Meta Coach Training - Coaches as Learning Facilitators

COACHES AS LEARNING FACILITATORS

By Dr L. Michael Hall

“Coaching will become the model for leaders in the future... I am certain that leadership can be learned, and that terrific coaches... facilitate learning.”
Warren Bennis

As a Coach your role is that of a Change Agent, you are a Self-Actualisation Coach, you are a Communication Expert, you are a Facilitator synergizing meaning-making and best performances, you are a Dream Maker, and you are a Matrix Explorer.

What else are you as a Coach? How about being a Learning Facilitator? Is that part of your role definition or your identity?

In the quotation above from Warren Bennis, one of the things that many coaches do involves leadership development and a big part of that is facilitating leaders as learners. Why? Because the competency of learning, unlearning, relearning, and learning in new, fresh, and creative ways is, and will increasingly become, a competitive advantage in the twenty-first century. Today the competitive advantage goes to those who are continuous learners, to those who can unlearn as efficiently well as learn.

So, how are you at facilitating learning?
How are you as a learner yourself?
Do you have a disciplined approach to our ongoing learning and development?
How are you at coaching yourself in this area?
Do you have, or do you need, a coach to facilitate your own accelerated learning skills?

Peter Senge also speaks about this when he spoke about excellenc-ing. In writing about such, he wrote that to practice a discipline (any discipline) requires being a lifelong learner. “You never arrive, you spend your life mastering disciplines.”

“The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance. A corporation can never be excellent in the sense of having arrived at a permanent excellence; it is always in the state of practicing the disciplines of learning, of becoming better or worse.”

I got several shocked responses recently at workshop, when I talked about my “system” for studying, researching, and developing new things. I commented, as I have many times, that I read one book at a time (and if I purchased it, then I read it twice) and I read in one area (which typically lasts about 18 months), and after I read a book, I type notes on the book and then keep track of the notes by sorting them into notebooks. I also create my own index as I read so that I can get back to passages that I might quote or reference in later writings.

The shock that several mentioned to me was how disciplined I was at reading and researching. I don’t know why they were surprised, one said that he just assumed that I had an excellent memory and didn’t need to create my own index or take notes or any of the other things. No, my memory isn’t natural, it’s developed. And my memory is developed through my learning strategies and discipline.

Later, when we moved to the Innovation Conversation and covered the many, many processes involved in taking an idea (solution) to market, I mentioned that I write between 5 and 12 drafts of every book. “There is no great writing, there is only great rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.” That created more shock.

In fact, while in Stockholm I had the delight of talking with three different people about writing and when I mentioned the number of drafts I write, one said, “That’s a lot of work!”

“Well, you can look at it that way if you want to, if it helps you. Or you can look upon it as just the process for writing with a clarity that truly adds value to those who read.”

To return to the Warren Bennis quote, how does a Coach help people learn leadership? The good news is that, from the NLP/ Neuro-Semantic approach, leadership is an experience and every experience has a structure.

So why not learn that? Why not study the structure and form of leadership and then facilitate the development of the core competencies required to win the hearts and minds of people? And if leadership is about bringing out the best in people, then why not enable a leader to learn about how to do that? And if self-actualizing leaders apply first to self in order to be authentic, then why not facilitate the learning of self-leadership first?

And, because all of these things lies at the very heart of Neuro-Semantics, you have a lot of resources at hand for becoming one these terrific future coaches that Bennis forecasted.

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