What is Coaching?
“Coaching is person-focused conversation about success, excellence, and performance that empowers a person to move forward in life. Coaching is a catalyst for new ideas, change, and enhanced performance. Coaching is transformative learning.”
L. Michael Hall, founder of Meta-Coaching
“Coaching is a conversation, a dialogue, whereby a coach and coachee interact in a dynamic exchange to achieve goals, enhance performance and move the coachee forward to greater success.”
(Zeus and Skiffington, p. Xiii)
You can find the definition of the International Coaching Federation here
How does coaching differ from counseling, consulting, mentoring and training?
All these fields share some overlap but, in essence:
Some counseling operates from a mentality of seeing people as ‘broken’ and in need of ‘fixing’. Coaching operates from the principle that a person is just ‘stuck’ and, with facilitation, quite capable of moving forward towards their goals.
Consulting often puts a person in the realm of expert and the client as learner or the one ‘being advised’. Professional coaching does not involve advising, only questions that facilitate the client accessing and applying their highest resources.
Mentoring is often associated with guidance from a more experienced or mature person to a younger and more inexperienced person. In coaching, the coach is an expert on change but the client is an expert on him or herself!
Training is often the imparting of skills from one person to another. Whilst coaching facilitates new skills (often as a by-product of the process) a professional coach will make it clear when he/she is taking off his/her coach ‘hat’ and putting on a trainer ‘hat’.
What is Meta-Coaching?
Meta-CoachingTM is a powerful coaching methodology that transcends traditional Performance Coaching, taking coach and client to higher levels - to Developmental and Transformational Coaching. That is why we call it 'meta' meaning a higher level. At these levels profound change occurs naturally and easily. The result is success and transformation.
Coaching at a meta-level means that we work with people from the level of structure and process about their content. It means that the dialogue and relationships we facilitate with our people empower them to run their own brain, access their resources, and achieve their highest outcomes.
What are the benefits of Meta-Coaching?
Meta-coaching will help you to feel more purposeful, more in control of yourself, with greater insight about how you work and do what you do. And as you get those insights not only will you understand more but you will enjoy the freedom and success that comes with transforming those old ‘stuck’ habits into powerful allies that support you in the direction you want to go.
You will also experience:
A clear sense of direction as relates to your goals and how they relate to your life vision(s).
Specific steps for achieving your outcomes with action plans measured against time-frames you agree.
Increased sense of purpose.
Increased feelings of intentionality, purpose and direction.
Increasing ability to ‘walk your talk’.
An increase in personal power with the ability to get yourself to do more of what you need to do. This leads to:
Increased self-esteem, self-confidence and self-efficacy[ your belief that even if you don't know how to do something you can 'make it up as you go along'
Find out more about meta-coaching at: www.meta-coaching.org and
What are the models you use?
The two main fields the models are drawn from are:
NLP
NLP is a model of how we communicate with ourselves and others. In essence, we receive information from the world via our senses and process it inside re-presenting the world to ourselves using our ‘inner’ senses of sight, sound, smell etc. This is the NEURO part. Next, we use language to describe our inner world to ourselves and play it back to others. This is the LINGUISTIC part. Whilst doing these things we actually shape our reality and PROGRAM ourselves to respond to ourselves and others.
You can read much more about NLP here
Neurosemantics
Neurosemantics is a cutting-edge branch of cognitive psychology which explains how we utilise and perform our ‘meanings’. We have ‘meanings’ for everything in our lives and we act them out inside our mind-body’ (this is the ‘inner game’) and then in the world around us (the ‘outer game’).
If our meanings are ‘toxic’ we can find ourselves at odds with the world - our mental ‘maps’ do not match the territory. However, we can also enhance and change our meanings so they become empowering and uplifting and life becomes more ‘meaning-full!’
Neurosemantics is the art and science of working with your meanings until you can live a fuller life.
You can read much more about Neurosemantics here
