Since that muppet went on Dragons Den and wanted to run a Live Coaching website I’ve been assaulted with a hail of questions on my opinion of what was said by the Dragons.
Firstly, although she mentioned NLP she didn’t seem to practice it… where was the rapport? Or any other technique that might help in a sales presentation, remembering that these guys have probably been badly NLP’ed a million times by clunky salesmen who did a bit of persuasion on some course. Of course the rapport could have been edited out to make the pitch more dramatic.
The last thing that coaching needs is the Dragons criticising it. I do understand their concern though - there are a lot of people out there being very evangelical about it’s benefits because of the potential money involved… in reality I think that there is a lot less money in the marketplace for this service because the public in general don’t see the point. People “get” and accept hypnotists nowadays but it will be a long time before personal coaching is a reality for all but the wealthy.
The woman on Dragon’s Den did have a good idea though - that people could be helped with only 6 questions. Now I don’t know what 6 questions she was going to ask, but if I was asking six questions to coach someone on a problem they would be:
(after they have the problem in mind)
1) What do you want?
2) How will you know you have got it?
3) What is different from when you have got it from what you have now?
4) What is stopping you doing it now?
5) What are your options?
6) What are your actions?
I might cheat and add a 4a) which tends to yield good results…
4a) If that didn’t stop you, what would?
Now you could go away and use those questions on your own and perhaps get some good results. However you might not and if you don’t it’s because you are too close to the problem… having a face to face discussion allows the coach to read a bunch of non-verbal information to support what you are saying… in most cases the actual words that come out of your mouth reveal a tonne of information, and coupled with your non-verbal, give a good coach a very powerful representation of what is going on, including what you don’t actually say.
For example, look out for people shaking their head when they are answering a question, now that could mean incongruence (they don’t agree with their spoken words), it could also mean that they are weighing up options represented auditorily (is that a word?) in each ear, or it could mean something else which has a context related to other things that they are saying. Clearly the first two could have considerable impact on the information offered verbally, and all this stuff and more you miss when you’re not face to face.
So my view is really that coaching isn’t a commodity ready for the internet… there’s no formula for people’s problems, so no expert system can be programmed (although I bet Richard Bandler has thought about it). Lots of people get coached by friends, families and coworkers every day. There’s no need for a website to replace this. Let’s spend MORE time face to face than less, please.
