COACHING YOUR CLIENTS’ COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

As a Meta-Coach, you know what cognitive distortions are and why they are important to you as a coach. At least I hope you do. We cover them in NLP trainings and in ACMC and describe how they show up linguistically in the language of your clients. We also send you the list of the cognitive distortions so that you can make that part of the reading task of your clients.

Now, in one sense, they are simple and obvious. They reflect childish thinking and that’s precisely what makes them unfit for adult life. In another sense, they reveal a complexity in the thinking patterns— a complexity that distort good map-making and effective representing and encoding of information. And as distortions— some of them are also Meta-Model violations of well-formed maps. You can also count on something else that’s really critical— they undermine and sabotage learning. The more a person, including you, have any of these cognitive distortions, to that extent, one’s learning is reduced in quality.