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Transformational Coaching | The Range of Transformational Coaching | NLP | How? - Encompassing the What? the Why? and the Who? | The Way of Unfolding | Coaching and Leadership | Performance and Alignment Coaching is the art of facilitating the development of others. An effective coach helps others unfold the potential already present within them, but not yet fully manifest. Transformational Coaching offers an holistic and multi-levelled approach to development, in which we adjust our approach according to the client's need to change, learn, or grow. THE RANGE OF TRANSFORMATIONAL COACHING The processes of change, learning, and growth imply each other and together shape personal transformation. Sometimes, the client primarily needs to adjust his or her way of responding to a particular context. However, behavioural changes are often merely part of a wider process of learning, involving new knowledge and skills. Then our focus may be on helping the client learn how to learn. In addition, the desired changes may only become possible when we address the attitudes, values, and beliefs underpinning the old behaviours or those needed to support new options. At times, realigning the frames used to support action or develop new knowledge and skills brings the client to the edge of his or her current sense of who or what he or she is. Then what is called for may be an expansion and realignment of the client's overall sense of self. The Transformational Coach is sensitive to these different dimensions of development. He or she adjusts the approach taken to support, at the very least, the realization of what brought the client to coaching in the first place. In our approach to Transformational Coaching, we draw extensively on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), returning to the original systemic inspiration of Gregory Bateson, and other outstanding masters of transformation. Central to NLP is the realization that the systemic relationship among body, mind (language and conceptual thought), and senses shapes our experience. In Transformational Coaching, we are sensitive to how the client's way of perceiving and conceiving things is reflected behaviourally in and through the body (and vice versa). NLP was created as a practical method of coaching, well before this term was widely used. At its outset, NLP was focused on identifying and replicating patterns of excellence, through the art of 'modelling' the structure to subjective experience. Unfortunately, this rather precise and innovative approach spawned a plethora of techniques, which displaced the modelling process that had engendered them. Exploring precisely how the client was succeeding or failing gave way to a rather linear and sometimes unthinking attempt to identify a class of problem and match a technique to it. In Transformational Coaching, our emphasis returns to 'modelling' the patterns and structures pertinent to what the client is requesting. This helps us clarify the breadth of the 'problem space' that needs to be addressed to realize the coaching outcomes. HOW? - ENCOMPASSING THE WHAT? THE WHY? AND THE WHO? In Transformational Coaching exploration of the full range of experience is guided by the question of 'how?' More precisely, 'How exactly can the client's inability to meet his or her expectations (or those of others) be transformed into an ability to fulfil those expectations?' To answer this 'how' question with any precision, we need to consider a range of elements. For instance, 'what' is envisaged concretely? And what in the client's current thinking makes the current outcome desirable, possible, and/or impossible (the 'why?' and 'why not?')? And ultimately 'who' is the person in which these challenges are situated and to what extent are the assumptions about who or what he or she is constraining realization of the expressed outcomes of the coaching? If we are fully aware of this full range, we can focus on the particular level of patterning appropriate to realizing the client's outcomes - whether simply behavioural, or attitudinal and cognitive, or the deep epistemological presuppositions determining the development of the person as a whole. 
Such an holistic approach only becomes truly practicable when we realize that change and development in our lives is merely a particular expression of the natural processes of unfolding implicit in the transformation of all things. The 'Way of Unfolding' refers to the universal patterns of transformation present both in our world and in our development over time. The orienting principles of the Way of Unfolding enable the coach to become more aligned with his or her own possibilities, while helping clients realize theirs. Through the holistic perspective of the Way of Unfolding the coach can support the client in the full spectrum of development from simple behavioural change to growth and transformation in the person as a whole. It is sometimes said that leaders are born not made. But in reality most leaders take time to fulfil their potential, with a lot of learning on the way. Coaching can help leaders fulfil their promise. Those who coach leaders well must, in a sense, become leaders too. In our diploma training, we are sensitive not only to developing the skills of the coach, but to unfolding the kind of alignment with the art of coaching that can release qualities of leadership in the coach as well. Becoming effective in any field arises from a deepening relationship between the quality of our performance and our alignment with what we are doing. The coach seeks to address challenges to the quality of performance in the client, not only by focusing on the skills and behaviours of the client, but by attending to his or her alignment with what he or she is doing. Such alignment implies a deeper relationship to our context. In nature, there is a natural flow of evolution and development over time. We perform at our best, when we are aligned with this flow. The Transformational Coach seeks to help the client grow in this broader alignment between self and context. |
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