Coaching Models Don’t Work
Coaching Models Don’t Work
If you coach as part of your role you are likely to use a model or structure to guide you and guide your client to their desired state or to a new performance level. If you have trained professionally as a coach you will know there are many models of coaching being used. Some coaches will stick to the model they have been given at their training. Other coaches may prefer to choose a model to fit the needs of their client, and there are those who like to take a more spontaneous approach responding to the client in the moment and taking their lead from the client.
One of the earliest models still in use today is the basic GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will). It provides the novice coach with a simple structure to follow, but it has its limitations. For example, it assumes that the client is able to identify and articulate a goal up front, but sometimes the client only has a vague idea of what they want to achieve at the start of coaching. A client may contact a coach because they know what they don’t want and are confused about what they do want.
Other models are more transformational in design, aimed at helping a client make a transition to higher levels of conscious awareness. The more models you know the more flexibility you will have as a coach, and to use them all well requires a breadth and depth of skill. It’s not enough to know a model. It’s also important to know when to leave the structure of the model and when to return to it, as all models put some degree of limitation on your coaching by the frame it offers.
It is important to remember that no matter how much you may love your particular model, a model is only one way of putting a frame around an experience. A model doesn’t actually exist except in the mind, and so the ability to switch models and the awareness of when to leave the confines of a model may be crucial to the outcomes of your client. Remember, the client exists – your model doesn’t. You may be able to draw it on paper, but it is only a representation of a mental frame, and as such it has no workings. So I come to the title of this article that models don’t work – only you can work as the coach. So the question becomes whether the model, or mental frame you are using to shape and so constrain the coaching process is useful or not.
The ability to select and switch models subject to the client’s changing direction and awareness has been a central theme to my executive coaching. Some models are useful at a detail level; others lend themselves to higher plains of thought. Sometimes there is no model at all and I will work from the 4 legs of NLP:
- Have a desired outcome
- Have the sensory acuity to sense changes in the client’s neuro-physiology
- Have behavioural flexibility to adapt to the client’s process
- Move to action at the appropriate time.
NLP Practitioners will be familiar with this model which implies that skill is more important than the model or frame. But frames and models are useful as long as we don’t come to depend upon them, or stick to one regardless of how the client is responding.
One of the most flexible models I have come across for coaching comes from the late David McClelland of Harvard Business School. I also use it as a motivation model for managers as it is so flexible, and it was used to design our company logo Q1. It is based upon the three conditions required for any person to acquire a new skill:
Opportunity
Frame all issues and problems as positive opportunities. So the problem ‘I feel anxious when attending board meetings’ becomes ‘board meetings offer me an excellent opportunity to listen, learn and understand how the senior management team think and make decisions together’.
The verbal reframe doesn’t immediately deal with the anxiety, but you can then use NLP techniques to change anxiety into fascination, curiosity or any other more useful emotional state very simply.
This is also about how coaching is set-up. If a client learns a new approach, strategy or behaviour during a coaching session there needs to be an opportunity to apply the new learning almost immediately after the session. The longer the gap between learning and application the less likely the desired outcome will be realised.
Desire
Your job as a coach is to help your client create the desire to do whatever they now feel would be a positive and fulfilling outcome to go for. Notice the use of the term outcome and not goal. Outcomes are more rigorous than goals because they cover the wider impact of consequences.
Testing desire is also much more than listening for a yes, no, or somewhere on a scale of 0-10. It is more about the tone of voice and other cues given through the neurophysiology that the desire is congruent. NLP Practitioners know all too well that a client who cares about how other people feel over and above how they feel is likely to go along with what is expected of them in a coaching session. This is because they want you as the coach to succeed more than they want to solve their own problem. Other aspects of personality present different challenges to the coach in being convinced that a stated desire really is backed up by the energy and motivation to succeed.
Know-How
There are some coaches who use an eductive process exclusively, that is they avoid contaminating the client’s thought process with any of their own thoughts by only asking certain questions. This may work for some people. When you can also give your client some feedback about how they are thinking, how they are creating certain emotions, and how they are creating their own limitations you have given your client some know-how. When you couple know-how with desire and opportunity you create the conditions for learning and change.
A great deal of our thinking and behaviour is under our conscious radar. Like an iceberg where the majority is under the waterline, we are only aware of the tip. We are unaware of so many aspects of our own thinking and behaviour. So to help a client increase their awareness can have significant gains as the client is able to take the awareness and make simple changes.
Regardless of which model you use for coaching, if you want to increase your success rate you need to develop skills. The more you can learn about how you think, behave and motivate yourself the more you will be able to relate to your client’s limitations and strategies that are not working so well. NLP has so many tools to help a coach develop their skills to a high level. This is why the top coaches train in NLP.
Models are useful, but they are not the coaching. It’s the skill that does the work.
Contact us on 0870 762 1300 for information about NLP training.
David Molden
