The Most Dangerous Coaching Question

The entire self-help industry is based on a simple question: "What do you want?"

With this one question, coaches and life transformation gurus conjure up your wildest dreams, innermost desires and best laid plans.

And what you don't realise is that this one question is precisely what prevents you from achieving those dreams.

In fact, the self-help industry is designed to create one result: Addiction.

Here's why.

The question "What do you want?" contains a presupposition, something which must already be true for the speaker in order for the question to be understood. Whilst all statements contain presuppositions, the important one here is 'want'. To want something presupposes that you do not have it.

'Want' is also an 'unspecified verb', meaning that it is an action with something missing. The missing part is 'to have', so if we expanded a 'want' statement to be fully grammatically correct, the result would be "I want to have..."

Have is not an action, it is a statement of possession. However, the word 'have' shows up in language in the same place as a verb, and it is therefore an unspecified verb, and also a 'lost performative' meaning that the direct action has been lost, muddled up and hidden.

Here's an example: "My boss criticises me". Criticising is not an action, it is not a performative verb. It is a judgement on a series of experiences, edited together in a generalisation, like the trailer for a movie. Similarly, we could summarise the movie Star Wars into the statement "Boy becomes hero". It's true, but it's missing a few details. Maybe sometimes your boss does give you feedback which you don't like, and at other times that's not the case, and at other times you are not interacting with your boss at all. Your assertion is a misleading generalisation which omits the action that you are commenting on.

If I use 'have' in present tense, I might say, "I have a pen". That doesn't tell you anything about how I got the pen. Did I buy it? Steal it? Borrow it? 'Have' is a snapshot in time, and your brain will create a story to explain that snapshot. My mother developed dementia later in life and would create stories to explain unfamiliar items around her. When I bought her a clock, she said, "Oh, where did that clock come from? Oh yes, the neighbour brought it in for me". Five minutes later, my sister had brought it. Five minutes later, another story. None of them were true, from my point of view, but all of them were true for her, at least for a moment. Our brains create stories to explain the world that we see around us, like a prequel for a movie to explain the backstory to a character.

When you use 'have' in place of a verb in future tense, you miss out the steps that you'll take to get you to where you intend to be. Anything in the future is imaginary, yet we act as if it's real. We say, "This time next year I will have a new job". And what are you doing, today, right now, this minute to get a new job? Nothing.

The question "What do you want?" provokes the response "I want to have..." which means that you don't have it now, and you have no idea how to get it. You're not focusing on the first, direct action that you can take, you're focusing on the end result. You're picturing the cake, but you don't have any of the ingredients. And you don't know how to bake a cake. When I say that you have no idea how to get it, that’s based on a very simple observation. If you knew how to bake a cake, and you had the ingredients to hand, you wouldn’t want a cake, you would be baking a cake.

'Want' literally means 'lack', as in this ancient rhyme and proverb:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Focusing on what you want without considering how you'll get it amplifies your sense of dissatisfaction with where you are right now, with what you have in your life right now.

With that amplified sense of dissatisfaction, where do you go? Straight back to your guru for some more daydreaming.

We're so used to thinking in terms of goals, objectives and targets that we have largely forgotten that goals are impossible to achieve, because by the time we start taking action, the landscape has changed and the goal has changed.

Research shows that the only reliable way of making changes in your life is to DO something. NOW.

Move. Get going. Start. Begin.

Goals exist only for a far more important reason - to set a direction of travel. Focus on that instead, and see where it takes you.

As a coach, perhaps a more useful question is therefore, “Where are you going?”

Take a look at my upcoming NLP training dates here for Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer

Stop Selling Yourself

The most common complaint I hear from self employed people and anyone who is personally connected to their product such as an artist or writer is, “But I find it hard to sell myself”.

My advice is simple. Don’t sell yourself. Your family will not thank you for it. It doesn’t matter how much money someone offers you for you, you’ll regret it in the long run because you won’t be able to spend it, and since they now own you, they also own the money they just paid you for you, so it’s never a good deal.

Instead, sell something that you know or have made. You can sell lots of these things without having to give any part of you away permanently.

So not being able to sell yourself is not a problem, because you should never be doing that anyway. Instead, you have to be clear on what your product is.

If you’re a trainer or consultant, your product might be knowledge. If you’re a coach, hypnotherapist or masseuse it might be your expertise.

Selling your time is almost as bad as selling yourself. There is only one of you to sell, and there isn’t much more of your time to go round either. Let’s say you want to work 8 hours a day, which means you can only sell 40 hours a week. An artist might charge more for a limited edition print, so you might value your limited time in a similar way.

Now, I’m not talking about that holy grail of passive income which all the coaching e-books tell you about. The idea is that you write an e-book, or charge people to look at your website, and you create a passive income stream. Hooray! Everyone can have a passive income stream and retire to the coast! As the American life coaches say, you can “monetize your blog”, which sounds painful. The latest thinking from the cutting edge of ‘self-actualization’ is that you write a blog, then turn it into an e-book to sell, then you give the e-book away so that people think they’re getting something of value from you. Whoever thought of that obviously had a day job to pay the mortgage.

No, what I am talking about is putting value on the result of your expertise and knowledge rather than putting the value on the length of time it takes you to use that expertise and knowledge. In other words, how it is that your client benefits from what you know or can do. And what I am talking about here is designed not to create the perception of value but to put real cash in your bank account.

Whatever your views on capitalism, materialism, consumerism or antidisestablishmentarianism, there’s no denying the fact that cash in the bank comes in very handy indeed, especially when it comes to those little essentials of life such as eating and keeping a roof over your head.

By the way, this also implies that the better you are, the faster you can achieve results, so you actually deliver your service in less time. If the client values your service less because it takes less time, they are not valuing their own time. A client who values their own time understands the importance of coaching taking less of it in order for them to achieve the results they want.

If you’re a masseuse, your product is neither a massage nor an hour of your time. You might sell an hour’s appointment, but that’s a scheduling issue, not a sales issue. If I could feel that good after 5 minutes, why would I want to spend an hour there? So what I really want is to feel relaxed, or energised, or whatever you want to feel after a massage.

If you’re a trainer, are you valuing your knowledge by the time it takes to transmit it? If that’s the case then why not charge by the word? By now, I expect you to be charging based on the value of what your learners can do as a result of your training. If their sales performance increases by 10% then you could show an excellent return on investment by charging anything close to that.

So why don’t more sales trainers charge £10,000 for a day’s training that increases the team’s output by £100,000?

Perhaps because no-one else is. Perhaps because they’re not totally confident their training will have that result. Perhaps because they can’t be bothered to measure the return on investment once the initial decision to buy the training has been made and they’re home dry. Perhaps because they can’t appreciate how their time can be worth that much, it just doesn’t seem right when you compare it to an average salary for an employee.

Economists understand the concept of ‘price anchoring’, whereby price is such an arbitrary label that no-one really knows what anything should cost until someone tells them. On that basis, some people are comfortable paying the same amount for a new car that I spent on my first house, even though the car will be worthless long before it needs replacement. The car marketers are selling the concept of ‘newness’ as much as the car itself.

One thing you can ask of yourself is what you’re doing in the time when you’re not ‘delivering’. Professional athletes can win quite a lot of money in a sports tournament. However, there are only so many of those a year and a lot of potential winners, so when you work out their annual salary it’s about equivalent to someone with a full time job. They’ll add to that with advertising and public speaking too. But here’s the thing – it is a full time job. They’re working on their game every day of the week. If they only play one big tournament a year, they spend the rest of the year getting ready for it.

So what would it be like if you spent the whole year getting ready for one piece of work? What would its value to you be then? If you spent a whole year learning, practising and preparing for one project, the client would get an amazing piece of work from you, wouldn’t they?

“Yeah, yeah”, you’re thinking. Pricing on value rather than cost sounds nice but it doesn’t work in practice. Maybe, maybe not. I heard about a company that makes luxury yachts that cost a million Pounds per metre in length. A Rolls Royce car probably costs no more to make than any other Volkswagen. But how many of those products can the market sustain? Not many, because the economy has evolved to sustain a range of products at a range of prices.

No matter what you charge for your services, I guarantee you will not be the cheapest, and I guarantee you will not be the most expensive either. Knowing that you fall within the market system, you can choose how to price your services, not on the cost of your time but on where you want to position yourself in that market.

A student on a NLP Practitioner course once asked me about day rates for training. She felt that she could only charge a certain amount, which was ludicrously low. Up until the point you start doing the work you’re hired to do, the client has no idea whether you are worth what you’re charging. And based on the concept of price anchoring, your work is worth pretty much what you think it is. She said that she was afraid to justify a higher day rate, so I said to her, “It’s not your job to justify it. It’s the client’s job to justify it. It’s your job to ask for it.” A decade later and she is living the dream, having moved abroad, running online training for other coaches and trainers, and giving them advice on what to charge!

Remember, you can’t sell yourself because there’s only one of you to sell, so you can only sell yourself once. Your time is almost as limited, so you could sell it but you would run out of it so quickly that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

Selling the result of your knowledge or expertise is best of all, because it’s a tangible product that you can define in the client’s terms, and there is no limit to how much of it you can sell.

You might only want to spend a maximum of 40, or 20, or 10 hours a week generating that result for your clients, but that’s a lifestyle decision that you make for yourself, not one that your clients make for you.

What you are really selling is therefore not your time and not your ‘self’. You are selling your Intellectual Property, and it’s such a valuable commodity that there are laws to protect it. The reason that most service providers charge on a time basis is that time is the only constraint that limits how much IP you can sell. If your business model is to write your IP down then you’ll charge for access to that, for example with a subscription to a content website, or a cover price for a book. If your business model is to pass that IP onto the client, you’ll charge for training time, perhaps with an element of results-based charging, or something like a license fee for profiling tools. If your business model is to retain that IP yourself then you have to be ‘hands on’ when working with clients, and you have to charge on a time basis. But for all of these examples, what you are charging for is not a book, or website access, or licenses, or time, but for the value created by the application of your unique Intellectual Property.






Take a look at my upcoming NLP training dates here for Practitioner, Master Practitioner and Trainer

Excellence in Coaching Masterclass with Changeworx, Mumbai, May 2016

In May 2016, I'll be joining Amit Pathak of Changeworx in Mumbai to run a Coaching Masterclass.

You can read countless books on coaching models, theories and techniques, you can attend courses on many different types of coaching, and you can gain qualifications from institutions all over the world in coaching. And yet all of this is worthless if you cannot achieve three simple things with your clients. Without these three things, you will never achieve the true depth of connection and engagement that enables all of those wonderful tools and techniques to work. You’ll be like a car mechanic who has a wonderful, sparkling toolkit but no way to get to the engine.

This masterclass will give you those three missing pieces of the puzzle, and show you how to make that magical connection with your clients, so that your work with them will be faster, easier and more rewarding for both of you.

Surely, coaching has been around for so long that other courses and books must have this missing information now? It just doesn’t make sense that so many people can have trained as coaches, all over the world, and not be able to coach.

It’s important to understand that the thousands of people who have trained as coaches can indeed coach. Many of them are good. Some are very good.

But very few are truly great.

If you are happy to be a good coach, you don’t need to attend this masterclass.

If you want to be a great coach, an outstanding coach who gets results for your clients that they never dreamed possible, then you’re one of the few people with the desire and the attitude to get real value from this masterclass.

An Interview with Peter Freeth

A while back, I was interviewed by Chris Delaney, and I just came across the text, so I thought I'd share it here, as I find some of my comments on coaching interesting, and I hope you will too.

1. For people who don’t know you, can you tell our readers a little about yourself and how you coach others?
2. What made you choose coaching as a profession?

I think it chose me, actually. I was delivering NLP training and through that, lots of people were asking me for 1:1 help with various personal and business issues. Towards the end of the 1990s, the coaching market became established, and what I was doing became known as coaching.

3. When you started out as a coach, did you believe that you would come this far?

I didn't have a goal or destination in mind, actually, I just wanted to do something that I enjoyed for as long as I enjoyed it. 20 years on and I'm still enjoying it.

4. What is your greatest success with a client?

That depends on what you value as a measurement. Either 700% increase in profitability for a Business Unit Director, or the CEO of a conference business who recently told me that the coaching session I had with him 10 years ago changed his life and continues to make new opportunities possible for him, such as giving a great speech at his own wedding! Personally, I value the latter example, and in fact the original coaching session is used as an example in my book The NLP Practitioner Manual.

5. How many sessions do clients particularly attend for?

That depends on the client's needs, but my aim from the start is to make myself redundant because the last thing I want is for clients to depend on me; I get bored. I find that for a leader to make a step change in their thinking, behaviour and performance, 6 months is about right, with maybe 4 to 6 sessions over that time.

6. Do you always meet clients in the office or do you ever deliver sessions out in the open?

Actually I prefer busy public places. Lots of coaches complain to me that they find their work very tiring, and the reason for that, I believe, is that in a private room, the coach is having to supply all the energy. In a busy, happy, public space, there's so much positive energy to feed off that it makes the session so much easier. I learned this many years ago by accident when I had planned to do a coaching session with a client who was terrified of public speaking in a cosy, plush, deserted hotel bar. When we arrived, the bar was closed and we were sent to the leisure club where the ladies' aqua-aerobics session had just finished. The buzz and energy in the bar definitely made the session easier.

7. As well as coaching do you use NLP or Hypnotherapy to support your clients?

As a coach, I don't think you can help but use all of your skills and experiences, so yes, definitely. I would say that I don't use either of those tool kits overtly, though, so I don't 'do' NLP or hypnosis, but I do weave their principles into the conversation. For example, I might say to a client, “So, by the time you walk out of that door in an hour's time, how do you want to feel differently about that?” In the cold light of this web page, it's loaded with Milton language and even a linguistic timeline, but in a natural conversation, it just gets the client to think about what they want as an outcome for the session. I do conversational swishes, timelines, squashes, all sorts. I've actually pioneered a number of unique adaptations of NLP techniques which I know are used by many other coaches and trainers, such as doing a swish with a flipchart.

8. What do you do to keep up with the latest trends in coaching?

I don't. Trends are only there for someone to sell something. I only judge myself by my results as measured by my clients. I do keep up with advances in other technologies though, such as neurology, psychology, various aspects of human behaviour and so on. I think that's much more valuable. As much as I struggle to read academic research, it's much more valuable than the 'latest trends'.

9. Do you attend any regular training?

I look for interesting events to go to. I don't think it's necessarily useful to keep going to coach training, I have found that coaches who do that do it for one of two reasons; either they need the CPD points, or they believe that they don't yet know enough to be a good coach. I prefer to go to lectures, business talks and so on, anything to expand the mind. Your local university will have lots of different free events that you can go to.

10. Who in the coaching sector do you look up to?

I don't know anyone in the coaching sector these days. I used to go to lots of networking events and practice groups but I found them to be mostly populated by wannabe coaches looking for clients. I realised that successful coaches don't go to such events, they're too busy with clients! I'm also sorry to say that the people who become well known in a particular field, if they're commercially driven, have to keep reinventing their ideas so that they can keep making money. Even academic figures are often driven by a need to be published in order to keep the research grants flowing and their centres open. I suppose I've never really been one for heroes. Of anyone, I look up to my father the most, but he's not a coach as far as he knows!

11. Why do you believe coaching is important to people from all walks of life?

I don't believe it's important. I believe that access to education is important, for people who want it, and coaching is just one form of education.

12. What is the main benefit from a coaching session?

That the client gets something important for them that they had believed to be just out of reach.

13. Do clients come for one off session or do you meet them on a regular basis?

It depends on what they want. If it's a problem fix, I'll do that in one session. For example, fear of public speaking is a common one, and I'd expect to have that sorted in about an hour or so at most. If it takes longer, the client starts to question too much and begins to believe that their problem must be really serious. So I treat the client with total respect, and their 'problem' with total disrespect.

14. For someone potentially looking for a coach, what questions should they ask before booking a session?

Treat it like any service; a plumber, gardener or whatever. Trust your gut reaction and ask for testimonials, but bear in mind that no coach is going to refer to a client who hated them! An acid test is to ask for a money back guarantee. If the coach says no, they can't have a lot of faith in their skills.

15. Do you have a coach yourself? How does your coach help you?

Not formally, but I know where to go to talk things through.

16. Has having a coach changed your life?

I guess so, yes, though accidentally. My partner gave me a lot of very challenging feedback when we first met, and it made me rethink the whole direction of my life. While I didn't employ her as a coach, that's the job that she really did. We shouldn't think of coaches in only a one dimensional way, but instead think of the role that they play in our lives.

17. What area of expertise do you specialise in?

I suppose it's become two things. Fear of public speaking is so common and so easy to resolve that I end up doing it quite often. The more interesting area for me is modelling high performers. I've written a book about it, Genius at Work, which contains my full modelling methodology. In NLP terms, it's the basis of how you create custom techniques, so whatever the client raises, I model and create a custom intervention for it. When you model lots of people, you start to see patterns of excellence which make it so much easier to coach future clients.

18. How do your friends react when they find out your a life coach?

I'm not a life coach. I'm just a friend. One of the worst things that coaches do is to fail to turn off the coach at 5 o'clock.

19. Has being a coach benefited you personally? How?

It's given me a varied and interesting career.

20. You recently released a book, can you tell me a little bit about it

Genius at Work is a methodology for modelling high performance. The book takes you right through all the basic principles and the most up to date research in brain function, so for example it finally explains how learning and 'anchoring' work without the mumbo-jumbo explanations of many NLP and coaching books. By following the book, you'll be able to identify high performers, extract the essence of their talents and turn the model into a template for pretty much anything. I used it to create a custom coaching program for a well known engineering company, a graduate program for a high street retailer, a development program for an industry regulator and so on. And of course, I use it almost every day to learn really useful and interesting tricks from people who I meet. One of the problems that I see most often in corporate training is the use of 'rituals' and 'incantations'. A ritual is a sequence of actions which is designed to bring about a certain result, a common example being the sales manager who believes that if his team just did what he does, they would be as fantastic as he is. An incantation is a script, a magic spell which is sure to get a certain result, so if a store assistant asks you, in a dreary, deadpan voice tone, “Can I interest you in one of our fantastic special offers today?” you're supposed to fall over yourself to part with your hard earned cash. The high performing sales people who were observed to create these scripts didn't actually say those words, they adapted their interaction for each customer. They didn't have a script, but they did have an underlying, consistent way of thinking about their behaviour and results, and that's what you can get at using Genius at Work, so you end up with people who say something slightly different to each customer but usually get the same, positive result. The script is easier for corporates to teach – or at least they think it is – but it's really counter-productive. When we model high performers, we find the same common traits coming up, every time, in every walk of life or skill set. They under-rate their own skills, they make it look easy and they can't explain how they do it. The Genius at Work approach enables you to get underneath that and unlock the real secrets of their success.

21. You have recently started a radio talk show, how is this going?

N/a

22. Do you coach people in groups or just on a one to one basis?

Both I suppose. 1:1 work looks more like coaching, but when I'm training a group and one person raises a personal issue, I use it to coach the whole group because I know they'll all identify with it in some way. For example, on a presentation skills course, I'll talk to someone who is anxious about the nature of worry, which is actually just an application of our goal setting ability. Of course, everyone worries at some point, so by changing one person's understanding of worry, the whole group benefits without having to step into the spot light and talk about their own experiences.

23. What is your life mantra?

Life's too short to have mantras.

24. Do you have a vision board?

I don't even know what one is. I imagine it's a big board on the wall with all my hopes and aspirations on it. I've seen other people use them, and to me, they're just a big advert for stuff they haven't actually done. They would cleverly add the word, “yet!”, but actually it just seems to be a big excuse for not doing some impressive sounding stuff. What a waste of time! Just get on with your life.

25. Why is goal setting so important?

Oddly enough, I don't think it is. What I mean is that we are goal directed animals, we can't not set goals. So I don't think it's as important to set goals in the sense that coaches are probably familiar with, I think it's more important to be aware of the goals that you already have for yourself and which drive you every day. Only when you're honest about what those are can you modify them to get different results.

26. What is the difference between negative and positive goal setting?

I don't think there is a difference. We're analogue creatures, so we can't directly think in terms of negatives, so a negative goal such as, “I don't want to still be in this job in a year's time”, translates into, “I want to be in this job a year from now, still feeling miserable about it”, because that's the image that you might make in your mind when you verbalise that goal. So a goal can by definition only be something you move towards. You might be motivated away from failure, for example, but that tells you nothing about what direction to move in, so you're likely to go from the frying pan to the fire, as they say. You really want to be in the living room watching your favourite TV show, so there's no need to think of getting out of the frying pan, that's just the triggering event, it's not a goal.

27. What goals have you set for yourself? Did you achieve them?

I have goals such as having so many clients, running so many corporate projects at a time and so on. I promise myself a little reward when I get there, so for example if I win a corporate project I might promise myself a camera accessory. I find that those sorts of goals become reality quite easily.

28. Does coaching work for everyone?

Yes, but not everyone knows that they're being coached!

29. Where do you see yourself in the nest 3-4 years?

I've been asked this question since my first job interview nearly 30 years ago, and I still can't come up with a better answer than, “enjoying myself, somewhere”.

 

Mapping a Process

This post relates to a Facebook group discussion where I was asked to give an example of how we can map out a client's rules at the lowest level, to get round the problems inherent in working at more abstract levels such as metaprograms or neurological levels. These are organising patterns, i.e. they are a feature of your perception, not the other person's behaviour or construction. A butterfly's wings aren't coloured, they only look that way.

Can you dissect a brain and find metaprograms, neurological levels, the soul or the mind? No. Can you find rules? Yes. Oh yes indeed. Unbelievably tiny yet perfectly formed little logic circuits, organised in an astonishingly similar way to those in your computer.

I just put the phone down to a coaching client, a technical manager. This is part of a year's coaching program for a group of high potential managers.

He's stuck at a career point and doesn't know where to go next. His career progress to date has been linear. He likes adding value to his team, helping them to solve problems. He dislikes situations where he has to deal with cross functional teams such as finance, HR, logistics. He finds that frustrating. He spends too much time in 1:1s, and he often intervenes in his team's projects, providing his technical and organisational knowledge to help them solve problems, overcome organisational obstacles etc. That's enough information to work out what's happening.

The process is as follows:

He bases his self worth on 2 things; factual knowledge and approval from his manager. In order to stay in a safe place, he intervenes if a project seems doomed and 'rescues' his team, thus creating dependency because they never need to learn for themselves. He can then win approval from his manager which reinforces the cycle. He can essentially say, "look what my team did!", knowing full well that his team's performance equates his performance, so he is really saying, "look at what I did!" without having to put the spotlight directly on himself and risk any critical feedback.

As he gets promoted, his responsibility increases, so his value based on success increases, however the risk of failure increases too. These two factors reach an equilibrium which prevents him from progressing further. He says that he doesn't know what his next role should be, what he really means is that he doesn't even want to think about it (evidence: over the last month he says he has not thought about it) because a promotion would upset the success/risk balance.

My approach in these coaching sessions is to unfold the process which the managers have created in order to keep themselves where they are. His reaction as I started this was increased stress (evidence: raising voice pitch, calibrated last month face to face, to the point of sounding like Minnie Mouse) up until the point that I provided approval (completing that part of the cycle) at which point his stress level reduced and he agreed that the process described his behaviour exactly.

So the underlying rules are as follows:

My 'superior' or 'guardian' provides my self worth (and judges me based on success or failure)

I am valued for my knowledge

The combination of these two simple rules, played out in the context of his organisational role, generates beautifully complex yet incredibly ordered patterns of behaviour which get the job done, but at great cost to him, in terms of stress, time and of course lack of career progression. Not that this is important to everyone, but at the moment he is in that position as a reaction rather than a choice.

As is always the case with people who are stuck in a cyclic pattern of behaviour (think Six Step Reframe), the problem is never the behaviour, it is the absence of feedback. This is, in my humble opinion, a major insight that I've had in teaching the 6SR and does away with the totally unnecessary parts metaphor and yes/no signals.

Value is relevant in this project because it keeps people stuck in a particular job, creating a 'glass ceiling'. The person values themselves for the skills that got them here but they must let go of that and develop new skills for the next level. The need for self worth tends to push them back into subordinate activities which in turn prevents career progression. So sales managers go to sales meetings, totally undermining the sales consultants and distracting the customer. Plus, as soon as a sales manager gets involved, the customer knows that he can ask for a bigger discount. This behaviour is damaging on so many levels, yet there are sales managers who still involve themselves in sales meetings because it's where their own sense of value comes from. One even said, "I get a kick out of it". The long term development of a business plan and sales strategy and the development of a professional sales team doesn't really compare to getting a 'kick', right now.

Someone has suggested that I am not coaching, I'm diagnosing, presenting the client with an assessment of what is 'wrong' with them. "it seems to be you (the 'expert') diagnosing the problem and reflecting your diagnosis back, which the client either agrees with or is appearing to in order to get your approval as an authority figure"

I don't believe this is the case. After a total of 64 coaching sessions with the group in the last month, I have some confidence that the approach of mapping out the client's process which generates the current behaviour gives them a valuable insight into why they do what they do. In my notes from those coaching sessions, I can see quite a few of the clients have said "You hit the nail on the head", which in my mind means that I gave a succinct definition of something they already knew, rather than telling them something that they didn't know.

My goal is to simplify a complex process that might run over weeks, months or years so that they can interact with it, for themselves, more directly. The usual scenario is that they wonder how they got "here" again and wish that their life could stop going round in circles.

Oh - and about the butterfly. The colour of a butterfly's wings is caused not by pigment but by interference patterns resulting from the arrangement of scales. The interference pattern is perceived by our visual sense as colour. If you look at a pink flower petal under a microscope, it's still pink. If you look at a butterfly wing under a microscope, it loses its colour. Colour is a perception of the observer, not a quality of the object.