In this instructional video, Susan Britton MCC explores ICF Core Competency #1 – Demonstrating Ethical Practice – through a neurobiological lens. She reframes ethics not as a dry set of rules but as the quality of the coach‑client relationship, arguing that ethical practice expands the client when the coach approaches with curiosity, inquiry, and respect, and diminishes the client when the coach jumps to judgment, fixing, or advice. She explains how these relational states trigger distinct physiological responses: an expansive state activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowers heart rate, blood pressure, and improves vagal tone, whereas a diminishing state leaves the client stressed and dysregulated. Vagal tone, a measure of how efficiently the vagus nerve regulates heart rate and stress response, is presented as the physiological “heartbeat” of ethical coaching – high vagal tone enables a calm coach to help a stressed client return to calm, while low vagal tone hampers that ability. Britton identifies subtle coach stressors (self‑monitoring questions, fear of offending, uncertainty about client direction) that can erode vagal tone, and previews the polyvagal theory and practical steps for maintaining optimal vagal tone in coaching sessions.
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We're talking today about ICF Core Competency #1: Demonstrates Ethical Practice. And for some, a topic like ethics can feel dry or regulatory, and in this video we want to underscore what happens biologically in the brain and the body, the neurochemistry and the biochemistry, when we think about ethics as dry or regulatory or a bunch of rules to follow. Whereas if we think about ethics, it really does boil down to just treating other people with respect. And humanity. And so we can make the case that really the heartbeat of ethical practice is relationship. So the way we approach our relationships can really, really either expand or diminish a client, the person that we're coaching. In fact, it can either expand or diminish any relationship that we're in, whether that be spouses, partners, friends, colleagues, coworkers, families. Children, etc. So if we're in a relationship in a way that expands the other person, we must be curious, and we can focus on inquiry and exploration and wondering about how that other person is thinking, feeling, or behaving. And conversely, if we're in a relationship where we're diminishing the other person, even if unintentionally, what happens is there's often this lack of curiosity, and instead there's a judgment or there are assumptions about thinking that we understand how the other person is thinking when we actually don't, or we jump in with this tendency, this human tendency to fix things, control things, offer advice, "think about it this way" kinds of comments, and those end up actually diminishing the client because it takes away from them their self-efficacy, their power, their own strengths to be able to tap into. So inquiry and exploration and curiosity expands. Jumping to conclusion, fixing, advising diminishes people. And there are some neurobiological components about how a person feels when they're in either of those states. Bottom line, when somebody's in that expansive state that they're with you and they're feeling as a result of the way you're treating them, they're feeling expanded, powerful, like they have choice in, in things and can control and get on top of these challenges. Several things change. Their parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. Their heart rate and respiration is returned more to a normal state. The blood pressure lowers. And really key to our topic of ground ethics is that vagal tone improves. So how does vagal tone relate to ethical practice? Well, just a thumbnail on the vagus nerve: it's responsible for the regulation of internal organs, digestion, heart rate, respiration, and some of those things. And it sends information from all of those organs up to our brain. And basically vagal tone is a measure of how well the heart is responding to stressors. So low vagal tone means that you may have poor emotional control and you may not respond well to stress, whereas good vagal tone is just the opposite. It means that you are actually in a space where you can respond quickly to stress, you might feel the stress, your system kicks in, but you can, you know, kind of bring it back to normal pretty quickly. So big differences between low vagal tone versus high vagal tone. So the most important thing to remember in all of this is that when you have good vagal tone, you are calm, and a calm coach can help restore a stressed client back to calm. But a stressed coach can never restore a stressed client back to calm. It's just like not having your oxygen mask on first to be able to help someone else. So if we think about being stressed in our coaching conversations, we may experience subtle stressors that we're not even like acutely aware of. And those subtle stressors can be things like, oh my gosh, was the client happy with that last question I asked them? Or maybe I offended them with that last question. Or where should I go in this conversation to make sure that the client gets what they want and are pleased with me? Those can all be sorts of stressors. Another stressor is just being able to contain the stress that the client is feeling in the coaching conversation, because typically when somebody's moving towards something new and different, change, a goal that they have, there's a great deal of uncertainty, complexity, ambiguities often associated with that, and that can very easily create subtle, if not overt, stress in the client. So important to understand, like, where is my vagal tone? How is it changing or impacting the way that I'm relating to clients? And we'll talk a little bit more in the next video about the polyvagal theory and the different types of vagal systems that might be involved or engaged when you are working with a client and what you can do about keeping your vagal tone as good as possible in that process.
