DIAGNOSING MIS-DIAGNOSES

It is no secret that we humans often get it wrong. We offer a diagnosis about what we think is the situation and what we think should be done about the situation. About two years ago I began noticing clients mis-diagnosing their situation and later I added mis-diagnosing to the Meta- Coaching skill as one of the benchmarks for listening. This is usually an advance listening skill— one that we would expect at the PCMC level.

Mis-diagnosing is common and mostly because of uncritical thinking and because of the prevalence of cognitive distortions, fallacies, and biases. We can get things wrong, can misunderstand, and we do. These errors in understanding then lead us to mis-identify what a situation is which then snowballs into misunderstanding what we should do about it.