Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership

Mampodi™ – coaching the champions in all of us

Current socio-economic and political conditions have placed South Africa’s workforce under unprecedented levels of pressure. So much so, in fact, that according to experts in the life coaching arena there is a critical need for self awareness in people in order to fully realize their own potential as well as their place and value to the businesses that employ them.

This is according to Freddie Oosterhuis, director at Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership, a South African-based provider of coaching services and a Certified Meta-Coach™ at the ACMC level which is governed by the International Society of Neuro-Semantics® (ISNS) and the Meta-Coach™ Foundation (MCF).

“Coaching and Meta-Coaching in particular has emerged as one of the fastest growing service provision industries globally. Recent statistics indicate it has reached the level of being a R10 billion industry. Whilst it shows the remarkable commercial opportunity that can be found in this market, it also, more importantly, demonstrates the significant and genuine need there is for businesses and people to be supported through credible, proven coaching methodology,” says Oosterhuis.

Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership (a name derived from the Sotho word ‘mMampodi’ meaning ‘champion’) was established for this very reason and has developed a comprehensive Meta-Coach™ service-focused model that can be customized to meet requirements at corporate and government level, for organizations and groups, as well as the individual.

It is run by a team of trained and accredited coaches with experience in the application of the Meta-Coach™ Training System®, an internationally recognized training system acknowledged by- and utilized extensively throughout the global Meta-Coaching™ fraternity.

This combination of a proven system and expert support helps clients identify, understand and effectively deal with issues that could be blocking their paths to success and a vastly improved level of general interaction and ultimately a better quality of life.

The company has its head office in Tshwane, Gauteng, but provides a national service that covers executive, leadership, performance, developmental, transformational and life coaching via two fundamental components: the primary focus being direct service to clients and the secondary being an opportunity for entrepreneurs to replicate the business model via franchise.

Whilst there are a number of facets associated with the Meta-Coaching™ Training System® and thus makes a simple, definitive description difficult, it does entail a great deal more than simply listening to peoples problems and trying to identify solutions says Oosterhuis. “It takes on a holistic approach and by definition relates to a higher application of coaching. It is focused on the mind, the brain and is specifically designed to understand thought patterns and their application in daily life.”

“Our approach is based on a proven methodology co-developed by Dr Michael Hall. Dr Hall co-founded Neuro-Semantics as a field of study and as an international society in 1996,” adds Oosterhuis.

Through its technology, expertise and access to information and international coaching resources, the team at Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership has laid down a number of objectives that it believes will strengthen the individual, teams, executive structures and the organization/ company as a whole.

“We want people to broaden their understanding of themselves, their mind-body-emotion states for greater self-esteem, confidence and sense of empowerment. Part of our aim is to help people to experience more pleasure, intentionality, decisiveness, clarity, positive emotions, creativity and fun in life. From a business point of view these objectives allude to the very well known saying that ‘a happy employee is a productive employee’ and really an asset to the organization,” adds Oosterhuis.

“The true mission-critical business objective is to empower people to become more efficient in business, career, making money, and financial independence, more effective in relationships, problem solving and staying motivated and be more able to move to mastery in their fields of endeavour,” Oosterhuis continues.

The vision of Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership going foreword is to grow the brand internationally and emerge as the premier provider of meta-coaching services & support to South and Southern Africa and to the rest of the continent.

For more information, click through to www.mampodi.co.za or call (012) 365-2955.

Freddie Oosterhuis

Founding Director & CEO – Mampodi™ Coaching & Leadership
NLP|NS|ACMC Certified Meta-Coach™

THE ART OF LIVING IN LANGUAGE

We live in language. As a species of life we have no full fledge instincts, but only “instinctoids” (Abraham Maslow). Our instinct is to learn and create mental models in our heads (“maps” Alfred Korzybski) is what makes us “a semantic class of life.” Not knowing what anything “is,” or means, or what leads to what (causation), we have to learn. We have to discover. We have to formulate, conclude, and construct a model of reality.

We have to create meaning and we do so at multiple levels.

So we live in language as a chief inner context in our minds which then governs what we see, what we perceive, what we feel, what we expect, etc. With the words that we accept, absorb, and invent we live inside them so that they govern what we are prepared to see. If we say that something is “terrible,” horrible,” “awful” so it becomes to us.

“Criticism is horrible; I hate it. I’m just not able to handle it when people don’t like me. I always fall apart.”

How’s that for a toxic thought? A toxic instruction? A pathology-creating hypnotic induction? And that’s just one of many, many, many that we all face everyday of our lives. Want more? Here’s a sick list of thoughts full of semantic toxicity:

“Over the hill.” “I’m having a senior moment.” “I think I’m cursed when it comes to money; nothing ever goes right for me.” “It’s his fault, if he had not made me feel insignificant and worthless, I wouldn’t have given up so easily.” “I’m alcoholic.” “Change is hard and painful.”

By language we create our categories of reality and by an unthinking acceptance and use of words, we experience and feel things that undermine our effectiveness and leash our potentials. I often tell the story of Wendell Johnson (People in Quandries, 1946) and his chapter, “The Indians Have No Word for it” (Chapter 17). As a speech pathologist and stutterer himself, Dr. Johnson studied two Native American Indian cultures (Bannock and Shoshone Indians) and could not find anyone who stuttered. And it so happened that their languages had no word for “stuttering.” That idea, that category, that experience is not punctuated by their language, so the experience of “stuttering” didn’t exist for them. At first they didn’t understand what he was referring to. To even communicate what he was referring to, his associate, John Snidecor, had to demonstrate stuttering.

So when a child spoke in a non-fluent way, no one noticed. It didn’t exist.

“Speech defects were simply not recognized. The Indian children were not criticized or evaluated on the basis of their speech, no comments were made about it, no issue was made of it. In their semantic environments there appeared to be no speech anxieties or tensions for the Indian children to interiorize, to adopt as their own. This, together with the absence of a word for stuttering in the Indians’ language, constitutes the only basis on which I can at this time suggest an explanation for the fact there were no stutterers among these Indians.”

Later when Johnson found children from those groups who had been adopted by white families he found those who did stutter. In the new English language, the category of stuttering did exist and so those kids raised in that culture learned to punctuate it as something that as reality and then learned to fear it as something dreadful. They then began to live in the language of stuttering.

For better and worse, we all live in a world of language. When we say a word, we call a world into being. It’s a creator power. Genesis describes the beginning occurring when God spoke the world into being, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” yet we also share in that same creative power. As we use language, so we create our reality and then operate within it semantically. In our languaging, our meanings are created.

Without language, we would live life moment-by-moment without any awareness of ourselves or life itself. We would lack “… narrative, evaluation, comparison, and contemplation. We would not know who we are, where we are going, or whether or not we have gotten there-the very issues…” that make life human and meaningful for us (Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, Robert Lukens, Language, Structure, and Change, 1990).

“Without language, there is only ‘now’-life unfolding moment by moment without self-consciousness or meaning. With the advent of language, an observing ‘self’ is created and experience is evaluated. Those evaluations continuously and recursively modify what is being experienced, leading to the self-referential quagmire that generates business for psychotherapists.”

So given that we live in language to this extent, then what is the art of living in language? How can we live with language and in language so that it supports us and enhances our life?

Obviously the art begins with awareness of language. First we need to become mindful of our words and mindful of what we are doing with our words.

What are you doing with your words? And, what are your words doing for you?
This is the neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic facet of language. Language does things to us! Language gets into our eyes so that we see the world in terms of our words and concepts. Language induces us into states. Language gets encoded in our body, in muscle memory. Now you know why Meta-Coaches and Neuro-Semanticists are always asking,

“Do you hear what you’re saying?”

“As you hear yourself say that and use those words, what are you aware of?”

“Hearing yourself say that, how will you start to clean up your language and frame things in ways that support you?”

Once you recognize that you live your life in language and always will, the next step is to quality control your language so that you can choose life-enhancing and empowering ways to speak and encode things.

“What cognitive distortions have you found in your language today?”

“How empowering is that term, concept, understanding, or belief?

“How is your language?”

“What are some of your best formulas that unleash your potentials?”

There’s more- and that’s the subject of the next Meta Reflection.

Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org

META-COACHING™: COACHING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”
-Thoreau

A Meta-Coach™ will first and foremost be able to recognize, detect, and effectively address the processes, structures, mind-sets, frames, beliefs, etc. of the expert or person learning to become a master in a given area whether business, leadership, management, creativity, relationships, persuasion, etc. He or she will address the things that get in the way of that excellence (i.e., lack of clarity, indecision, excuses, etc.). This means the ability to take a Meta position to the mental-emotional matrices of a person’s experience.

After recognition of the structure of experience and being able to model and profile the experience, the Meta-Coach™ needs to be able to see the neuro-semantic system of mind-body-emotion within relationships, contexts, etc. as a system. This means systemic thinking about the human mind-body system within yet higher systems (business, culture, family, government, politics, economics, etc.) and within which yet lower systems are embedded (thinking, valuing, believing, feeling, remembering, imagining, etc.).

For this reason we have developed the Matrix model based upon the neuro-linguistics of human communication and functioning (NLP) that describes how to run our own brain and manage our own states and the Meta-States model of Neuro-Semantics that describes the levels of min-body-emotion as a systemic process. The idea of framing from Bateson came into NLP in terms of a few basic frames: the ecology frame, relevancy frame, outcome frame, meaning (re-framing), etc. With Neuro-Semantics we developed this much further and created Frame Games as a model of the embedded nature of frames within frames. This has led to being able to work with mastering fear, becoming fit and slim, modeling the frames of business experts, wealth building, prolific writing and researching and other creative arts, relationships, persuasion, and much more.

What is META- COACHING™?

Meta-Coaching™ is a powerful coaching methodology that transcends traditional Performance Coaching, taking Coach and client to higher levels – to Developmental and Transformational Coaching. That is why we call it ‘meta’ meaning a higher level. At these levels profound change occurs naturally and easily. The result is success and transformation.

Meta-Coach™ Training is an accelerated coach training system that supports participants to move through learning modules, culminating in Master Coach Status. It is taught in an environment that gives participants every opportunity to excel – as Executive, Personal (Life), Organisational and Self Coaches.

This comprehensive program differentiates itself from other coaching education by integrating three key areas of a successful coaching career:

• Your Self
• Your Coaching Skills
• Your Coaching Business

Meta-Coach™ training draws on the Cognitive Sciences of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantics (NS) and integrates them into cutting-edge coaching psychology. The training programs are rigorous and qualifications internationally recognised.

Authored by: Dr. L. Michael Hall Ph.D – author, developer of Meta-States, trainer and entrepreneur living in Grand Jct. Colorado. You can reach him via www.neurosemantics.com / www.self-actualizing.org