META-MODEL COACHING

“Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.” Warren Buffet (quoted in Seeking Wisdom, Peter Bevelin, 2003)

In the field of investment, of buying companies, negotiating for good deals, Warren Buffet came to the understanding that bad terminology prevented good thinking. Now isn’t that amazing! Of course, we have known that in NLP for over four decades. And linguists have known it back to the beginning of the 20th century. And Korzybski developed General Semantics in the 1940s to address the problem of bad terminology.

Is it any wonder then that you as a Meta-Coach focus a lot of your coaching on words, definitions, statements, the propositions that clients present, their goals, beliefs, etc.? How they code their understanding tremendously determines their success in life. For this reason, as a coach, you listen very, very carefully not only to what a person says, but how the person says something. What words does he use? What phrases does she rely on to try to communicate her meanings? How functional or dysfunctional are the language forms?