CoMod

Modeling and Coaching for Success in Business - NLPU 300

Two of the most important sets of skills required for success in today’s business context are coaching and modeling.

Coaching

Coaching is the process of helping another person to perform at the peak of his or her abilities. Personal coaching methods derive from a sports training model, promoting conscious awareness of resources and abilities, and the development of conscious competence. They involve drawing out another person’s strengths through careful observation, feedback and encouragement, and facilitating him or her to function as a part of a team.

Modeling

Modeling is the process of identifying and structuring features and patterns relevant to achieving some goal or simulating some process. Modeling involves analyzing examples of successful performances (a combination of benchmarking and success analysis); sometimes by comparison to unsuccessful performances. The focus of modeling is on how people think and act when they perform effectively.
In many ways, modeling is the heart of NLP. The worldwide success of NLP as a technology for creating and managing change has its foundation in the modeling process. The modeling tools of NLP allow us to identify specific, reproducible patterns in the language and behavior of effective role models. NLP has developed techniques and distinctions with which to identify and describe patterns of people’s verbal and non-verbal behavior — that is, key aspects of what people say and what they do. The basic objectives of NLP are to model special or exceptional abilities and help make them transferable to others. The purpose of this kind of modeling is to put what has been observed and described into action in a way that is productive and enriching.

The Coaching-Modeling Loop

When combined, these two skill sets, coaching and modeling, form a powerful and positively reinforcing loop—the coaching-modeling loop. The ‘coaching-modeling’ loop is an example of double loop learning. There is an old adage which states that “if you give a person a fish, you have fed him for a day; but if you teach a person how to fish, you have fed him for the rest of his life.” “Double loop learning” would involve helping a person to catch a fish, and in doing so, teaching the person how to fish at the same time. Thus, it involves achieving two simultaneous outcomes—learning what to do and, at the same time, how to do it.

Double Loop Learning Involves Two Simultaneous Levels of Learning

In a sense, double loop learning involves getting “two for the price of one.” In a double loop creative process for example, a person would be coached to come up with an important and innovative idea or solution, and at the same time learn a strategy or “recipe” for generating other creative ideas that could be applied in other situations later on.
Modeling itself is a good example of double loop learning. In a company or organization, the process of an individual or group that does something effectively can be modeled, so that the structure of their process can be made explicit and taught to other individuals and groups. At the same time, that group can learn the process of how to model. So, not only do they receive the benefit of the results of the modeling project, they learn how to model on their own, at the same time.

This program will bring the processes of coaching and modeling together to further enhance this powerful ‘double loop’ synergy. Coaching contexts will cover project, situational and transitional coaching skills. Some of the areas to be covered through both modeling and coaching include:

Working relationships
Making choices
Generating Possibilities
Solving problems
Managing up/down
Balancing personal and professional
Setting expectations (self/other)
Learning from past mistakes

This program provides a unique and exciting opportunity for advanced NLP students to learn coaching in the context of modeling, and modeling in the context of coaching.

* Dates: August 7–18, 2008
* Registration: August 7, 12 pm-2 pm at UCSC. General Assembly 2-5 pm.
* Daily class times: 9:30am–5:30pm beginning August 8.
* Last day: August 18 ~ Program ends 3pm. Check-out of apartments by 12 noon.
* Residential package, including tuition, private accommodations and meals: $3,350, Tuition alone: $1,975.
* Deposit: Enrollment Form and Deposit due April 7: $1,700. Balance due June 7: $1,650.
* Prerequisite: Master Practitioner Certification.

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