Introducing Meta-Coaching (part 1)
Getting the Core of Coaching Right
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

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 5) 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.

Recently I looked at these things with another prism, namely, what you have to get right in order to have effective coaching that is true to what coaching truly is.  Here is what you have to get right for effective coaching:
(1)  You have to get your Psychology right.
(2)  You have to get your Objective right.
(3)  You have to get the Change right.
(4)  You have to get your Epistemology right.
(5)  You have to get your Conversations right.

For details of the above five aspects, please read Introducing Meta-Coaching (part 2)

What then is Meta-Coaching?
It is a conversation like none other that gets to the heart of things— the heart of a matter to facilitate generative, transformative change by activating and mobilizing a client’s internal resources thereby empowering the person as we confront his or her highest visions and values to support them making real their inner potentials.

As such, Meta-Coaching is an intense, intimate, and fierce conversation to actualize new possibilities.