The field of Coaching is still new, evolving, growing, and finding its way as it slowly moves toward becoming a profession. Will it eventually become a separate and distinct profession? Yes, I think so. When? Who knows?! There’s much to be worked out before that happens and mainly deciding on what it is.
Yet while a clear definition of what coaching is is still debatable and undecidable within the field of Coaching, we are much clearer in Meta-Coaching.
For us coaching is the process facilitation that unleashes potentials in individuals and groups for pushing the limits of meaningful performance.
Now that’s a Coach’s definition. People who coach others facilitate the very processes (psychological, mental-emotional, personal, semantic, physiological) that enable a person to actualize a significant meaning into their behavior. So if you are a consultant, trainer, salesperson, leader, manager, or parent— this takes your professional skills to the next level.
Yet coaching isn’t just for coaches. Coaching facilitates processes so that a person can become more fully what one can become. Who knows what a person can become? The person. That’s why coaches don’t teach, don’t train, don’t counsel, don’t do therapy— the coach doesn’t know what is best for the client. Only the client knows— except that he or she usually doesn’t know consciously. Yet at some level the client knows and that’s what the coach facilitates— that deep knowing.
So another way to think about the coaching process is to recognize that it isexpert level communications. When you use the “coaching” processes, you actively listen at multiple levels, you ask empowering questions, you set frames, you induce states, you give feedback, you support, and in a word — you develop your relational and influential skills to a whole new level.
Now in the field of Coaching, Meta-Coaching has become a leading model in framing the process of effective coaching in a highly systematic way. The design is to provide a Professional Coach the ability to know what to do,when to do it, how to do it, with whom to do it, and why to do it. The design also is to establish the field of coaching in the unique psychology for psychologically healthy people who want to change and develop, namely,Self-Actualization Psychology.
To do that end I have been putting the models and processes that we use in Meta-Coaching in a series of book so that the full process is set out.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
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