DAY ONE: MORNING (I) – Geoff
Geoff: Magnes, good to meet you. I would like to ask you about your thoughts on the world of coaching as it stands at the moment. I understand that you have some quite strong views on how coaching should progress.
MAGNES JACK: Geoff, if I start on about coaching, we’ll be here all night! These three days are a way of exploring the notion of “Feel the fun and do it your way” – so what I’d like to do is answer your question in this context, of having fun changing.
If you are in the coaching world, you will know that it originally developed from mental health work. Essentially, when patients got better, they then wanted to lead normal lives and needed support to do that, but all the existing models were around fixing people, and not guiding people to help themselves. So, that was the problem that, what became coaching, set out to address.
And it did do so, in a fashion. Many people have been helped and supported through a myriad of crises, new business launches, promotions, staff negotiations, relationship difficulties…you name it. Coaching touches most areas of life these days. There are Wedding Coaches and Pet Coaches. So I think you can see it’s gotten slightly out of hand and has diluted the notion somewhat of “self-help”, which a lot of people have a go at, essentially because of the deluge of books etc, but “self-help” is a great idea. People helping themselves. Great!
But somewhere, sometime, coaching ended up selling itself as the home of solutions, rather than helping you to find your own solutions. There is a big yawning gap there.
Now because most people don’t want to change, they like the coach to tell them what to do, then they can blame the coach, or fight the coach. Then, when coaches encourage them to change for themselves, they struggle and find reasons why it’s so difficult. Coaches try to side step this by a million and one different methods, such as taking it step by step and so on.
But the essential point remains, people don’t want to change, and coaches are not providing a service that is a new way to approach change, namely to have fun! Clients soon realise that it remains a struggle with or without a coach. Clearly, the act of paying for a coach is an incentive in itself. I mean, you want your money’s worth. And many coaches do facilitate great results for their clients, but they are few and far between.
Most coaches follow a fairly rigid model, which eventually bores the client and coach to tears.
So, I am proposing a new approach which I don’t even want to call coaching, though coaches could certainly use it, because this stuff needs to get out into the schools and colleges and businesses and wherever the people are. Change should not be the preserve of people who have the money for coaches. And sure, there will always be people who will change dramatically and love it; they are the lucky ones, and the examples to us all.
Geoff, I fear I’ve rambled on there a bit, and perhaps not really answered your question.
Geoff: It’s been interesting for sure. I just wondered if you had any practical ideas for coaches, like myself, who do want to provide a more fun-oriented personal change service, because I for one, can get a bit bogged down in the heaviness of it all.
MAGNES JACK: That’s right. Clients will bring you all sorts of heaviness, which is difficult to lift. Right? Heavy things are hard to shift. Light things are much easier. So this is the issue – how to make change light rather than heavy.
The starting point is the coach, themselves. The more experience that they have with changing themselves in a fun way, the easier it will be to communicate that to client, and in so doing, provide an atmosphere, a mood if you will, of lightness and fun and possibility.
Geoff: Ok. We need to work on ourselves first?
MAGNES JACK: Yes! It’s the only way. Over the course of these three days, we will explore a variety of practical ways that this can be done, so keep your notebook handy.
Geoff: Right, thanks very much.
MAGNES JACK: No problem.
