Why Should I Choose Meta-Coaching?
Standard “personal” coaching is a facilitation process that helps people understand where they are and helps move them to where they want to be. Most coaching models focus on basic goal setting and measurable, tangible performance outcomes; they break down the steps from A to B and then encourage and challenge the client along the way.
Meta-Coaching involves this and much more.
You’ll discover meaning and achievement beyond measurable goals. The Meta-Coach gets inside the client’s experience to tease out their internal thought process, their feelings, attitudes and intentions to identify their inner structure. The Coach reveals this structure to the client, helps them identify intangible struggles and empowers the client to achieve beyond what they thought possible. Meta-Coaching is for well-adjusted individuals who crave “the edge” they need to succeed, are open to self-reflection and difficult questions and are willing to do the personal work the Coach asks of them.
Coaching is by its very nature a field or discipline that works at a higher or meta position to the client and the client's experience. As a sports coach does not have to be an expert in the sport himself, he or she does have to know how to get the best out of the player. A meta-coach is an expert in structure and process rather than in content. The client is his or her own best expert in content.
The Meta-Coach knows how people function and operate and is guided by the six models of communication, change, reflexivity, implementation, systems, and self-actualization. With that meta-knowledge and meta-skill, the meta-coach is skilled in getting the best out of the client.
What is Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)?
NLP is a communication model that describes how language (linguistics) affects our body and physiology (neurology). Words and symbols work indirectly, not directly. Words and symbols work in our mind like a map about a territory ("The map is not the territory") just as our inner mental movies of sights, sounds, sensations, smells, etc. is not the external experience. But, and this is the magic of symbols, the movies we play in the theater of our mind do send messages (and even commands) to our nervous systems about what to feel and how to respond and so create our internal reality.
As a model of human functioning, NLP describes the processes and patterns (programming) that is currently governing our mind-body system and the processes and patterns that could enable us to "run our own brain" in new and much more resourceful ways. NLP is about how to change the communication (mapping, movie-making) so that we can experience more resourceful states of mind-and-body. (NLP definition excerpted from metacoachfoundation.org)