INTRODUCING META-COACHING Getting the Core of Coaching Right

Everything called “coaching” isn’t coaching and everyone who calls him or herself a “coach” isn’t a coach. It takes a lot more than merely naming yourself a coach and what you do as coaching to make it so. Branding alone is completely insufficient to establish a solid foundation for these things. Yet today there’s lots of confusion about coaches and coaching. There are lots of pseudo-coaching and pseudo-coaches. There are probably tens-of-thousands of so-called Coaches who are presenting things that are not coaching at all. So, what is the real thing?

In 2001 when I began, one of the conversations that I had with Michelle Duval was about this, “What is coaching? What are the factors that make coaching coaching? How can we best define coaching? At that time we identified five factors (which is still in the book, Coaching Change):

1) conversation, 2) self-reflexive conversation that gets to the heart of things, 3) creates generative change 4) systemically which 6) all serves the purposes of self-actualization. It was later that we added 6) implementation that executes the desired outcome as a plan and gets results which can be measured and 7) facilitation and specifically process facilitation of these processes.