The Practices of ALCS: A Learning Organization for Elite Coaches

The Australian Life Coaching Society is a learning organization whose purpose is to advance the coaching practices that lead to our highest states of well-being (our essential happiness).

This pursuit involves engaging in practices that enhance our collective wisdom, as to improve the performance of all coaches involved. This is the realm of ‘co-intelligence’, as Tom Atlee put it:

“Together we can be wiser than any of us can be alone.
This ability to wisely organize our lives together — all of us being wiser together than any of us could be alone — we call co-intelligence.

Co-intelligence is emerging through new developments in democracy, organizational development, collaborative processes, the Internet and systems sciences like ecology and complexity.

Our diverse efforts grow more effective as we discover
we are part of a larger transformational enterprise,
and as we learn together and from each other.”

The Australian Life Coaching Society is a nerve center for advanced coaching development, and serves as a cutting-edge research centre for elite life coaches.

To realize this objective, ALCS coaches actively practice Peter Senge’s five disciplines. As defined by the author, these five habitual practices, are something that we study, master and integrate throughout our collaborative work together:

1. Mental Models

Learning more about our mental models is our first practice.

By sharing and cooperating upon the stated mission, we examine the nature of our mental paradigms in relation to the practice of coaching, the creation of happiness habits, the participation in social contribution projects and so on. We examine how all these contribute to the goal of reaching our highest states of well-being.

Through open and non-defensive dialogues we hypothesize, test, and measure such premises as:

• What are personal driving values and principles contribute to peak well-being, across all dimensions of self?
• What assumptions, generalizations, and images best sustain this pursuit?
• How should the values and principles be best integrated into our mental maps?

Through this first discipline we gain greater self-awareness into the dominant patterns of thought as a primary cause, and what is their short, mid, and long-range effects.

Through dialogues and discussions, we bring to light the best mental models, as to realize a wider array of possibilities that supports our primary and secondary mission.

This naturally leads to the development of…

2. Personal Mastery

To be called upon the mission of being a life coach or a related role, is to undertake a noble task. This is a choice to support people to make fundamentally positive life changes, which ultimately translate into the overall health of our communities, our culture, and ultimately the health of our global village.

But as the proverb goes, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and as a life-coach, it is imperative that we are above reproach, and that we continuously “walk the talk”.

While this is a simple and obvious idea, it is arguably the most important and most difficult practice. Yet we must continually challenge ourselves to rise to greatness and to manage our lives with integrity – for this is by far the greatest instrument for influence ever created.

For as Ralph Emerson put it, “what you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Getting coaching, counselling and related education, or getting accredited and keeping up with professional practices… these are all relatively easy steps. Our true coaching capacity actually lies through the development of our character.

Personal mastery means becoming a man or woman of character. Through this choice of being, our mastery of coaching becomes second nature.

For coaching mastery is established through the way YOU can get yourself to make the choices you know you should make… as to also do what you have resolved to do. Coaching mastery is established through your ability to lead by example.

There is no substitute for this practice, which requires in kind, spiritual growth and connection with a deeper reality – our spiritual power. This is a never-ending quest, where we continually come to clarify our personal vision, to deepen our sense of reality and truth, and to strengthen our creative will to manifest what matters most.

In ALCS, we continually seek to develop this power to fulfil our higher calling, ‘to BE the change we want to see in the world’, as Gandhi put it.

And this, also involves the skill set of…

3. Systems thinking

To better understand the complex interaction of forces that limit and/ or support personal growth, requires a higher form of thinking than we are currently using. Causes and effects are often interconnected and arrange in complex patterns.

As such, by simply working on behaviours and attitudes, on one dimension, we often exacerbate problems and make them worse, rather than truly resolve them…

This is especially limiting when working as solo entrepreneurs, within today’s complex and rapidly evolving society… We become narrowly focused on the small parts of problems, through specializations, and fail to see how the whole operates or how the parts affect each other. Or as Abraham Maslow noted, “he who is good with a hammer, tends to think everything is a nail.”

The purpose of this project and its democratic organizational principles is for us to develop our abilities to ‘think systemically’. Through the discipline of working together in the states mission – we’ll develop our skill to process and see the larger and larger conceptual frameworks. In kind, this leads us to be better in our profession.

But we can only develop this skill set through practice. It is only by practicing and then noticing how we function as a collective, how we impact others, how we freely manage responsibilities and so on – that we gain a heightened capacity to understand the complex ecology of human empowerment.

Your participation in ALCS means learning and applying a more challenging system thinking approach, which will support us to build a…

4. Shared Vision

There is tremendous power in being united in a shared vision as coaches.

Author Napoleon Hill defined this power as the Mastermind Principle – ‘the coordination of knowledge and effort, in the spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose’. When functional, he noted, ‘the increased energy created through that alliance, becomes available to every individual mind in the group.’ (Hill, 1987)

Most life coaches already share a common purpose. But when we connect upon this common vision, when we unify our minds upon a mutually imagined vision of what’s possible – we amplify both our collective and individual creative powers.

Our role in this organization is to unearth these shared ‘pictures of the future’ that foster genuine commitment and enrolment. (Senge, 1990)

And finally, we pull all this off by the practice of…

5. Team learning

A team could be defined as a collective of individuals working together on a task.

In the Australian Life Coaching Society, teams consist anywhere from two to ten individuals – united upon the stated mission, with a passion for a certain standard of performance, and a commitment towards each other’s personal growth.

But it’s not the task that ultimately matters, as much as the “togetherness” that is realized between the individuals in working on the task. It is the combined harmonious interaction that releases the magic of teamwork.

For the ability to act together is a discipline. And as it is observable in our world, this does not come by easily. It requires conscious intention and attention as to creatively collaborate.

This power could be compared to the principle of alloying in metallurgy. If we take a few different metals with different tensile strengths, (ie. the strength that a metal has from being torn apart) of say 3, 4, 7, 2 and add them together in the right proportions, we can get a magical increase in tensile strength of 50 or more…

In the same way, each member in a team brings different strengths and weaknesses, abilities and deficiencies, knowledge and ignorance… But together, this ‘melting pot’ united upon a shared purpose, can realize far more than individual strengths, abilities and intelligences combined.

By learning together, we not only make a meaningful differences in our culture, community and in our private practices, – but through team learning, we develop our own potentials faster and more fully, than we could ever do otherwise.