In order to be successful at Meta-Coaching, especially once you’ve progressed over the ACMC level, you’ll need to develop your coaching mirroring skills. These include the two-way communication processes of receiving and giving feedback. Seems easy enough. But they are not the same thing at all. In fact, these are some of the most important abilities you can develop as a coach.
Now you know about getting feedback during and after a practice coaching session. That’s what we do day by day in ACMC. The assist team is always given two days of training in how to do that and even with two days, most do not learn how to truly and effectively do it until they have had that training five times and practiced it over 40 days (5 ACMC experiences). After that, those doing the benchmarking become basically proficient. Now as a process, that particular kind of feedback is feedback given to the benchmark criteria that have been set out in behavioral terms. Because of that, the feedback is primarily sensory-based to a well-developed set of criteria.
When you are working with your customers as a coach, things take on a completely different tone. Now you do not have a well-developed set of criteria by which to give feedback. So, the question is, what should you do? What can you do? The client’s outcome and what it intrinsically entails, in addition to the criteria of a healthy, self-actualizing individual, are now used to develop the criterion (being authentic, congruent, operating with integrity, compassion, good boundaries, etc.).
How do you begin?
You should begin by calibrating to the outputs of all of your clients. It involves adjusting your tone, volume, facial expressions, breathing, etc. to match his state, words, tone, facial expressions, and orientation style. It entails adjusting your behavior in accordance with her predicates, such as eye accessing cues, the congruency of state and expression, and so on. Your experience with NLP has provided you with a plethora of different items to take note of. If you have gained the knowledge necessary to do so, you will be able to observe and listen to your client in order to calibrate your understanding of how they do their business on a fundamental level.
You are now able to give feedback on that now that you have calibrated to how your client thinks, emotes, communicates, gestures, moves, and acts, among other things. Why would you even consider doing that? To put it simply, in order to heighten that person’s self-awareness. This is due to the fact that none of us are aware of “how we come across to others” in the absence of feedback. And how people actually experience us could be strikingly different from how we imagine they are seeing us to be.
One of the first things that coaching gives you is a more accurate sense of who you are. And since you can’t change something, you don’t know about, this is the first step towards change. But there is a catch: a lot of people will be surprised when they hear how they come across. It will hurt their sense of self. It will shake up what they think they know about themselves. So, get ready to hear no and be turned down. “No, that’s not what I did!” And since you don’t believe it, just let it go. If there is a pattern, it will happen again, and you can tell the person, “There it is again.” Sometimes, you’ll have to do these four or five times before the person starts to notice. Here your patience is your expertise.
How do you introduce giving feedback in the middle of a coaching session? There are many ways to do that, here are a few:
- Let me give you some feedback as to how I’m experiencing you right now.
- Was that a sign I just heard? Yes? And what does that mean to you?
- I notice that you are looking up a lot, are you making pictures as you talk? If so, what are you seeing?
- Excuse me, I think that what I heard you sounded incongruent to how you said it. What I heard was a tone of voice that sounded like… Does that fit for you?
- Let me interrupt you just for a moment, what you just did with your right hand, I’m interested in what you’re aware of when you said…
When giving feedback, it’s important not to sound like you’re sorry. Don’t say, “I’m sorry.” Say, “Okay, so it doesn’t fit. I’ll try to pay more attention to what you say so I can understand you better.”
As a Meta-Coach, one of your most powerful tools for making changes is getting and giving feedback in the middle of a session. Review the pages in your ACMC manual that talk about feedback and the seven things that make feedback good before you use them. When you move up to PCMC level, this will be a key part of getting to the heart of things and catching coachable moments.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Certified_meta-coach] FW: 2023 Morpheus #8 WHEN YOU GIVE YOUR CLIENT FEEDBACK by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
