HOW TO REASON AS A META-COACH

When a client sits in your coaching chair and you ask the opening question, “What do you want to achieve in this coaching that is the most important thing that will make a transformative difference?” your client will begin to give you “information.” But as you know, that information will very often be vague, confusing, abstract, and contaminated with all sorts of cognitive distortions and biases.

What then? What’s a Meta-Coach to do? Ah, that’s where your work begins—helping your client to communicate with clarity and precision. How do you do that? Use the Meta-Model distinctions and questions of course! When you do that, you actually help your client to think more clearly— usually more clearly than they have ever thought. That’s because the Meta-Model questions keeps inviting your client to go back to the experience and the referents to map it more accurately. This, in turn, enables him to speak more explicitly and begins the process of thinking and speaking with precision. It enables critical thinking.