What is COACHING?

  "Coaching is the self-actualisation technology for the 21st century that enables people to realise their full potential."

Coaching offers a new paradigm. As a paradigmatic shift, Coaching has become a much more acceptable way to think about managing change, personal and organizational transformation.

Why?

Coaching invites us to think about change in terms of becoming more, refining and adding new skills, focusing on direction and outcomes, and receiving feedback as information for continuous improvement. As a paradigm, coaching presents and implies numerous frames that supports the process of transformation and makes it a positive experience.

For these and many other reasons, coaching fits with NLP and Neuro-Semantics Models. These models focus on generative change based on the idea that people have all the resources they need and that we only need an expert in facilitation to make it happen. This changes the expert role of the change agent (coach).

To be an expert in coaching does not necessitate being an expert in the content, the coach's expertise is the process. It necessitates becoming an expert at a higher level, at a Meta level of awareness. The coach as a change agent works at the met-level, the processes of how we humans transform and develop.

Coaching is often confused with various other methodology's such as training, mentoring, counselling & consulting. Although it contains certain elements of each of these disciplines (as depicted in the diagram), it is in actual fact a complete methodology has its own unique skill set. To highlight the differences, lets look at each discipline:

Training

Training is a skill-based process for teaching, educating, and leading a person through a process where he or she is enabled to perform the new skills.

Mentoring

Mentoring is a process of focusing on a particular skill that a particular individual has. It involves giving advice, guidance, and sharing oneís own personal story. In mentoring there is an unequal relationship, senior mentor passing on specific information to a younger and less experienced person.

Counselling / Therapy

Therapy focuses on problems, their sources, the symptoms that result from those problems, how people are broken and dysfunctional, diagnosis of such disorders, and so focuses on healing hurts and bringing resolution to personal pain. It implies that thereís something wrong with the person.

Consulting

Consulting involves giving advice and using one's own expertise in a given field to inform (tell) the client what to do. While consulting can be facilitative, it can also involve procedures, and helping a client do something new.

META-COACHING: COACHING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

        "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." - Thoreau

A meta-coach will first and foremost be able to recognize, detect, and effectively address the processes, structures, mind-sets, frames, beliefs, etc. of the expert or person learning to become a master in a given area whether business, leadership, management, creativity, relationships, persuasion, etc. He or she will address the things that get in the way of that excellence (i.e., lack of clarity, indecision, excuses, etc.). This means the ability to take a Meta position to the mental-emotional matrices of a person's experience.

After recognition of the structure of experience and being able to model and profile the experience, the Meta-Coach needs to be able to see the neuro-semantic system of mind-body-emotion within relationships, contexts, etc. as a system. This means systemic thinking about the human mind-body system within yet higher systems (business, culture, family, government, politics, economics, etc.) and within which yet lower systems are embedded (thinking, valuing, believing, feeling, remembering, imagining, etc.).

For this reason we have developed the Matrix model based upon the neuro-linguistics of human communication and functioning (NLP) that describes how to run our own brain and manage our own states and the Meta-States model of Neuro-Semantics that describes the levels of mind-body-emotion as a systemic process. The idea of framing from Bateson came into NLP in terms of a few basic frames: the ecology frame, relevancy frame, outcome frame, meaning (re-framing), etc. With Neuro-Semantics we developed this much further and created Frame Games as a model of the embedded nature of frames within frames. This has led to being able to work with mastering fear, becoming fit and slim, modelling the frames of business experts, wealth building, prolific writing and researching and other creative arts, relationships, persuasion, and much more.