in
North Koreas elite military troops.
Soon they were fying along in
the Positive Emotional Attractor
(PEA) with bright smiles, broad
gestures, laughter and by fnishing
each others sentences.
If anyone was slipping into
the NEA, it was me. How could
their happiest memories be
ones in passionate support of
the state that had imprisoned
him and deceived Mrs Bae
into teaching nonsense to a
generation of youth?
This is an example of coaching
with compassion coaching to the
PEA. In contrast, coaches and
managers still often coach for
compliance to the NEA.
When coaching to the PEA, you
focus on the persons dreams,
28 Coaching at Work
values, gratitude, even playfulness.
It has the effect of activating neural
circuits and endocrines that invoke
a cognitive, perceptual and
emotional openness. The person
being coached is physiologically
and then psychologically prepared
to consider new ideas.
We know that giving someone
ideas as to what they should do
and how they should change to be
more effective, often has the
opposite effect, arousing
defensiveness and closing down
the person.
Marital tag team
Mr and Mrs Bae insisted on being
coached together. It provided an
opportunity for positive emotional
contagion to work in favour of a
more inspirational session.
Of course, it could have gone the
other way. Though I would direct a
question to one or the other, they
would look at each other before
answering, and decide who would
start the response.
They were cautious, having lived
for so long in a repressive, political
state. A point would come, in
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almost every response, when the
person responding would falter,
drift into sadness, or simply stop,
as if reaching an emotional traffc
light. At that point the other would
pick up the narrative seamlessly,
typically making physical, but not
visual contact a hand squeeze, a
pat on the shoulder before
continuing, with positive emotion,
often with a tease.
Once, when his wife began to
struggle as she shared a story
about a young man who had stolen
her socks, but whom she still chose
to help, Mr Bae said, Meeting me
was her happiest moment!
Later, Mrs Bae said, Everyone
knew he was a good man, as her
husbands voice cracked when he
mentioned his 13 months in prison.
Once they were guided into PEA
through that initial question, they
sustained each other.
COACHING EXTREMES
Coaching at Work 29 May/June | Vol 7 Issue 3 2012 | www.coaching-at-work.com
The ideal self
The ravages of Mr Baes time in jail
and Mrs Baes defection are
apparent in their bodies. Mr Bae has
had multiple surgeries to manage
his haemorrhoids so he can
continue to work at the car wash to
save for his daughters education.
Mrs Baes speaking engagements
drain her for weeks a bodily
consequence, perhaps, of publicly
reliving NEA. They learned recently
that the North Korean authorities
had executed Mr Baes parents.
Despite these seemingly
insurmountable daily obstacles,
they press on towards their dream
of putting their daughter through
medical school and building a
clinic for her practice. A personal
vision (articulated Ideal Self) gains
power and momentum when a
couple share their vision.
Mr Baes parents sensed their
time was short, and that their son
and his family had to defect to
protect the familys next-
generation gift. In this sense, they
did not so much escape from North
Korea as they were drawn to South
Korea by the realisation that that
was where they needed to go for
their vision to become reality.
A concluding thought
I have this mind that what
happened in my life was not
easy and could not happen
without God, so I keep thanking
God for what he has done in my
life. And because he is with us in
my life, I believe our dream will
come true, said Mrs Bae, when I
asked her how she felt about
the coaching.
She saw our session as another of
Gods myriad ways of refocusing
them away from the smog, the
bodily aches and pains, and the cost
of medicine back to the dream.
As our session progressed,
Mr and Mrs Baes dream moved
me back into PEA too. I began to
understand that they experienced
with happiness Mr Baes entry into
the Communist Party and Mrs Baes
preparation of soldiers for Kim
Il-sung, not in spite of the diffculties
they had faced, but because this was
their life, and all of it had been
required to lead them to the dream.
Coaching with compassion made
it possible for me to enter into their
PEA as a guest, even if they had
somehow needed the nudge of my
questions to remind them that it
was still there. n
Eric Foley and Richard E Boyatzis
Coaching with compassion made it
possible to enter into the couples Positive
Emotional Attractor as a guest
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