Meta-coaching is a powerful and effective way to help people reach their potential. It is a process of coaching people toward self-discovery and self-improvement. It is a process of deep exploration and reflection with the aim of creating positive changes in one’s life. It is not simply about giving advice or teaching skills. Rather, it is about helping people to uncover their natural potential, develop insight, and take action.
Meta-coaching focuses on the bigger picture and long-term goals. It uses a holistic approach to help people identify their strengths, weaknesses, and goals. The aim is to help people become more self-aware, increase their self-efficacy, and create strategies for achieving their goals.
The meta-coach competency involves a range of skills and knowledge. Competent meta-coaches demonstrate the core coaching skills such as listening, questioning meta-questioning, etc. A good meta-coach is able to ask effective questions and probe deeper in order to uncover the root cause of any.
The question is, how can you know when you are truly competent as a Meta-Coach?
True Competence
What then is true competence based on? How can you tell if you are competent? True Competence is based on facilitating a client’s self-actualization of his or her inner potentials. This requires numerous abilities.
#1. The Ability to take a Person Inside
Coaching is inside–out. An effective coach enables a client to go inside to his inside world, to his meta place. This is not easy. Most coaches actually do not know how to do this. Many are afraid of doing it. Real coaching is a conversation that gets to the heart of things—the person’s internal meanings. And most of these are not conscious to the client.
As a conversation like none other, coaching gets to the heart of the matter by taking the client inside into the meta place where you enable him to set new frames, deframe old ones, learn new meanings, unlearn old ones, install updated programs for operating in the world, detecting potentials, developing them, and unleashing them. That’s a lot!
#2. The ability to demonstrate the Coaching Skills
If you are truly competent, you can demonstrate the coaching skills on demand. To do that, over-learned them so they are now habituated practices you have at automatic access. In Meta-Coaching this includes the skills required to create a trustful relationship, questioning for deep exploration, feedback loops, induction so that the client has an experiential experience, framing skills, patterning and the boundaries of the field. And again, that’s a lot!
#3. The Ability to Measure Competence
Measurement is critical because if you can’t measure something, then you have no way of knowing if something is real or not. You have no way to tell when you have succeeded or failed in reaching a goal. Conversely, if you can measure it—you can manage it! In Meta-Coaching we have created a behavioral and operational definition of every one of the core and advanced coaching skills. We also have a Benchmarking Model by which we can construct benchmarks for the goals of our clients.
How to Become a Competent Meta-Coach
First, familiarize yourself with the different types of coaching approaches. It is important to understand the different approaches and how they can be applied to help clients reach their goals. You should also read up on meta-coaching theory and its relationship to other coaching disciplines. This will give you a better understanding of the roots of meta-coaching and how it is different from traditional coaching.
Second, you can practice the skills you learn. Allow yourself to engage in extensive, purposeful practice with other Meta-Coaches. Join or form a deliberate practice group and do it as part of your ACMC training. Send a video of your coaching sessions to someone who has received formal benchmarking training. It is important to get hands-on experience in meta-coaching so that you can develop your skills and become more competent in the field.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Meta-Coaches] 2022 Morpheus #54 ARE YOU TRULY COMPETENT? by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
