Meta-Coaching™ - A powerful performance solution for small business owners
You’re an SME business owner. On the one hand, you’re to be envied. You have the opportunity to live the life of your dreams. You report in to yourself. You make the decisions. You get to live your passion and your vision. You have flexibility and a lot more freedom than ever before.
On the other hand, it’s a lonely world out there. Who do you speak to for an objective viewpoint, or when you need a safe and confidential outlet for venting frustration?
How do you take your existing skills and turn them into those of chief marketer, accountant, human resources expert and customer services consultant all combined into one? Who makes sure you stay focused and on track?
Coaching entrepreneurs is a specialised field, and quite different to other forms of Business Coaching. Entrepreneurs have different challenges, needs and experiences.
If there was an experienced and creative person with whom you could brainstorm ideas, discuss opportunities or simply reflect on what is working well and what can be done better, could it change way you handle the present and plan for the future? Would it make a difference to the growth and development of your business?
How often do you lie awake at night trying to solve problems, worrying about cash flow, stressing about impossible deadlines? How would it be to have an experienced and supportive ear with whom to share seemingly insurmountable problems? What if this helped you quickly discover effective solutions?
You’re so tied up in the day to day demands of your business that you don’t seem to get to any time work on it. How would it be to have someone assisting you to leverage your time and stay focused and accountable for what is truly important?
You find it difficult to delegate to others, they just don’t seem to share your commitment and passion. What would it take to inspire them, trust them, and bring them in?
There’s not much balance between work, leisure, exercise and family. There are just not enough hours in the day when you’re running your own business. Does it have to be this way?
How about the current economy? When so many companies are focused on cost cutting and survival, is it madness to believe you can start something new and thrive?
Sound familiar?
Successful SME business owners have a clear vision of where they are headed, they are flexible, and maximise their own talents as well as those of the people working for and assisting them. They are able to be objective and achieve balance.
Meta-Coaching™ provides you with experienced and unbiased support, helps you find practical solutions that make sense, and allows you to fully actualise your own potential – and that of your business.
Meta-Coaching™ is by its very nature a field or discipline that works at a higher (or “meta”) position to you and your experiences. It is not important to the Meta-Coach where you come from or what type of business you are in (content). Your Meta-Coach is more concerned with the meanings you give to your content. Your Meta-Coach is an expert in the structure of thought and meaning and the facilitation process, and so he or she does not need to be involved with the content itself. You are your own best expert in the content of your life and your business.
The dialogue and relationship facilitated with you in Meta-Coaching™ empowers you to control your thought processes and behaviours, access your resources, and achieve your highest outcomes.
Meta-Coaches do not teach, train, or give advice because they know that you have the necessary internal resources to succeed – just sometimes you don’t know where to find them! So instead they use models and processes to mobilise your own internal and external resources, benchmark your success in using them, and ensure you are able to access them going forward on a sustainable basis.
This empowers you to:
Think for yourself and control your thoughts and behaviours
Solve your own problems as you develop critical thinking skills
Develop creativity to innovate new things
Own responsibility for your actions and become proactive in taking the initiative
Deal with problems when they first appear
Develop your own strengths
Meta-Coaches are trained in the cognitive sciences, using the frameworks of Neuro Linguistic Programming (the model of human communication and functioning which describes how to run our own brain and manage our own states) and Neuro-Semantics (the levels of mind-body-emotion as a systemic process).
Your Meta-Coach works with you at a meta-level for more skilled performance in an area of expertise. This can be for your own self-mastery or in specific areas within your business; such as sales and marketing, customer service, communication, planning, etc. It's about becoming masterful in mind, emotion, body, and spirit.
Barbara Walsh is a licensed and internationally accredited Meta-Coach, and is a Co-Owner and Director of MetaCo Coaching. Barbara is an entrepreneur herself, and over the past 15 years she has started a number of businesses from scratch. These include SA Tourism’s Tour Operator of the Year for 2009, (Specialised African Tour Services) and a new social events company (Great Conversations), both of which she still co-owns.
MetaCo Coaching has a variety of specialised, highly effective and affordable coaching solutions for entrepreneurs. These include one-on-one Entrepreneurial Performance Meta-Coaching, the Meteor® Programme and the popular Mindskills Performance Coaching Workshops. See www.metaco.co.za for more information.