Rob considers what it is to be a micromastery life coach and Neil suggests one active micromastery to explore an aspect of intuition

What is it to be a micromastery life coach?

Life coaching occupies that interesting ground between mentoring and therapy. The Mentor gives advice but the therapist and the life coach try to hold up a mirror so that the person advised finds their own solution.

Therapy and life coaching are based on the sophisticated idea that not just right information is needed, the right time to hear it is required too. When is the right time? Only someone with highly developed intuitive capacities will know. However, by leading the advised one to a state where they recognise for themselves the solution to their problem you achieve a result better than simply downloading to their blank and resisting face. It is a better time to hear things relevant to themselves, put it that way. And by pursuing this path of reticence, the life coach develops a sense of better timing, until they might just be able to drop a bombshell when the situation demands it. It’s not rocket science (to mix metaphors a little)- comedians develop impeccable timing so why not life coaches too?

Which bring me to micromastery- can it be used to coach people to a better level of living- for want of a more precise term?

They may want to get promoted, change career, move country or develop better relationships.

In all of these cases micromastery routines can be developed and micromastery itself can help supply answers.

Life coaching works primarily because people react strongly to certain forms of attention. We benefit from those who give us their undivided attention. Our kids are on their phones, our better halves are hard at work and we have some serious netflix viewing to catch up on.

But that is just the start of it. Giving attention provides a carrier wave for reciprocal influence. It seems as if the person listening is being influenced- they are nodding and agreeing- but actually the effect is to open up the person being listened to.

The miracle or seeming miracle is, that by asking open ended questions the life coach elicits responses that surprise the person being coached. Why does it work? Because the person being coached has opened up, they have decided to change by starting the coaching.

The way you get the person to improve is to change their worldview. You have to change their perspective. An analogy comes from aikido. If you try and stop someone pulling down on your arm when it is outstretched it is hard. But if you imagine that your arm is twenty feet long and your hand is not the end but near the beginning it becomes much easier. You minutely adjust your stance to change the way the arm reacts to being pulled down. And you seem much much stronger- even though all you did is change the way you thought about the situation.

Sometimes these dramatic visualisations and different perspectives are hard to internalise and make your own. That’s why micromastery training comes in.

The life coach will give a routine to a person being coached which will help them both to get out of their own way but also to increase the width of the vision, their range of what is possible.

Here’s an example- a coach may ask someone interested in finding a more conducive job to imagine what they would do if they had 1 million pounds or perhaps ten million pounds. But this game is static. There is no experimentation, no special kit and not much fun in it beyond exercising the imagination.

In the micromastery you ask what would you do if you had one pound. Only one pound in the whole world. Then you ask what would you do if you had one million. Then ten pounds and ten million. It is in the contrast between the two answers, not the answers themselves, that some kind of truer concept of the possibilities of wealth occur. For example it is only when one’s wealth changes that happiness occurs. Even losing all your wealth can produce an excitement of the possibilities ahead if you look at it in a sufficiently positive light- an imaginative act the coach will encourage.

In life coaching the coach asks what would you do if you knew how to solve the problem. The idea is that we are inhibited and given the right permission we really do know what to do.

In micromastery we gamify this question by asking what different people would do to solve it. We ask the person being coached to imagine they are various different roles and even their own relatives. Just as others can often solve your problem, we tacitly already know their solution and simply need permission or an excuse like this role play to reveal it to ourselves.

A third concept of interest to people life coaching is that of the rub-pat barrier. This is when you reach a situation in learning something complex where two required skills pull against each other. It is like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. In skills such as drawing, the rub-pat barrier is between fluency of line and accuracy. In driving it is between steering and using the gears. In skiing it is between how you lean and how much emphasis you put on each leg. In micromastery we prepare for this moment, for this is when you are most likely to give up. The rub pat barrier in any given attempt to level up a perspective comes down to believing in the possibility of achieving the new possibility versus the ability to imagine it. Those who are creative and playful by nature will have no problem imagining it- but this very skill militates against being practically able to achieve it, since the practical person will see all the problems and lose heart. How do you find a balance between the two? First you acknowledge it will happen. Second you work on both skills in isolation and to excess. This is so that you have reserve power in each. In drawing this is done by alternating drawing fast with drawing very slow. Drawing using only curves and drawing using only straight lines.

You then combine the two skills and observe how well they work in balance. You give the result a number out of ten and then see over time as it improves.

Another micromastery requirement is the possibility of experimentation. The life coach suggests that person being coached view their own life as a series of experiments aimed at achieving greater enlightenment and that they themselves are a scientist tasked with inventing new experiments. Naturally the micromastery life coach gives them help in steering them towards types of experiment that are likely to yield useful results.

From these few examples you can see that micromastery has a lot to offer people who are both being coached and offering life coaching.

Micromastering Intuition

Intuition can seem to be something somewhat mysterious. You may be aware of the divergent claims made of it. Some scientists and lay people suggest it is very fallible and not to be trusted, that slow ‘deliberative thinking’ is better. However, others point that a lot of our thinking is really based on unconscious thought and feelings combined and justified after the event by deliberative thought. A bit of a conundrum!

Serious people with experience in practical wisdom don’t claim that intuition is infallible but that it is able to be developed. The Micromastery suggestions presented here come from the work of Professor Gary Klein. Professor Klein’s work is interesting because he collects his evidence from the ‘wild’ as it were. He observes people with expertise, often working in life-or-death situations, rather than novices in a laboratory. He demystifies aspects of it, as he concludes that the expertise and intuition can come from both a long and broad experience alongside certain dispositions.

Current Evidence Suggests

We learn both consciously and implicitly (implicitly - without always being conscious of everything we learn.) Even some conscious learning, when digested can also become tacit knowledge – that is (as a starting definition) knowledge that you cannot easily put into words because you are not completely aware of its source or in this example, how you operate it. Often the mark of someone with a degree of expertise is that they have made their working practises habitual to a point where they can operate their skills unconsciously.

Developing expertise is about improving judgement (and as Robert asserts, is a facet of, or a context for Practical Wisdom).

For professor Klein, and in the context that he has studied it, it is –

·      based on the relatively slow accumulation of experience – intuition is shaped by learning.

·      It needs the acceptance of unambiguous feedback from the experience or from someone who has more expertise.

·      When experience leads people to have a richer repertoire of patterns to size up a situation, they can make decisions without comparing all the options – a form of intuition or insight. This can be achieved sometimes rapidly and sometimes more reflectively. The recommendation is that intuitions can be strengthened by providing a broader experience base that build perceptual skills and richer models.

Summarised simply perhaps, as learning well from experience.

A micromastery for intuition in this context

1 The Entry Trick

Start reflecting on decisions in the following way, (whether you think it was arrived at consciously and discursively or intuitively does not matter too much initially.)

·      Suspend your theories or experience during this and focus carefully on what actually happened.

·      It is important that you do this equally with experiences that have successful and unsuccessful outcomes. This is a counter to one rub pat barrier. The rub pat barrier being that on the one hand, we can flip between trying to forget our unsuccessful outcomes, or we can focus too much on the unsuccessful ones because we are trying to privilege reducing errors and ‘proceduralise’ the way we work prematurely or inappropriately. Here we are emphasising finding out what happened and the circumstances and aiming to both increase intuitions and reduce errors.

·      Success or not, ask yourself how the outcome has improved ideas concepts, or ‘mental models’ about the circumstances or factors around the decision. For example, you might now realise that something is only true in a narrower range of circumstances. Can you be curious about that range? In this way, you begin to see that your models and experience can work well enough AND can be adapted. They are becoming ‘richer.’

2 Further Rub Pat Barriers

Don’t harangue yourself too much about your emotional response to success and mistakes. Over time, it is possible to sense an appropriate degree of emotion to them. Seeing emotions as having a function to create saliency and value of the experience you have had, may enable one to keep the matter in mind and move towards this. One can also learn to take a measured amount of pleasure and gratitude in success.

There can also be a tendency to dismiss this type of learning behaviour as too simple. This could be part of us, or ‘a self’, that thrives on overcomplexity and the drama and self-narratives of ‘struggle’. There is one way to find out!

3 Background Support

Start small, perhaps when you are learning something obvious such as a micromastery or other learning you may be undertaking rather than following big decisions at work or in life. Do it when you can remember and have time. A bit of diary keeping might be useful. If you have started reflecting on general decisions, you will begin to gain a sense of when decisions are made intuitively (usually when you can’t make a ‘rational’ decision) and start to focus attention more on their circumstances. Fairly inconsequential interactions about leisure or related to friends and family can also be a useful place to start.

The Payoff

A good analogy of the difference between working with tacit knowledge and a degree of intuition on the one hand and following instructions on the other is that of an experienced chef cooking and a novice following a recipe. A recipe is abstraction, using words, numbers, and conventions to convey essential information about cooking. If you can understand them, you can cook the dish to some extent. In contrast, the experienced chef can use their situational recognition and procedural relationship skills to know something such as when they have stirred something enough. Also, the chef can rapidly adapt if circumstances have changed. Recipes don’t usually add ‘here’s why we’re doing this way, here’s what you can anticipate, here’s how you can tell when to move onto the next stage (though you can find elements of this in the structure of micromasteries).

Begin to see that your models and experience work well enough AND can adapt was one of the suggested awareness’s to develop. There is another aspect to this in terms of a payoff. People with more expertise do start to adapt as they actually navigate their decisions and action as well as after the event. They have developed the confidence to try and the flexibility to adapt as well as a keen situational awareness.

5 Repeatability and experimental possibilities

After starting small you could certainly extend this to a wider set of domains. The approach of micromastery is conducive to this so that the process of reflecting on how mental models are changing becomes generalised and habitual.

You could also start mentally exploring other courses of action.

Identity, rather than kit. might be useful or looking for a ‘self’ that enjoys this. ‘Scout’ or ‘explorer’ has worked for some. (Julia Galef has a book called ‘The Scout Mindset’ that has many complementary activities that could be followed or developed into micromasteries.)

This micromastery is an active, largely conscious approach, perhaps characterised as ‘left hemispheric’ (if you accept the metaphor.) This micromastery is one possible ‘foot in the door’ to intuition that might suit some. Gary Klein’s work has a narrow focus and there are many other contexts and aspects of intuition to explore. The next newsletter will consider how to make the best of learning with people with more expertise in order to widen one’s experience base. Another newsletter will survey possibilities for reducing barriers to a more receptive and wider awareness of all the ambient feedback coming from the environment using all the senses.

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