MODELING AS AN ASPECT OF COACHING

What is it that you’re attempting to do when you work with a client? Think for a moment how you would answer that question. Okay, here is mine. First and foremost, you are working to understand your client. Now what makes this quite challenging is this— you have to understand your client on your client’s terms. That is, first you want to understand the person sitting before you in the same way that the person thinks about him or herself. If you don’t do that, you can’t get to understanding’s first base. In the field of psychology (whether it is remedial, therapy or generative, coaching), to “understand” someone in your terms and on your terms— your models and your theories is not to understand the person.

This was one the learnings that came out of the Human Potential Movement and that the NLP developers found in Perls and Satir— they started with the person. They went to the person’s model and understanding of the world so that they could speak that person’s language. Today we call that matching or pacing. I like how Shelle Rose Charvet describes this. Metaphorically she says, “Go to their bus stop” and meet them there.