BECOME A PROFESSIONAL

Just because a person has the ability to open his or her mouth and say words does not mean that they can communicate effectively, precisely, or persuasively. To become a professional communicator requires a lot more than that. Yes, talking is easy. To do that all that’s required is a mouth and vocal chords and the ability to shout air through those vocal chords.

Communicating is an entirely different story. That requires a communion (co-union) of understanding between two people, not necessarily agreement, but at least understanding. And to achieve that, the persons exchange messages of their meanings. They listen, they speak, and they listen some more and they keep checking out what they heard until they are able to present their understanding of the other person’s message (and meaning) to that person’s satisfaction. Then, when message-sent and message-received is the same, the process begins anew.

To be truly professional as a communicator (as a leader, manager, parent, lover, collaborator, etc.) you have to patiently and persistently listen and support, question for precision and question for meaning frames, receive and give feedback, and induce state. And these seven skills are the seven core skills that are training and benchmarked in Meta-Coaching, which also explains why you can receive either a Meta-Coach ACMC Certificate or a Professional Communicator Certificate.

The fact is that few people are able to effectively communicate at a professional level. Communicationally, they are lazy and sloppy. They listen passively and defensively. They either do not know how to listen actively, deeply, or supportively, or are just not able or willing to put in the effort to do so. After all, it does take effort. Lots of it! That’s because if you truly seek to understand a person and what that person is attempting to communicate, there are so many things to listen for and sort through. And there are many levels that you can learn to listen for.

So with questioning. When it comes to exploring with another person, most people do not have a clue as to how to effectively question and have horrible habits of asking leading questions, unuseful questions, and accusatory questions. Asking grounding questions that index for precision is an art that even many NLP-ers who know the Meta-Model don’t know how to actually do in practice. They know it intellectually, but when it comes to doing it in an actual conversation, the theory doesn’t inform the words coming out of their mouths.

And then there are the self-reflexive questions that enable a person to probe into the back of a person’s mind, into their Matrix-world of ideas and premises that govern their thinking, understanding, and believing. These meta-questions are questions that enable and facilitate depth and intimacy and asking them involves several sub-skills. They involve recognizing frames, inquiring about the meta-levels, holding them to make a jump to the next meta-level, etc. Professional communicators can do that and know that what they are doing, those who are not professional cannot.

Then there are the mirroring-skills of receiving and giving feedback in real time in the conversation. Again, not easy for the untrained. That’s because to receive such is to calibrate to a person while he or she is speaking and not preparing your response. It requires total and completely presence to that person and understanding of what you are seeing and hearing while they are speaking. Such calibration skills, as Paul Ekman has demonstrated and as is taught in quality NLP courses, are clearly learnable. But they are not learned in a day or even a week; they require practice over time with many different people.

Now while we use these core communication skills in Coaching Mastery (Module III of Meta- Coaching) as the core coaching skills, they are equally the core communication skills for selling, for leading, for managing, for parenting, for loving, for mediating conflict, for negotiating, and any other communication discipline. So the behavioral benchmarks for these core communication skills are at the same time the behavioral benchmarks for leadership, persuasion, management, etc.

If you are now ready to become a professional in any of these disciplines, the next Coaching Mastery programs are in the following places at the following dates:

• Hong Kong is July 31— August 7. Team Leaders: July 30. Mandy Chai

• Auckland New Zealand — August 14—21. Team Leaders: August 13. Lena Gray

• Pretoria South Africa — Sept. 00 Team Leaders: Sept. Cheryl Lucas, Carey Jooste.

• Stockholm, Sweden — Oct. 7— 14. Team Leaders: Oct. 6. Sara Lee.