If you have wondered about world class coaching? Have you asked yourself such questions as:
What makes a person world-class as a coach? What are the secrets for developing into a world-class coach? What would I have to know in terms of understanding and what would I have to be able to do in terms of skills which would enable me to coach with such high quality that I would distinguish myself as a successful coach.
If so, then here in this Special Report are our answers to these from the perspective of the Meta-Coaching System. What you will find in the following pages are the strategies and skills for developing into a highly effective coach with a successful practice and a first-class reputation.
The Fast Growing Field of Coaching
In 1999 Coaching became the second fastest growing industry in the world behind I.T. And in the following years, has remained one of the fasting growing fields. People at all levels of business, industry, government, media, and entrepreneurship have discovered the power of having a professional coach to facilitate their success.
Indeed, Coaching has become a revolution in business as a managerial tool and as a way to truly empower people in taking into their potentials and unleashing their talents. What was once coaching reserved only for top athletes, has become a new technology for Fortune 500 CEOs, Senior Managers, Presidents, and everyday people. Today, through coaching, people are achieving accomplishments they never thought possible, they are experiencing personal growth that taps into their human capital of intelligence, emotion, and relationships, and they are taking their businesses to new levels of growth and quality.
Yet there’s a downside to this. The downside is that many unqualified and/or poorly skilled people have started hanging up their signs: “Coach.” Then by flooding the market, they have started to threaten the field, undermining the value and uniqueness of coaching. Now as a market-driven industry, the good news is that those who are truly skilled, have the first-class qualities that make for an effective coach, and who operate from a solid coaching methodology will rise to the top of the field. They will be the ones to make a difference.
The Modeling of Expertise in Meta-Coaching
When we designed and created the Meta-Coaching System in 2001, I began by interviewing and modeling several expert coaches. I looked for highly qualified men and women in the field who had been in the field for several years, had created a reputation among their colleagues for being ethical and effective, and who were making more than $100,000 USD. That led me to model Graham Richardson (Executive Coach), Michelle Duval (Personal Coach), Cheryl Gilroy (Group and Team Coach), and Dan Bangley, Ph.D. (Executive Coach). Then, with almost every single presentation of Meta-Coaching in more than two dozen countries, we invited other expert coaches who visited the training. We interviewed and modeled them as well.
This enabled us to put the Meta-Coaching System together based on real live experts in the field in addition to reviewing the literature of Coaching. By then integrating both, we were able to design a process for training the Coaching strategies and skills that represented a systematic approach and one that actually delivers in the real world. This enable us to distinguish what makes the difference between being mediocre as a coach and being truly productive, effective, and professional. Since 2002, I have interviewed another 28 expert coaches in more than two dozen countries
“The Meta-Coaching program delivers more useful and practical information per minute/ per dollar spent than any training program I have ever attended– and I have been to a great many of them. This is the best delivered and most useful piece of NLP/NS that I have attended in the last twenty-five years! A brilliant experience.”
Jim Brush, NS Trainer, Business Consultant, VP
“The profundity of my learnings are so layered that I will be assimilating and implementing and expanding for some time. I have a map! I can step into a coaching scenario full of confidence and competence now. Thank you for a fantastic investment, It was a blast! Meta-Coaching is the quantum leap in coaching.”
Sarah Nanclare, Health Coach, Equilibrio, Australia
STRATEGIES AND SKILLS
FOR BECOMING WORLD-CLASS
So what are the strategies and skills that distinguish expert coaches?
#1. Clearly Distinguish What Coaching is and is Not
Today Coaching is a field and a movement, but not a profession. Not yet. One of these days it will become a Profession in its own right. In order for that to happen, Coaches will have to be able to make clear distinctions between what Coaching is and how it differs from other helping fields such as psychotherapy, training, consulting, and mentoring. Without these distinctions, Coaching will not be seen as a unique and separate field. It will be seen merely as a step-child of one of these fields. And without clear distinctions, Coaches will not know the boundaries of the field or when to refer.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowing how Coaching differs from the other modalities.
∙ Able to linguistically describe the line between them and knowing when, how, and why to refer.
∙ Able to describe the core competency of consulting, mentoring, training, and therapy in contradistinction to Coaching.
∙ Able to facilitating one of the unique Coaching conversations.
∙ Able to refer when a client needs or wants something other than the challenge and actualization of one’s potentials.
Key Distinctions about the other Helping Modalities:
∙ Consulting is about giving advice and expertise.
∙ Mentoring is about guiding from experience.
∙ Training is about teaching and drilling in new skills.
∙ Counseling and therapy is about solving problem, healing hurts, resolving traumas and building up ego-strength so the person gets up to average and becomes “okay.”
∙ Coaching is about process facilitation of the psychological and personal processes for unleashing potentials.
#2: Develop Core Competencies in the Coaching Skills
To coach well requires skills— unique skills that are especially designed to be able to facilitate the learning, changing, communicating, and relating experiences which clients need. These core competencies sound easy to an outsider. They are not, however, easy. To truly listen well— actively, deeply, empathetically, without judgment, understandingly, systemically, etc.—requires specialized training and lots of experience.
In Meta-Coaching, we have identified 7 core competencies in these categories:
Relationship: Listening and Supporting
Exploration: Questioning and Meta-Questioning
Mirroring: Receiving and Giving Feedback
Experiential: Inducing State
In the context of change; there are 8 core change skills:
Motivational: Awakening and Challenging
Decision: Probing and Provoking
Creation: Co-creating and Actualizing
Integration: Reinforcing and Testing
For the advance PCMC level, there are additional skills:
Framing and Pattern Detection
Co-creating a KPI and Tasking
Additionally there are another 20 coaching skills and 10 business skills.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge about the essential and supportive Coaching Skills.
∙ Knowledge about the uniqueness of the Coaching Skills which separates coaching from the other helping professions.
∙ Ability to listen, support, question, meta-question, etc.
∙ Ability to demonstrate competency on the skills according to the behavioral benchmarks.
#3: Facilitate the Many Coaching Conversations to Evoke the Desired Experiences.
At the heart of coaching is a conversation. Ultimately Coaching is a dialogue that gets to the heart of things with clients—namely, the meanings that they have constructed about things. As a special kind of communication, Coaches have to be highly skilled and professional as communicators. This involves competency equally with both the verbal and non-verbal dimensions, with knowing how to ask questions, explore words, comment on gestures, calibrate to states and physiological responses, and much more.
In Meta-Coaching we have identified 18 different kinds of Coaching Conversations. The five most fundamental ones are: The Clarity Conversation, the Decision Conversation, the Planning Conversation, the Experiencing Conversation, the Change Conversation. There are many more, some for Group and Team Coaching, some for Executive Coaching. To become a world-class Coach, you will need to be able to distinguish these conversations, recognize when a client is asking for or needing a certain conversation, and be able to facilitate that conversation.
Every Coaching Conversation is unique and different from “normal” conversations and involves all of the complexity that communication involves. Using the Neuro-Linguistic Programming model of Communication, we have 22 linguistic distinctions for creating precision and the Representation model for guiding us in facilitating the internal “movies” that clients make as they think and communicate to self and others.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge about how communication works in the mind-body-emotion system.
∙ Knowledge about the different dimensions of communication, verbal, non-verbal, metaphorical, etc.
∙ Ability to facilitate the requested and/or needed Coaching Conversation.
∙ Ability to use advance communication skills in real time with a client.
Kinds of Coaching Conversations
Individual Coaching
1) The Clarity Conversation
2) The Decision Conversation
3) The Planning Conversation
4) The Experience Conversation
5) The Change Conversation
6) The Confrontation Conversation
7) The Mediation Conversation
Group Coaching Conversations
8) The Meta-Conversation
9) The Rounds Conversation
10) The Problem-Solving Conversation
11) The Collective Learning Conversation
12) The Conflict Resolution Conversation
Executive Coaching Conversations
13) The Sounding Board Conversation
14) The Systems Conversation
15) The Paradox Conversation
16) The Outcome Conversation (Clarity)
17) The Feedback Conversation
18) The Unleashing Potentials Conversation
19) The Integrity Conversation
“Meta-Coaching is all about co-creation. It has given me the understanding that I can never create an outcome for you, but I can help you co-create your own miracle.”
Schoeman Rudman, CEO FNB Insurance,
CEO FNB Solution Support, Johannesburg, South Africa
#4: Call for Meta-Cognition and Awareness for Gaining Perspective
Coaching goes beyond regular “communications,” to the unique human kind of consciousness and communicating—self-reflexive consciousness. To do that Coaches uses several different meta-communication skills. A truly professional coach has to be able to get to the thoughts in the back of the mind of a client— to the unspoken and even unconscious meaning frames that govern the client’s experience.
In Meta-Coaching, we use the Meta-States Model to call for Meta-Moments which facilitates a client to become aware of their operational assumptions and premises. This can reveal the quality of one’s thinking, call for mindfulness, reveal blind-spots, and facilitate a larger level perspective. It’s very powerful. It also facilitates “applying to oneself” and that creates personal congruency and integrity. And in a profession like Coaching, credibility is critical to be truly successful. It’s critical for marketing and positioning, it is critical for being winsome and influential as a business person. Further, given that most clients will come through word-of-mouth referrals, the Coach’s personal congruence, professionalism, reputation, and ethics is central to being world-class. Further, because Coaching is a personal and experiential discipline, being world-class requires that the Coach “walks the talk.”
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge about self-reflexive consciousness and the meta-levels of mindfulness.
∙ Ability to engage in self-coaching practices.
∙ Knowledge of the ethics and professional standards in Coaching.
∙ Ability to facilitate getting to a client’s “thoughts in the back of the mind.”
∙ Ability to call for a Meta-Moment and expose thinking patterns, cognitive biases, etc.
“Meta-Coaching is a revolutionary approach to personal and professional transformation that will blow your mind. Potential, potential, potential.”
Andrew Jenkins, Wealth Coach, Equilibrio Australia
“The Meta-Coaching training has been the most personally important one that I have attended. It has not only provided for the training and learning of cutting-edge skills and strategies for coaching, but it has enabled me to radically shift dysfunctional aspects of my own paradigm and behavior. I’m stunned, gratefully and really excited.”
Anne McKinnon, Coach, Australia
#5: Think and Operate in a Systematic Way
When the field of Coaching was developing in the 1990s the most common complaint and criticism was that it was un-systematic. Coaches were coaching “by the seat of their pants,” and their coaching tended to be more of a “grab bag of tricks” from self-help books and seminars than a thoughtful process. Writers, researchers, and theorists argued that Coaching has to move beyond the coaching doing “whatever he or she feels like doing,” to having a mindful systematic approach.
Today both the public and Coaches recognized that Coaching needs a systematic framework. This is not question. But what system should the Coaching be based on? Ah, this is a place of immense disagreement. Some have attempted to base it on the older psychologies (Psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis, Jungian, etc.). Others are based on some of the Brief psychotherapy and yet others on the Cognitive-Behavioral sciences.
WHAT COACHING IS AND THE META-COACHING MODELS
Coaching Meta-Coaching Models Psychologies
1) Communication: The NLP Communication Model Cognitive-Behavioral
2) Self / Meta-Communication The Meta-States Model Cognitive,
Reflexivity Meta-Cognitive
3) Change and Learning The Axes of Change model Gestalt
4) Implementation The Benchmarking Model Cognitive, Sports Psy.
5) Systems The Matrix Model Developmental
6) Self-Actualization The Matrix of Self-Actualization Systems
The Self-Actualization Quadrants Self-Actualization
Existential psych.
7) Business The Matrix Business Plan
In Meta-Coaching, we based primarily on Self-Actualization Psychology (Humanistic) and the Cognitive Psychology models. We did that by identifying what coaching is (the distinctions of coaching) and then we identified the models that we use to guide our thinking and working (see the attached box). In this way, the approach is systematic and we train Coaches to be able to answer the systematic question: How do you know what to do, when, with whom, how to do that, and why?
What is systematic in this approach is that we have Psychological Models which enable us to understand the structure and process of human development, consciousness, communication, learning, change, and self-actualization. After all, that’s what Coaching is ultimately about —communicating and co-creating with a client a compelling future and facilitating the change for learning to mobilize resources that will unleash the client’s potentials for actualizing his or herself best talents.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge about what Coaching is, the distinctions that set it apart.
∙ The knowledge about the various methodologies for working with the distinctions.
∙ The knowledge of the theoretical frameworks that govern the methodology.
∙ The skill in being able to use these distinctions so you know what to do when, with whom, and why.
∙ The skill for facilitating the communication and self-actualization processes.
WHAT IS META-COACHING?
Meta-Coaching is 1) the art of facilitating1 the processes with an individual or organization2 2) to a specific agreed upon outcome3 3) by means of a ruthlessly compassionate conversation4 4) that gets to the heart of things— the client’s core meanings5 5) and thereby identifying and mobilizing inner and outer resources6 6) for generative change 7) that leads to develop, unleash, and actualize the client’s potentials for achieving his or her dreams.7
Process Facilitating, not consulting, teaching, doing therapy, counseling, mentoring.
- Applicable for both Individual and group coaching.
- Using the Well-Formed Outcome process to generate a KPI: Key Performance Indicator for measurement because the client is the expert of his or her goals.
- An intimate and open relationship created by care (even love) and toughness (confrontation).
- The frame (interpretation, mental model, meaning) is always the real issue, not the experiences or emotions.
- People are not broken, but have potential resources for being their best self and actualizing their highest and best.
- The self-actualization drive within moving clients to become fully alive/ fully human and performing their highest meanings.
“With Meta-Coaching my feet are grounded in the model of Neuro-Semantics Coaching and my heart and mind are open to endless possibilities...”
Antoinette Chmke, Occupational, Specialised Kinesiologist,
Meta-Coach ACMC
“Meta-Coaching is highly motivational—to belief in the impossible.”
Tereeza Ballantie, Owner, Windsor Trainer
#6: Facilitate Generative Change for Multiple Level Transformation
Obviously, Coaching is about change. At its heart is facilitating generative change and doing so at numerous levels. That means a Professional Coach is at the same time an effective change agent. And that requires that an effective Coach know the levels of change and the process of facilitating generative change.
The problem with this is that the majority of “change models” used in Coaching today are based on therapy models. Yet in using therapy models, Coaches are operating (whether they know it or not) from the old therapy assumptions about change. And that creates several problems. What are these problems? The first problem is that those models assume that clients will resist change because they view change as “hard” and “painful.” The second problem is that the models assume that people will inevitably relapse. While these are true statements for people who need therapy, they are not true for people who are psychologically healthy and want the challenge of Coaching. They are not change-resisters, they are change-embracers.
In Meta-Coaching, we have developed The Axes of Change Model for non-therapeutic or generative change. This model eliminates both resistance and relapse. It eliminates resistance because the Coach is imposing nothing but facilitating the client to discover and say what the client wants. There’s therefore nothing to resist. It eliminates relapse because it has a continuous improvement loop so that the client cannot fail but installs continuous feedback for the next level of development.
About the levels of change, the levels introduce different kinds of Coaching. In Meta-Coaching, we base the levels on Gregory Bateson’s “levels of learning / change” model. This gives us three kinds of Coaching:
1) Performance Coaching: Enhancing skills and behaviors.
2) Developmental Coaching: Evolutionary change to beliefs, values and identity.
3) Transformational Coaching: Revolutionary change in purpose, direction and meaning.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge of the levels and dimensions of generative change and how it differs from therapeutic change.
∙ Knowledge of a change model for governing one’s use in Coaching clients for generative change.
∙ Knowledge about how change works for psychologically healthy people: motivation, decision, creation, and integration.
∙ Ability to facilitate as a change agent for the four mechanisms of change.
∙ Ability to operate in the eight roles of change: Awakener and Challenger, Prober and Provoker, Co-creator and Actualizer, Reinforcer and Tester.
“There is no other course which compares to Meta-Coaching. Mind warping, healing, magical, living-giving, deeply moving, and skills for action. Meta-Coaching offers a state-of-the-art approach to living.”
Glen Tucker
“I liked the discovering of creative emergence in the frames and thoughts of my mind. Neuro-Semantics takes all of the theories I apply ... to its greatest application level.”
Leon Rautenback, Soul in Business Coach, Johannesburg, South Africa
#7: Facilitate the Actualizing of a Client’s Highest and Best
Coaching, as about generative change, has to be based upon Self-Actualization Psychology. This psychology speaks about both the deficiency needs (lower needs on the hierarchy of needs) and the higher “being” needs. Coaching is for healthy people who want to actualize their full potential of what’s meaningful in a high quality performance. That’s why to be effective as a Coach, one needs to know and operate from a Self-Actualization model.
Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers shifted the psychology paradigm from a psychology of pathology to one of studying healthy self-actualizing people. People who operate from a higher or meta-needs —the needs of those who are seeking to express and actualize their potentials, rather than satisfy deficiencies, are those who are best suited for coaching.
Lower Needs: 1) Survival Needs
2) Safety and Security Deficiency Needs
3) Love and Affection
4) Self-Regard, Self-Esteem
Higher Needs:
5) Self-Actualization Being Needs (Growth, Expressive)
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge about the Self-Actualization Psychology to base one’s Coaching on.
∙ Ability to detect client’s needs and wants, and to facilitate effective coping and transcending the lower needs.
∙ Knowledge of the premises of Self-Actualization Psychology.
∙ Ability to facilitate the unleashing process so a client can make real the potentials clamoring within.
Maslow’s Hierarch of Needs
The Lower Needs The Higher Needs
Based in biology and genetics Based in psychology and semantics
Instinct-like in being more determined Governed by our cognitive understandings and beliefs
When in deficiency state, felt strongly Not motivated by deficiency,
and dominating states felt strongly as expression of growth
Desire homeostasis Desire disequilibrium
Removal of challenges and changes Embrace challenges and changes
Drive goes away, satisfied Drives grows, expands, amplifies
Deficiency motivation Abundance / Expression motivation
Purpose: to reduce need, create homeostasis Non-purposeful: end value, not means to an end
Post gratification forgetting Memorable peak experience
Satisfied directly with specific gratifications Satisfied mostly indirectly
Few if any preconditions Preconditions for gratification
Satisfied mostly by self, individually Satisfied mostly in relationships with others
Individualistic Social, relational, Altruistic
These drives move us to Comfort These drives move us to Challenge
More independent of others Dependent on others, communication
#8: Think and Work Systemically
Coaching is works with clients who are systems and who live in systems. Coaching therefore needs to work systemically and holistically with the client’s mind-body-emotion system. For this reason Coaching focuses on the wheel of life and work/life balance and for taking an integrative approach to mind-and-emotions.
If Coaching is systemically, then an effective Coach will think and interact systemically. In Meta-Coaching, we use a systems model, The Matrix Model. This is a model based on Cognitive-Behavioral psychology and Developmental psychology. The model has two kinds of sub-matrices: the process and the content matrices. These govern and determine a client’s sense of reality. And in Meta-Coaching, we use it to “follow the client’s energy” through one’s mind-body-emotion system in its feedback and feed forward loops.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge of systems, the variables, relationships, principles, etc. of a system.
∙ Ability to think and operate in a systemic way in working with a client.
∙ Knowledge of the human mind-body-emotion system as a system, how it works.
∙ Ability to recognize the feedback loop of information coming into the mind-body system and up the levels.
∙ Ability to recognize and work with the feed forward loop of information transforming into the energy of emotions, language, and behavior.
#9: Benchmark to Measure Intangible Differences that the Coaching Makes
Coaching, if it is real and makes a real difference, has to be able to measure the difference that it makes in the lives of clients. Coaches have to be able to benchmark that difference to articulate the ROI (return on investment) that the clients make. This is what the benchmarking process enables a Coach to do.
In Meta-Coach we use the benchmarking process for measuring intangibles like listening, leading, questioning, giving feedback, etc. to specify precise the behavioral measurement of an experience. In this way we can scale how well someone is doing or experiencing a skill or a value. We have done that with 50 coaching skills which enables us to measure a Coach’s actual competency.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge of how to create a measurement process regarding an experience that we generally experience as intangible.
∙ Knowledge of the specific benchmarks one co-creates with a client for measuring the value of the coaching.
∙ Ability to facilitate the co-creating of benchmarks for an experience.
∙ Ability to detail and articulate the behaviors that indicate the scale of an experience.
∙ Ability to give concrete and specific behaviors for a skill to be developed by the Coaching.
#10: Coach Oneself in Developing a Commercially Viable Coaching Business
Coaching is not only the skills of communicating, facilitating change, working systemically, and facilitating self-actualization, it is also about a business. Effective Coaches run success Coaching practices. To be effective in the marketplace, a coach has to market and sell him or herself, put on the business hat and create a viable office, and take care of the administrative tasks, billing, office environment, etc. A common occupational hazard of people entering this field is that while they are strong on their “people skills,” their business skills suck.
In Meta-Coaching, we focus on each Coach creating his or her Business Model. We do that by facilitating each Coach to complete a Matrix Business Plan, by interview Expert Coaches, and by spending time on the business acumen needed to suceed.
Knowledge and Skills for this Strategy:
∙ Knowledge of business, the components of business success.
∙ Ability to create a Business Plan and a Business Model for one’s Coaching niche, market, speciality, practice, etc.
∙ Ability to detail the specifics of the Business Model.
Coaching as a Field Facilitating Individual and Organizational Success
Coaching is about success. Everything about Coaching is designed to take individuals and organizations to stretch forward to achieve more success in every area of value and importance.
First, it is about empowering clients to become more successful in their personal, business, financial, and relational lives. It’s about mobilizing resources to unleash untapped potentials. For that reason, one of the best sources of credibility and personal confidence is to apply to self to receive coaching about how to coach effectively and how to run a successful practice.
Second, it is about the coach’s own success.
In the Meta-Coach System® we work precisely to this outcome— empowering coaches to be successful themselves and to live in a network of coaching relationships that continually support their own growth and development.
“I’ve been Wowed by the realisations I’ve reached through the Meta-Coaching training.”
Sean F. Farrell, Chartered Accountant
“Meta-Coaching was superb, well-structured, invaluable in every part of life ... and much more.”
Dr. Frederic Moiz, Naturopath
THE VALUES IN LEARNING
COACHING STRATEGIES AND SKILLS?
From what’s been said, you can tell that there’s lots of values and benefits in learning the inter-personal strategies and skills which are inherent in the Coaching process.
1) Develop the skills to be a Professional Communicator.
2) Deliver your messages with both precision and inspiration.
3) Enable and empower people in your life to actualize more of their potentials.
4) Lead and manage people using the methodologies of coaching that calls forth their best.
5) Parent your children to grow up to be “the best version of themselves.”
6) Understand how change works and become an effective change agent for self and others.
7) Appreciate the profound nature of deep empathic listening and be able to be present without judgment to the people in your life.
8) Give refining feedback in a way that enables people to be able to listen to it and receive it for their growth and benefit.
9) Discover the processes for handling conflict over differences with grace and effectiveness.
10) Create a Business Model and Business Plan that will allow you to unleash your own entrepreneurship and create a new business for yourself.
11) Model experts in the field of Coaching to accelerate your learning curve.
12) Learn how to self-coach — the highest expression of coaching.
See the Meta-Coaching website:
www.meta-coaching.org
Author:
- Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, author of more than 50 books, co-founder of the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) and co-founder of the Meta-Coaching System.
