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ARE YOU UP TO THE CHALLENGE OF COACHING?

Meta-Coaching is not for everyone –and it may not be for you …

This article may be dangerous to your peace of mind. If you continue reading, you may find yourself squirming in your seating, questioning yourself, and beginning to feel uncomfortable with what you’ve done with your life so far.

This is precisely our goal, because this is what Meta-Coaching is truly about. If you’re not in a place where you don’t want or need to be shaken up, have your equilibrium disturbed, or be challenged about your untapped potentials, then don’t proceed!

… If you’re still reading, then let’s plummet into the heart of Meta-Coaching and see if you’re up to the challenge. Today the Meta-Coaching revolution which is spreading around the world at lightning speed has become the second fastest growing industry after IT. Why is this? What’s going on?

What is going on is a change in the way people are leading, managing, empowering employees, finding their true passions, and actualising their talents. What is happening is a paradigm shift about how people live and work. It’s a paradigm shift about how they are finding meaning in life.

Yet in spite of this revolution in business and self-development, Meta-Coaching is still not for everyone. This is because not everybody can handle it. Not everyone is ready for Meta-Coaching.

For example, Meta-Coaching is definitely not for people who are traumatised or psychologically damaged, nor is it for those without the necessary skills and competencies in a given area. And also, Meta-Coaching is not for the faint of heart or those whose life goals reflect only peace and tranquillity.

What does it take to be a good candidate for Meta-Coaching?

As Meta-Coaching differs from counselling and therapy, you have to be psychologically sound to begin Meta-Coaching.  This is because Meta-Coaching involves a tough challenge for those who are courageous enough to look at their performance and possibilities, to stretch to higher goals, and to reach within and demand the best of themselves.

Meta-Coaching is a methodology and process designed to do the following:

• Awaken you to all of the untapped potentials and possibilities asleep within
• Mobilise your internal and external resources for becoming more, feeling more, thinking better, experiencing more, having more and contributing more
• Challenge you to create new and more expansive descriptions of a bold and compelling outcome, that sets forth an exciting direction
• Facilitate the actualisation of your new game into actual behaviour, which takes performance to a new level of achievement in actual behaviour and new habits
• Unleash new potentials, unique talents and aptitudes, and incredible possibilities.

In a word, Meta-Coaching is all about self-actualising.  It is about enabling you to more fully express all that lies within so that you are more fully true to yourself and your potentials. Meta-Coaching is about using your ego-strength to stretch forward, optimise talents into marketable skills, translate great dreams and visions into pragmatic actions and organisations, and embrace the chaotic and ambiguous nature of the future to leave a great legacy.  Now, isn’t that a great adventure?

Prerequisites for the Meta-Coaching Adventure

There are several prerequisites for taking on a coach and entering into a Meta-Coaching programme or relationship.   If you think Meta-Coaching may be the next step for you, then you will need the following:

1. Sufficient and Robust Ego-Strength
   
   Therapy is the discipline, field, and profession for building up ego-strength when it is weak, fragile, or traumatised. Therapy nurtures and empowers clients to learn to accept and face the world and self for whatever it is without the ego-defences of denial, rationalisation, suppression, compulsion  etc. Therapy is the discipline of nurturing, re-parenting and dealing with problems and hurts.
   
   Meta-Coaching, by contrast, assumes that you have sufficient ego-strength, not to just become “okay,” but to fully actualise your talents and aptitudes. Meta-Coaching assumes that you have “dealt with the past” and are already fully in the present - ready to journey out to the future to create wild, ambitious, and even audacious goals.
   
   Meta-Coaching is about challenging, pushing, awakening, and activating your best dreams.  To do this, a truly competent coach will have a fierce conversation that “quickly gets to the heart of things” to challenge you. It takes a lot of ego-strength to face that.
    
2. A Robust and Positive Attitude About Mistakes
   
   Because Meta-Coaching is future-oriented, about actualising great dreams, and about stretching forth to achieve impossible goals, as a Meta-Coaching client you have to have enough ego-strength to look at your  weaknesses, failures, and mistakes full in the face - without blinking, without caving in, and without becoming defensive. The Meta-Coaching process embraces mistakes as part of learning. In Meta-Coaching, you learn to look for failures with excited anticipation for breakthroughs, learning and change.
   
   This demands a whole new and radical frame of mind, a mental frame that knows that new opportunities for growth and development lie inside of your failures and mistakes. To be ready for full-on Meta-Coaching, you need a reframe of failure as learning and feedback that’s “in the muscles” so that failure is nothing to fear and everything to embrace
    
3. A Receptive Openness to Feedback
   
   In order to take the process of looking at failures and mistakes for the purpose of using them as stepping stones to the next level of development and achievement, you have to have the ego-strength to be openly receptive to feedback about what didn’t work, and what needs refining and correcting. It takes a solid psychological state to be able to look into a mirror that holds nothing back, that reflects back to you precisely how you’re doing, coming across, and being experienced by others.
   
   Openness to feedback includes a willingness to be held accountable to what you say you want. The power of Meta-Coaching lies to a great extent in this accountability factor. In fact, when you  contract for Meta-Coaching, you contract that the coach will not let you off the hook, but will hold your agenda first and foremost and hold your feet to the fire.
    
4. A Passionate Commitment to Your Full Development
   
   Since Meta-Coaching is not about the past, not about getting over old things, but about creating a bold, compelling, exciting, and challenging pathway to the future, it demands (yes, “demands”) a full commitment to yourself. This is where Meta-Coaching frequently begins, awakening in a client a bigger vision and dream about what’s possible in order to get that commitment.
   
   Coaches frequently ask, “Are you willing to do anything it takes to make this dream of yours become a reality?” This is also part of the accountability within a Meta-Coaching relationship—to grant a coach the right to call your bluff and to keep having the fiercely focused conversations about what you are doing or not doing that might be selling you short of your highest values and visions.
   
   In this, you have to be willing to be open and vulnerable to your needs, drives, possibilities, beliefs, values, meanings etc. And it is the embracing of this vulnerability that makes your Meta-Coaching effective.
    
5. A Passionate Commitment to Change and Transformation
   
   While therapy is about remedial change, that is, remedying things that are not right and changing things so that they are right for a person to feel “okay,” normal, and ready to get on with life, Meta-Coaching is about a different and higher level of change. Meta-Coaching is about generative change - generating new patterns and lifestyle changes. It may be evolutionary change as you evolve in your self to become more and different. Or it could be revolutionary change as you change your paradigms about life, self, others, and change your very direction in life.
   
   Meta-Coaching clients are change embracers. They are people who think about change, plan for it, and long for it. They are not satisfied with the status quo, and in fact, often embrace the ambiguity of the unknown for the joy of the adventure itself.
    
6. A Passionate Embracing of Ambiguity and Dis-Equilibrium.
   
   When Abraham Maslow distinguished lower and higher needs, he distinguished two kinds of motivations, one to gratify needs so that they would go away and leave one in peace and equilibrium. The other is the meta-needs or self-actualisation needs, which enable us to express our higher drives. These don’t make the drive go away as gratification does with the lower needs. Gratification of self-actualisation meta-needs amplify the needs and create even more dis-equilibrium.

Summary

As Meta-Coaching is so challenging, exciting, disorienting, and discomforting,  it certainly is not for everyone. It is  for the courageous, the change-embracer, the person ready to actualise new potentials, the person ready to make paradigm changes and transformations and so for someone with lots of ego-strength.

Are you ready for Meta-Coaching? Could Meta-Coaching be the methodology to take you to the next level of your excellence? Are you ready for this adventure? In the Meta-Coach Training System™ we have a worksheet about coach-ability. You may want to take it to determine if you’re ready for the intensity and ferocity of a Meta-Coaching relationship.

Click here to find out more