Developmental Coaching And How It Can Work For You:
Developmental coaching is about working with a tool that exists in human potential movements. The first thing to know is that there are about thirteen of fourteen recognized levels of maturity in a human being. From the day they’re born to the day they die, we can map their levels of development, and developmental coaching makes it possible to have a look at recognizing their habits, patterns, values, drives and know where they are on the maturity scale. This is done scientifically with a test or conversationally through knowing what those levels are.
Basically, developmental coaching says: “okay, here is where you are, here’s how it’s working for you, and here how you can actualize your potential”. When a person finds out what stage of maturity they’re at, they will be able to unlock the potential that’s waiting for them.
Developmental coaching works with how the person is seeing the situation, how they’re acting, what they’re valuing and the meaning they’re making in that situation, and then shows them what the next level of development will be.
For example, as a coach, I am currently working with an executive who is operating at level 3.5 (in levels from 0 to 7), which is called the achiever level.
At that level, that person is all about strategy, tasks, thinking that if something is measurable it’s real, and that they need a strategy to achieve it. For that person, following a strategy is the most meaningful thing that they can do because it enables them to achieve their outcomes.
That’s the kind of semantic structures in that stage of development. In the coaching, at 3.5, his next level of development is 4.0, which is a view that’s not driven by achievement, but rather by humanity. It’s not driven by strategy; it’s driven by a systemic view, a 4th person view.
This person was having a conversation with a relative of his who had a problem, and instead of focusing on the task, instead of focusing on what this relative could do differently, he just said: “No problem, it’s okay, how are you with what happened?”
This was a really significant transition from having an answer to being able to “zoom out’ into a 4th person view and environmentally be able to see the whole picture, and then ask completely different question and have a completely different relationship with that relative.
What’s interesting is as he took focus off the strategy, the relationship between him and this other person just blossomed in the moment, simply because it was a different way of being, and his words back to me were “It didn’t seem so important and it didn’t seem so personal to me anymore, and I actually was able to be more personable with this person that I have ever been.”
Helping A Person Develop To Higher Maturity Levels
To help the person, a coach gives them a range of practices such as life practices, setting practices, behavior practices, and introspective practices. These practices help them stabilize the view, and, as the person is starting to do that, they start to dislike their current ways.
This is what we call the “disidentification process”, and this moves the person to the next level of maturity, and stabilizes them there.
For example, the pattern to get from level 4.0 to level 4.5, they have first and foremost to be ready to move from one level to the other, and this can be done by coaches helping them enable practices, which enables the person to see the limitation of their current subjective way.
For coaches, the work is consistent and doesn’t tend to change very much other than the type of practices, but it’s a big commitment from the person that’s going through the levels because it has a relative impact on their world, since there’s a real unfolding and a real evolution occurring to the point where they become quite unrecognizable to people that haven’t seen them for a while.
The Question You Need To Ask Yourself
Some people will ask “All of that is nice and all, but what’s in it for me?”
What’s in it is that they get to change where they are in life, they get to change their reality to the better, and most importantly, they get to create their own legacy, which is all the benefits (attributes, ways of perceiving and being in the world) that are left in each level for other human beings to learn from. It’s not that the person develops mentally, but they develop into each level, and each one leaves their inheritance behind in each level.
So now, the question that you need to ask yourselves isn’t “What’s in it for me?” but “Who am I? What am I? and how do I know what to do?”
