META-COACHING AND CRITICAL THINKING

To coach is to enable clients to think critically. To coach is to help people look at their own lives, their thinking, reasoning, and decision-making with a healthy skepticism so that they can be more objective about their choices. Given that, no wonder then that this is one of the chief reasons that the primary tool for coaching is questioning. We ask questions to help clients think things through, gain a larger level perspective, and run quality control checks on their lives.

Of course all of this presupposes that you as a Meta-Coach know how to engage in high quality critical thinking and can enable your clients to do the same. Do you? Here’s one way to test yourself —how quickly do you jump into problem-solving? How much does a problem-statement from a client activate you into trying to figure out how to solve it? The quicker you go into problem-solving, the weaker your critical thinking skills.