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What is Ontological Coaching?

Coaches have been particularly prominent in the sports performance domain for a long time. Coaches intervene in the way people act so they can take full advantage of their personal skills, competencies and what they already know. In the last decade, we have seen the profession of coach translated into many other fields – business, education, performing arts and so on.

An ontological coach is a particular kind of coach who embodies the powerful distinctions of the "Ontology of Language" and who is able to support people in achieving their goals. Even though people often know what they want in life, quite often they do not know how to get there. Similarly, they do not always know how to avoid what they do not want. Often people do not even know what is missing for them. Dealing with this blindness is the job of an ontological coach. They help people address what is missing for them in the different domains of their lives, relationships, work, family, career and so on.

The role of an ontological coach is not to tell people how to be or behave, rather to allow them to achieve what they desire. Ontological coaching is not a process based on a script known by the coach. It is about enabling others to better serve themselves, expand their possibilities, increase their capacity to learn, act more effectively and better design their future. It is more an art than a science. How Did Ontological Coaching Develop?

Ontological coaching stems from the work of a number of Chileans – Humberto Maturana, Fernando Flores and Rafael Echeverria. Maturana is a biologist who specialises in the area of cognition. His life’s work has been the development of a new interpretation of what it is to be cognitive. This interpretation has been the key to seeing human beings as human observers. Observers, who rather than just seeing what exists independent of themselves, constantly change their own structure in a dance with their environment. Being social creatures, this environment includes other human beings. Flores was the Finance Minister in the Allende government and was imprisoned during the coup in the early 1970s. During his imprisonment, he spent a lot of time with Maturana and developed the work of John Searle and other linguists who had proposed the idea of speech act theory – how we use language to act in the world. Following his release, Flores moved to the USA where he went into business and wrote a book with Terry Winograd entitled "Understanding Computers and Cognition". This book pulled together the ideas of Maturana and Searle and developed the concept of an organisation as a "network of commitments". Published in 1986, this book also proposed the use of computers for work group computing – one of the major uses of information technology today.

Echeverria worked with Flores until he and Julio Olalla decided to go their own way and formed The Newfield Group. Echeverria developed the "Ontology of Language" as a basis for ontological coaching and The Newfield Group ran a number of programs known as Mastering the Art of Professional Coaching (MAPC) during the middle 1990s. This program has been further developed by Newfield Australia, who has expanded the notion to be the "Ontology of the Human Observer". Newfield Australia is currently running ontological coaching courses in Australia.

Previously at Gaia Consulting Group and now through Talking About, we have further developed the ontological approach by focusing on simplifying the approach to make it more readily accessible and provide very clear models for coaching and developing greater effectiveness.

Ontological Coaching focuses on two key requirements of effective coaching - conversational competence and the ability to develop effective interpretations of the human condition and use them to intervene in the way in which a client takes action in life.

Ontological coaching focuses in three mutually dependent domains – our physical body, our emotions and our language. The ontological coach is a keen observer of human beings in these domains and seeks to intervene in what they see is the most appropriate domain to initiate a change in being. They then ensure there is change in all domains to achieve a new way of being.

Built around these interpretations is an understanding of the basic conversational pattern employed with varying success by all human beings. This conversational pattern defines three types of conversations:

• Descriptive Conversations

• Speculative Conversations

• Action Conversations

Each of these types of conversations play a vital role in how we design and achieve what we want in life. Part of the role of the Ontological Coach lies in being able to pass this conversational competence to their clients and also to see what conversations might not be occurring that are creating the blocks for the client.

This is a unique way of coaching that works very effectively. All of our Coaches are trained in the concepts and practice of ontological coaching. We build teams, help leaders to lead, managers to manage and transform organisations by focussing on the individual, either in a workshop setting or on a one-on-one basis. We provide people within organisations with some of the distinctions we use to coach others and assist them to use them in their own lives and within their organisations.