[Neurons] Adventures in Meta-Coaching Land

[meta]

From: L. Michael Hall

May 21, 2008



ADVENTURES IN META-COACHING


Upon my return trip from Mexico and from 5 days of adventure in Meta-Coaching Land, I had several phone calls to return. As I made some of those calls, I talked to one lady who's considering attending Meta-Coaching this year. She asked me, "What is it like? . . . Really! What is it like to be at Meta-Coaching?" So after I talked a bit and shared some experiences, she said that if I had ever written anything like that she would have signed up a long time ago. "Really?" I commented. Then I asked, "Why?"

"Because you told stories about real people and what actually happens, and it sounds like an adventure; a great adventure."

So, in case there are others who would be interested in our adventures, others who would like to hear about some of the adventures that I had and others had in Meta-Coaching Land, I offer the following.

The Leader who wanted Influence Power

In Mexico on the second day when we had our first benchmarked coaching session, I met a young business leader, a junior manager, 38 years of age, who was there at his own expense because, as he said, "I want to develop the skills of becoming more influential so I'll be ready later this year for promotion to senior management." He told about a 360 feedback he had received and that he was now aware of his need to develop more personal "influence." 

So that was his outcome. He asked to be coached to develop more power to "influence." Pretty general. And the lady who was his coach for that session had a very, very, very hard time trying to get a KPI from him about that! "And how will you know?" she asked again and again because he kept talking about the results-people will follow his lead. He didn't talk about what he would do to elicit that response. After not succeeding at that for 25 minutes, as the benchmarker, I released her from the need to get a crystal clear KPI. "You have enough to start coaching. Let's see where things will go." The session was okay, he got some distinctions that he said were useful. Then the adventure began.

In the session that immediately followed, it was his turn to be the coach. And his client? The universe brought him just want he needed! The young woman was a new mother, had a 18 month baby and her outcome for the session was "to get rid of her thoughts, her tormenting thoughts, that she was 'desperately missing out on the key moments of my baby's life' by being at work for 8 hours a day."

That's when I discovered, and he later discovered, precisely where and how he lacked the power to influence. Oh, he was exact and precise in his questioning. Wonderful, in fact! He asked the right questions, and he asked them at the right time. But there was no emotion in his questioning, no compassion, no passion, no touching of heart-to-heart about her situation. I constantly reached over and touched his arm to interrupt as his consultant and asked questions. He tried. He really tried. Finally he became frustrated enough to stop the session and ask for help.

So I suggested, "speak to the emotion and confirm her as the person in this experience." She had said that the thoughts in her head were a "torment," and she had emphasized the words, "missing out" on key moments in the baby's life. I said speak to these words; speak with a tone that supports her in that experience. When he tried again, the eyes that were beginning to water turned to full and big tears and with his change of tone, suddenly all of the technically correct things he was doing had power, had influence, and had the effect of coaching her to some very useful resolutions. Afterwards, they were both absolutely surprised. And delighted. She found a resolution to her inner torment and he discovered a missing ingredient he was searching for in order to become influential.

Turning on One's Eyes!

Another adventure occurred on Day 3 when an older lady who already had two other coach certifications was struggling with her listening skills. Listening! The simplest thing of all. Or, so she thought. She wasn't even getting close to the minimum benchmark of 2.5, but was getting 1 and 1.5. And she was an experienced coach! "What am I missing?" "Why do they keep marking me down for mind-reading and advice giving?"

Then after that training day, she asked her Team Leader about how to learn to listen more actively and deeply. So the Team Leader spent some time going over the sensory/ evaluative difference. I'm told it only took about 20 minutes, over coffee, and that made the difference. Something clicked in her and as it did, she learned to see a whole new world through that distinction; she discovered on Day 4 that she could distinction between a sensory-based assertion and her interpretations. I discovered this after the Coaching Sessions. She came running up to me and said, "I can see! I can really see! And hear. I heard things that before I would have interpreted and perceived through my learnings. It's like a whole new world! It's amazing! Thank you; thank you; thank you!"

The Secret of Meta-Questioning

On the last day of the 4 days, I introduced a new exercise to learning Meta-Questions. It was a simple one that Omar Salom and some of the other Team Leaders suggested to me. So I took a dozen basic meta-questions, wrote single words for them as a list, asked someone to think of something they absolutely loved, and then used the list of words-one at a time-questions about the experience using the words of the list. Most everybody suddenly "got it." "Oh that's how you create and use meta-questions."

But we had several people who had certifications as Ontological Coaches and one of them came up and said told me how, in that coaching tradition, they use assertions, declarations, requests, offers, and promises and wondered if those could be meta-questions. "Of course, those are meta-levels," I said. "Good!" the person said in relief. I then inquired about the relief. And of course, she had used declaration and promise when she did the exercise. "And what happened?" "It was great! I asked my partner, 'Now if this is your great passion and love, what will you now declare? And what promise can you make to yourself and others?' And it was like the biggest state induction you can imagine!"

This kind of creativity and discovery is part and parcel of the creative adventures that occur in Meta-Coaching Land. What most found in that exercise was that with meta-questions you can gather high quality information, set frames, induce states, create trance states, solidify a resource state, create a new identity, blow out an old attitude, and much more. And of course, that led to many Meta- High Fives and expressions of "How Fantastic!" That's our way of counting when we experience something rich and rewarding. 

Getting to the heart of things in record time 

The final story that I'll share happened on the day prior to Meta-Coaching when we had the training day for the Team Leaders. I invited one of the team to coach another for 20 minutes while all of the rest practiced benchmarking his skills. The presenting problem of a young woman is that she felt disappointed with not having achieved more of the things that she wanted to, and expected that she should have achieved, by this time in her life.

Well, the experienced Meta-Coach began asking outcome questions to create more precision, specificity, and to get a KPI, but before that happened, 6 minutes into the conversation, he had asked a couple meta-questions and suddenly-and I mean suddenly-her heart and soul, the core of her being was completely out in the open and many of the key factors creating the dissatisfaction were on the table. 6 minutes! Not three years of analysis. Not session after session trying to get to the heart of things. 6 minutes!

I got onto him for not getting a precise KPI for how she would know that she had achieved her outcomes by the end of the session; but even as I did I knew that we had just seen magic before our eyes, and more than magic. We had seen one human being creating such a safe place for another for being real and letting one's authenticity just be and all in just a few minutes.

So there you have it. A few adventures in Meta-Coaching Land. And there were many, many more as people developed high quality precision in their communications, took the quality of their relationships to new levels, as new worlds of possibilities were opened, and as the unleashing of that which is the highest and best in people occurred.

So if adventure is one of your goals and values, and if human adventures for the unleashing of self-actualizing potentials fascinates you, then here's to seeing you in Meta-Land one of these days!







L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Neuro-Semantics Ltd., Executive Director
ISNS - International Society of Neuro-Semantics
P.O. Box 8
Clifton, Colorado, 81520 USA
www.neurosemantics.com 
www.meta-coaching.org
www.self-actualizing.org 

Email: meta @onlinecol.com @acsol.net @mindfocus.co.za
(970) 523-7877
(970) 523-5790 FAX
(877) 686-2867 toll free in the USA only
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://eight.pairlist.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20080521/c6f8d9e9/attachment.html>