After over 20 years as a globe-trotting producer and interviewer, I’m often asked how this diehard documentarian evolved into a communication trainer and career coach.

Video Feedback Improved My Marriage

It all started when my husband and I decided to learn more about how we interact by recording ourselves. Right away, we discovered two things that immediately improved our communication.

• I observed that I interrupted him a lot more than I thought I did.

• My husband noticed that he allowed himself to be distracted and was not paying attention to me when it was my turn.

To this day, we make more productive communication choices and have more peace thanks to not wasting time arguing about these points.

Video Feedback Enhanced My Documentary Interviews

I soon realized there’s no excuse anymore for being the last to know how I’m coming across. The more I watched and listened to myself, the more choice I had over my words, tone, eye contact, and gestures. All these became more congruent with my intentions. My messages had more productive impact.

It wasn’t long before I started showing interviewees short clips of themselves to help boost the clarity of their content and their confidence.

Insights through Filmmaking

In the course of filming documentaries, particularly in cultures so varied from Western Massachusetts, I quickly gained an expertise for registering non-verbal cues that helped me know what questions to ask, where to focus the camera, and when the energy in a scene had changed. It honed my already high social and emotional intelligence.

Over the years, the people I interviewed at events in my own culture made a common observation: “My video interview with you was a highlight of the event. Thanks for making it more meaningful.” They said they appreciated the chance to explore the topic on a deep level with a thought-partner who was also emotionally present.

It wasn’t uncommon for interviewees to have “aha” moments, realizing they had choices over an undesirable situation that they didn’t know they could change. Sometimes they acted on these insights and planned to make different choices.

One day, a mentor pointed out that helping people make new choices and take different actions is the result of good coaching. Voila! My second career (and calling) had snuck up and found me while I was pursuing my first passion.

Deepening My Training as a Coach

I chose to study Psychosynthesis, an approach to self-realization that is a down-to-earth combination of transpersonal counseling, meditation, and mindfulness practice. I received mentoring in this three-year training in client-directed techniques that complemented my rapport-building skills already in place. My filmmaker’s eye and ear added to every step of my coach training.

Research Grant Opens Doors

Curious as to why a tool as powerful as video feedback wasn’t used more frequently in individual and couples counseling sessions, I applied for and won the support of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center to conduct research in 2008. Sponsorship included an excellent supervisor for my research, Patricia Romney, Ph.D., from the Department of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College.

How would psychotherapists who had a sample session with me assess Video Mirror Feedback®? According to the research questionnaire, they unanimously reported the process “promoted the kind of self-awareness that would lead to increased motivation for lasting change.” Inquiries are welcome for this unpublished research.

Embraced by Early Adopters in Business, Medicine, Higher Ed, Non-profits

These favorable results led to an ongoing collaboration with physician and med school professor Suzanne Mitchell after her own powerful VMF experience. She witnessed firsthand how this tool could be used to quickly develop empathy skills in her senior medical students.

Carlyn’s distinctive method enabled me to see aspects of myself that I was unaware of. Her skillful questions made it comfortable to welcome the new self-awareness that led me to make lasting changes in my professional and personal communication.

Suzanne E. Mitchell, M.D., M.S.
Assistant Professor
Boston Medical Center

For Dr. Mitchell’s pilot course on effective inter-professional teams, she hired me to use VMF to privately debrief an ethically challenging role play with 17 clinical graduate students. Each student discovered how their communication choices contributed (positively or negatively) to the dramatic outcome of the scenario.

After they discerned how they would rather have contributed to the team’s life and death scenario, I guided them through the process of making these new communication choices. A similar ethical challenge was bound to come up in their careers as physicians, social workers, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists. When they watched themselves speak in a more conscious, emotionally present way, each one experienced a paradigm shift that surprised them and reinforced their behavior shift.

Early adopters in the business community have welcomed the benefits of my method. Executives and managers become intensely interested  when they learn that social/emotional intelligence is a vital ingredient in the long-term success of individual’s and companies. 

Life Beyond Work?

Group improv (great way to practice being present), biking, yoga, snowshoeing, nature walks, dancing, lively conversation, singing with friends, and watching documentaries–preferably wth popcorn!