Coaching Frameworks/Methodologies

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Imagine a world where companies operated at the highest possible level because every team member was fully engaged and fully alive. Imagine a world where students and adults confidently navigated their careers based on a deep understanding of themselves and their goals, and carried that sense of purpose and direction throughout their careers and on through retirement. The Highlands Company is passionate about seeing personal career visions come to fruition for adults, students, career counselors, and organizations. Since 1992, the Highlands Whole Person 4-Step Method has helped tens of thousands of individuals to transform their lives, both at work and at home.

Chris is an Aptitude Specialist, certified to administer the Highlands Abilities Battery and further trained in their Whole-Person Coaching Method. The method considers eight spheres of a person’s life in relation to their personal and professional development: the development cycle, abilities, skills, interests, personal style, family & core relationships, values, and goals. It is normal for these to become part of coaching conversations and clients may request this as the foundational structure for their coaching experience. 

Positive psychological theory (PPT) is predicated on the understanding that humans need positive feelings for the cause of well-being. Former APA President, Martin Seligman, is a champion for the theory, which reverses the emphasis of counseling. Rather than focusing on psychological problems, we highlight people’s strengths and positive conditions. Issues are not ignored, but are viewed adjacent or peripheral in the psychological landscape. PPT is reflected in Chris’s “coach the person, not the problem” paradigm.

Strengths-based therapy is a subcategory of PPT. In it, a client’s abilities, personality, cognitive and emotional wiring, skill sets, functional propensities, etc., become a source for mining positive predispositions and aptitudes. These resources empower methods and strategies for achieving breakthroughs and desired outcomes. 

In essence, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) focuses on the subject's personal experience. The practice can be restated: analyzing the way someone interprets a specific experience. It’s not that reality and truth are irrelevant, but individual perception is often the key to understanding and adjusting one’s relationship to an experience. IPA dovetails beautifully with Chris’s dialectic methodology via interrogative conversation and active listening and really facilitates your goal achievement.

“Neurolinguistics is the study of how language is represented in the brain: that is, how and where our brains store our knowledge of the language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write, what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our everyday lives” (The Linguistic Society of America, italics added). While not a core framework in Chris’s coaching, certain functions of NT support the discovery process of IPA.

In sum, IPA and NT break down experiences into bite-sized, understandable pieces of impact on client success. We discover how you view life events and clarify the language used to communicate them. We take inventory of the big “you” picture, via the Highlands, PPT, and SBT perspectives and tools. Finally, various learning theories organically leverage relationships and resources toward enabling growth and goal attainment. Blockages, solutions, and results are identified, pursued, measured, celebrated, and assessed for further refinement.