From: L.
Michael Hall
Meta-Coach Reflections #13
April 22, 2009
META-COACHING AND PROBLEMS
What is the relationship between coaching and “problems?” We know that coaching
differs from therapy in that therapy focuses on healing, fixing, and re-parenting. The
problems that therapy addresses are those of trauma that causes a person to
become stuck in the past with something that serves as “unfinished business.”
Serious personality problems involving low ego-strength and/or the distorting of
one’s mapping (framing) of personality undermines a person’s psychological health
and leads to various forms of pathology. This is the domain of therapy.
Counseling, another domain of psychology, is a lighter form of therapy and focuses
on enabling and equipping people to cope with similar problems about one’s self,
one’s values, talents, skills, career, relationship, etc. Yet while the problems are a
lighter version, they are still focused on the past, ego-strength, and support rather
than challenge.
Coaching clients also bring problems to the coaching session for the coaching
conversation. But what are the problems appropriate for coaching? Similar to the
kind of conversation you can have with a client (Reflection #9), there are different
kinds of problems that clients will want to bring and work through. As a coach, you
might want to put this question in your mind so that as you listen to your client—you
keep an openness to the kind of problem that the client is attempting to put before
you:
I. “What kind of a problem is this?”
II. “Am I you working on the right kind of problem?”
III. “What problem is the real problem, the core problem, my client is trying to make me
aware of?”
The good news is that psychologically healthy people also have problems and they
always will. If you are growing, stretching, learning, and taking risks, and breathing,
you will have new problems arising from time to time. This is good. It means you’re
alive! And once we use therapy and training to get beyond the self problems, then
we’re ready for the more useful problems— problems that center around unleashing
more and more of your potentials and making a positive difference in the world.
Kinds of Problems:
1) Motivation: goals, outcomes, needs, gratifications.
Is the problem a problem of motivation, energy, focus, or goals?
2) Coping:
Is the problem that of how to cope with gratifying his or her needs?
Is it learning how to cope with job, family, time, etc.?
3) Decisions: choices, will, indecision.
Is the problem about how to make a decision? Criteria for decision-making?
Is the problem about resources for handling risk? Taking a chance?
4) Values: Standards, criteria, etc.
Is the problem about determining what’s important?
Is the problem about figuring out how to prioritize values?
5) Language: critical thinking skills, operationalizing terms, (meta-model,
benchmarking) cognitive distortions, dichotomizing.
Is the problem about how to think or how to define things?
Is the problem how to measure something, especially an intangible?
Is the problem about a thinking pattern —a cognitive distortion?
6) Confusion: lack of clarity, precision, focus.
Is the problem about sorting out information and creating a clear movie in the
mind?
7) Inhibition: by taboos, prohibitions, fears, worries, apprehensions, seriousness,
uncreative.
Is the problem that there’s a frame in the back of the mind that’s prohibiting a
required response?
Is the problem an interference by some belief frame?
Is the problem due to too much seriousness and too little humor and
lightness?
8) Meanings; frames, semantically over-loaded things, semantic distortions.
Is the problem from having semantically over-loaded something with too much
meaning?
Is the problem failure to recognize the meta-levels in the back of the mind?
Does the problem need exposed through ferocious meta-questioning?
9) Actions: Procrastination, impatience, reactivity, fears.
Is the problem one of taking action, taking effective action, getting oneself to
act?
Is the problem one of under-performance?
10) Focus: attention deficit (ADD).
Is the problem too many attentions and not enough strength of intention?
Is the problem having too much of a meta-program of options and not enough
ability to follow-through on a procedure?
11) Release: letting go, de-activating, suspending meaning.
Is the problem one of holding onto the past or old meanings?
Is the problem one of needing more acceptance and permissions?
Is the problem one of failing to suspend meanings that no longer enhance the
quality of life?
While this obviously is not a complete list of problems, it does suggest some of the
problems you’ll face as a coach. Part of your work and value as a coach is to enable
your clients to distinguish real problems from pseudo-problems. These include
symptoms, riddles, and paradoxes. If the problem you coach your client to solve is a
symptomatic problem, your client will return to work on it again, and again, and
again. After all, it’s a symptom of a problem; not the problem. If the problem you
coach your client to solve is a mere riddle— it also is not a real problem, but a
linguistic frame inventing problem that doesn’t really exist. And if the problem turns
out to be a paradox, it isn’t something to solve as it is to accept the confusion of
levels with a frame.
To your Coaching Creativity in facilitating great problem-solving!
