Parts Work by Holmes: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Parts Work by Holmes, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Practices that may help
- Break apart perceptual chunks that may be blocking you
If a problem object looks like one thing, try perceiving it as separate parts with separate functions.
Constraint Relaxation: Escaping the Walls You Built Yourself - Track the relationships between parts
Notice how parts trigger, protect, and sometimes war with each other — the system’s dynamics are as important as its members.
IFS Parts Mapping, Made Practical - Self-explain each step as you work through an example
Pause after each step in a worked example and explain to yourself, in your own words, why that step was taken.
The Worked Examples Effect: Learn Faster by Studying Solutions First - Deconstruct the problem to its fundamentals
Break the problem into the few things you actually know to be true, with no inherited conclusions.
First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable - Compare two examples side-by-side to extract the underlying principle
Place two worked examples next to each other and find exactly what is the same, structurally, beneath the surface differences.
The Worked Examples Effect: Learn Faster by Studying Solutions First - Use a body double for low-initiation tasks
Work in the physical or virtual presence of another person to borrow their initiation momentum.
Task Initiation: Overcoming the Start Problem - Put to other uses
Ask: who else could use this, and what problems could it solve if applied somewhere entirely different?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - Focus intensely, then deliberately release
Work hard on a problem for a set time, then consciously step away and let the diffuse mode take over.
Focused vs Diffuse Thinking - Substitute
Ask: what component, material, person, process, or rule could be swapped for something different?
SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique - Seeing the eight factors as a mutually supporting system, not a checklist
Practise one factor well and notice how it naturally improves the others — this is the integrated structure of the path.
The Noble Eightfold Path as a Practical Life Framework
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep seeing this as one solid thing that either works or doesn’t, and it never occurs to me that I could pull it apart and use just one piece of it differently
- I keep working on my inner critic and nothing shifts, and I’m realizing it’s because the second the critic eases off, the part that procrastinates takes over
- I read through the solved examples and they all make perfect sense as I go, but then I hit my own problem and realize I can’t actually do any of it
- When I list out everything I “know” about this problem, half of it is really just how everyone says it has to be
- I sense two of these examples are really doing the same thing underneath, but I can’t quite put my finger on what
Related concerns
- Parts Work Holmes
If a problem object looks like one thing, try perceiving it as separate parts with separate functions.
Break apart perceptual chunks that may be blocking you
- Parts Work Theory
Notice how parts trigger, protect, and sometimes war with each other — the system’s dynamics are as important as its members.
Track the relationships between parts
- Parts Work By Tom Holmes
Notice how parts trigger, protect, and sometimes war with each other — the system’s dynamics are as important as its members.
- Parts Work Different Parts
Notice how parts trigger, protect, and sometimes war with each other — the system’s dynamics are as important as its members.
- Parts Work Gestalt
If a problem object looks like one thing, try perceiving it as separate parts with separate functions.
- Parts Work Guided
Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.