THINKING OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE Coaching Skills for When Your Client Loops

Clients loop. They go round and round the circle of stimulus and response. You know that, I know that, and from time to time a client will even recognize it. And yet, most of the time, they do not. And this is so much true, that even when you are the client, when you meet with your coach to unleash some potential or deal with some interference, when you loop, you probably don’t even know it!

Now from Coaching Mastery and various Neuro-Semantic trainings (even APG), you learned about the two communication loops, the horizontal and the vertical loops of communication. The horizontal loop is the way communication looks to a Behaviorist: X trigger occurs, person responds with Y behaviors of speech and action. X leads to Y. X causes Y. That’s the view from the outside: stimulus–response, event–experience, but of course, this is a shallow and superficial perspective.