The Zen of Coaching

A mountain is a mountain when we start, a river a river. As we learn, the mountain is no longer a mountain, and the river a river. In mastery, the mountain is still a mountain and the river a river.

 Zen Saying

 What is the function of Coaching?

 With a large majority of coaching that I listen to and see as an assessor, supervisor and trainer, form seems to take over the function of coaching. More importance is paid to the structure of coaching in the form of competencies and assessment indicators. Coaches 'explore' through canned, powerful questions and copycat, cookie-cutter techniques, most of which are transactional and cognitive. The client responds with cognitive perceptions, which are already twice corrupted in the brain's neural networks, in a garbage-in, garbage-out mode. Such coaching is ineffective and not aligned to the function of coaching.

 Questioning and exploration in a cognitive transactional and superficial way, not customised to client's needs in the moment, is not in alignment with the true function of coaching. The true function of coaching is to create awareness within the client about beliefs that are limiting them from empowering their value potential and being their better self, whatever may be the semantics of the definition. Coaching deals with the human mind and psyche, a living energy. It is not a structured Newtonian science-based competency framework. it's quantum exploration in the Einsteinian manner, treating the client as an energy being, as is the person interacting with them as a coach.

What is masterful coaching?

 Coaching at its best is a masterful healing process. It can empower people out of the emotional traumas of painful experiences, which may not be possible to treat even with extensive long-term therapy. Most therapy requires recourse to exploration of the past. Coaching is a present moment, client-centric interaction involving the exploration of painful memories stored as one's sensory perceptions in the body. Unfortunately. Most coaching offered in a transactional cognitive solution format, providing mentoring and advising, does nothing to create sustainable awareness in the client to reframe and heal chronic traumas caused by grief and invalidation.

Masterful coaching helps make unconscious incompetencies that limit one's potential conscious. The coach skilfully partners with a client in a trustful and safe space with confident presence to create awareness within the client to reframe these conscious incompetencies into conscious competencies. These conscious competencies with sustained follow-up and committed practice help form new habits in the unconscious competency mode of flow. With mentored cognitive solutioning that passes for much of coaching, the client is spoon-fed pre-digested and regurgitated advice that can best be a band-aid solution and never a sustainable new behaviour pattern. Unconscious competency flow state requires neoplastic changes based on deliberate awareness and practice. This is coaching 101.

 The Zen of Coaching

 There are three core critical elements to coaching that heal at the mastery level. These are Self, Systemic and Spiritual coaching. A coach must work on oneself to dissolve conditioned negative memories that limit one's potential. What I see for the most part is that coaches carry serious baggage themselves and attempt to coach others to remove similar limiting beliefs, causing negative behaviour. This is hypocrisy, giving coaching a bad name. This is not very different from an obese, unhealthy person claiming to specialise in helping people lose weight and become healthy. At Coacharya, our first principle is to help people self-coach themselves to heal themselves. Only then can they be ready to practice on others.

During this process of learning to self-coach, one learn to coach systemically. What this means is that outcome desires are not selfish, limited to one's interest alone. They take into account the value added to people around them, those who impact them and those who they impact. The systemic coach partners to reframe self-centred, ego-centred desired outcomes of the client into systemically beneficial outcomes to the ecosystem.

This, in essence, is spiritual coaching, adding spiritual intelligence to Rogerian client-centricity elements of unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence through the felt sense that we are all fragments of the same energy, entangled and all with undiscovered infinite potential.

This is the Zen of Coaching. We return to our innate nature.

Reflective Action: Reflaction

 Learn to meditate. Learn mindfree gamma level energy meditation that helps focus and heal, you and others. This is no longer spiritual fantasy, but evidence in neuroscience and quantum physics. Coaching in spiritual intelligence needs a meditative practice.

 As for others, AI is ready to take your practice over!

 Contact support@coacharya.com to learn more.