Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for coaches. Last week I talked about group coaching. I shared some of my concerns about the way I have seen it done the way I think it is done on average. And. I agree with what I said. Mostly I woke up on Friday morning having recorded on Thursday, and I had that feeling that I get sometimes, maybe you get this feeling sometimes that something wasn't quite right. It's just this internal thing.
Sometimes it wakes me up in the early hours of the morning. This time it didn't. But when I did wake up on Friday morning, I had this sense that something wasn't quite right with how I had talked about group coaching. Now I know that I like most of what I said and I like most of the way that I said it and I think that same day I got an email from a listener who was very specific and very, Uh, Generous in her praise of the episode.
She said that she thought there was a lot of goodness there and that she was going to share that with her community, and of course that kind of feedback means the world to me, I am not immune and I am not beyond enjoying the, that kind of external validation. And then I had a coaching session with a client just a couple of days ago where she said. That episode nailed it.
She's a person who's done group coaching programs and enjoyed those group coaching programs very much and sees them as positive and beneficial. But she said the way you contrast group coaching versus one on one coaching lands with me, 100%. Okay, great. I'm glad I'm grateful that my own sense of some of the value of those ideas from last week. I'm glad that, that there's resonance there with at least two people. And yet I had this unsettled feeling, like the whole story wasn't being told.
I know it's not my job to tell the whole story. I know other people are telling other versions of the story that are valuable and useful. And those, those are getting attention to, and that's as it should be. But I don't like the idea that I would. Leave information out or leave my opinions out that I think maybe create a more robust view of the, of the whole thing.
So today I want to talk a little bit more about group coaching, but I want to look at it through the lens of what I think is great about it. And how I think that where it's maybe not quite great yet, it could be made better. I recognize the potential for my own ego getting involved there because I'm sitting here saying, I see a thing that's not great. That could be great. And I'm going to tell you how that is, but this is a podcast and this is the internet and that's what we do here.
So first of all, a couple of huge benefits that I don't know that I called out in last week's episode. Number one is that the price of group coaching typically is lower than the price of one on one coaching. I gotta say I hate the word accessible. It gets used all the time in the coaching world.
And I think the reason I hate it is that it's very often being said by a person who is scared of selling a more expensive thing or scared of doing the marketing and the personal development around selling a more expensive things. So they default to this idea that I'm going to make it more accessible, which they think excuses them from the hard work of personal development, marketing, and sales. That they perceive to be associated with expensive one on one coaching.
Okay. So I don't like it when I hear the word accessible in conversations with other coaches and yet what else could we call a program that costs 49 or 99 or 149 per month as it relates to a multi thousand dollar one on one coaching experience. It simply is more accessible and because of its accessibility, thousands and tens of thousands of people have gotten the benefit.
Of being in a space where important topics are being discussed in a mostly helpful way that helps the participant activate themselves to make some changes in a way that they end up being thrilled about, right? They improve, they move forward. And it's in no small part because this thing had a price tag on it that was easier for them to pay. That's so powerful. It's so important.
There are programs like,, my friend Jody Moore's membership, my friend Edie Wadsworth's membership, you know, even self coaching scholars from Brooke Castillo, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say even, but what I mean is I've never participated in self coaching scholars and it is 300 or was 300 a month, I'm not sure it exists anymore. I haven't, I think something's going on there, I think, but I have bookkeeping clients who paid for self coaching scholars for years at 300 per month.
They must have been getting something from it. it must have impacted them in some positive way because 300 a month, it might be more accessible than a 10, 000 one on one coaching program, but it's not a small amount of money. So. There's something about these group and even larger group experiences that clearly is benefiting people and the comparatively lower price is part of that.
And so I respect those programs for what they do, even when I haven't engaged directly with, with those programs, you can't do a thing at that scale for that many years for that many people without it offering benefit. It's just impossible. So I respect those programs and I respect the fact that people want to pay for and participate in those programs.
I think one of the biggest benefit of these kinds of programs, whether it's a multi thousand person membership or a 10 person group is that there's a sort of osmosis that happens in these settings.
If the calls are recorded and then if I'm able to consume those recordings and I'm able to hear good principles repeated over and over and over again, there's this osmosis to that where it starts to seep into my consciousness and my, and my subconscious, and it starts to impact my behavior in a positive way. If you were to pin me down on the biggest benefit of one to many coaching environments, it would be that osmosis.
It would be the fact that simply being in the presence of a bunch of people who are looking to improve in specific ways, changes you even without you realizing I'm for that. I think one of the reasons that osmosis can happen is because there's something happening. Liberating and empowering about sitting in a room with a bunch of people who think about these things in a similar way. I recognize that there can be an unhealthy group thing.
Can I, I put it in the hands of the facilitator of the community owner and community manager to do a good job of managing that and making sure that what has this powerful beneficial osmotic effect. Doesn't become cultish and group think ish. And these things can happen.
And sometimes they do happen, but the positive side of these communities is that many people who want to make changes in themselves and in their relationships and their way of being feel very alone in that when they sit in their families, in their book clubs, in their churches, in their companies, they hear the way other people talk about some of the subjects. it can be incredibly lonely and isolating.
These memberships and scaled group coaching programs create an environment in which a person can say, I'm not alone and I'm not crazy because. All of these people seem to have the same desire that I have to learn and to grow. Just knowing that you're not alone and that you're not crazy and that your way of thinking has merit to other people and they share it, that can unlock you. You can't have some of that in a one on one coaching setting.
In fact, you can have a lot of it in a one on one coaching setting as you and your coach work together to validate you, to validate your way of thinking, to find your growth edges, to confront you, to challenge you, all of that. But there's also something powerful about sitting in a room with five or 10 or 500 and knowing that everyone in there is thinking along similar lines, not thinking exactly the same way, but thinking along similar lines.
So for me, that's the power of these scaled coaching experiences. They are, by definition, more financially accessible. They offer a sense of community where you're not alone and you're not crazy. And in that sense of community, there's this osmosis effect where just you sit there and you just absorb it and it does impact you. Now, how do we make it better? Well, last week I talked about how I think that in group settings, there's a few things you can do.
You can do teaching, you can do facilitation and you can do coaching. I do think all of them have their place in a group setting. For example, I think that you can improve a group experience by actually teaching. Creating an environment that encourages study, preparation, and self confrontation. So instead of creating an environment that is just consumption, And almost entertainment and, and media. An environment in which a person can come and they can just absorb.
I realized I just said there's benefit to that simple absorption and I believe it, but the next level is invite that person to go beyond consumption and to go to study and to preparation and to self confrontation. And then be a great teacher of a specific philosophy. I don't think in a group setting, I don't think we should pretend that there's no dogma wherever there is a group gathered around a specific idea or set of ideas or goal or set of goals. There is dogma.
It's inherent to the environment, because if we didn't have any dogma, if we didn't have any shared beliefs, we wouldn't be here in that particular setting. Even if your dogma is anti dogma, that is dogma. I know this is getting a little meta and abstract and weird, but listen, hear me out. The reason you gather is because you share a set of beliefs or a set of goals. And if that's the case, then lean in. Codify. This is how we talk about this. This is our source material.
Let's study our source material. Let's master our source material. Let's challenge each other on our source material. Let's self confront around the application of the source material. So we go beyond just listening to the coach, talk to a person, and then sitting back comfortably and saying, yeah, she really needs to figure that out. Or, Oh boy, I don't have that problem. Or even, Hmm, that's probably beneficial to me. I should think about that.
The next level beyond that is I'm showing up to this classroom, zoom call, whatever it is, having studied and prepared and ask myself hard questions about this material. That's a way to level up the whole experience, the whole environment, actually teach and be great at it. I also talked last week about facilitation, My definition of facilitation is gathering a group of people and then as a facilitator drawing the knowledge and the wisdom out of that group.
It is slightly different from teaching, the same source material. In facilitation, when I gather the group together, there's an assumption of the group's, Knowledge and preparation. And then we're drawing their knowledge out of them along with their personal experiences and insights. So there's no lecture and listen, there's no quiz at the end of class.
There is a discussion prompt, and then there is a skilled facilitator drawing out the experiences and the ideas of each person in the room, and there's real transformation available there. There's a reason. That support groups and 12 step communities and churches. There's a reason these things have persisted for so long. It's because there's power in gathering and it's like counseling together, gathering and facilitating the sharing of knowledge and insight. So be great at it.
If you're going to have a scaled one to many experience with people. Become a great facilitator. And if you want to go even a step beyond that, help participants become great facilitators and then enable them, have them form facilitation groups. Sometimes I think for good reason, the owners and the managers of these communities are worried about enabling facilitation between participants. I share your concern.
I've been in these spaces a lot and one thing I've become completely convinced of is wherever you gather five plus people, there will be one crazy. There will be one person who doesn't seem to have quite the social IQ that you would hope, and they want to dominate the conversation. They want to go off on tangents. They want to ask inappropriate questions of the facilitator or of other participants.
And because of the almost mathematical certainty of that one person in every group and dear listener, if you say to yourself, I've never been in a group that's like that, I'm so sorry to tell you this, it's time to look in the mirror. There's a crazy in every group. That's larger than about five. Okay. I'm exaggerating. It's not every group. But you're all laughing right now because you've been in those groups, a face popped into your head and you're like, yep, him or, or yep, her.
So the thing to do is get good. And managing the crazy, probably starting by not calling it crazy. I can do that because this is the podcast and, I'm not in a room with five or 10 or a hundred people. So I'm not calling out a specific person, but if I had a group of 10 in front of me, I can guarantee you in the first session, I would identify the person that I probably need to take aside after the meeting. And, and find the kindest, clearest way to say that's a little too much airtime for you.
In the next session, I need you to listen more than you talk, et cetera. These kinds of conversations are not easy, but if you want to do scaled coaching, and if you want to actually elevate participants, you have to get good at the associated skills, like having hard conversations with difficult participants. It's the job. The payoff is.
If you can get good at elevating other people and helping them become skillful in facilitation, now the community can actually grow beyond your ability to facilitate and to teach and to coach. I'm not pretending that I'm even there. The reason we're having these conversations on this podcast is because I want to get there. I see potential benefits for the people I engage with and I also see financial benefits. Potentially, I'm not above wanting financial benefits. But I want to be good at it.
And I want to create amazing one to many experiences. And part of that is not just becoming a skilled facilitator, but helping other people become skilled facilitators. Last thing I do think you can coach in a group setting. Here's how I would approach it to make sure that the coaching is as useful as possible to the person receiving it and to the people observing.
I would create an environment in which if a person is going to be coached in the group, they've done some amount of preparation ahead of time. So for example, you might create a community wide template that we understand is the thing we do before we ask for coaching in a group setting. It involves self inquiry, and then the person brings the, the fruits of that self inquiry, the results of that self inquiry to the group, to the coach and says, here's what I've come up with so far.
I'd like some help. I think, and this is just a hypothesis, I think what can happen if you do this is you get through the throat clearing and the thought downloading and the rambling.
I tend to be a person that has to verbally process a lot on my way to figuring out what my point is and what I'm trying to get help with when I'm talking to my coach, that may be an essential part of my process, but if I were a participant in a group program, it would be helpful to me if the coach said, here's what you're going to do, Mark, you're going to take the template. And the template says, state your problem. And then it simply does this. It repeats. Why is that a problem? Five times.
So state your problem and then say, why is that a problem? Give an answer. Why is that a problem? Give an answer. You repeat that five times. Somewhere in your responses to why is that a problem will be. A very real thing that you and your coach can grab onto and talk about in a 10 or 15 or 20 minute interaction in a group setting that will be more impactful to the participant than the normal approach, which is how can I help today?
And then we go straight into some advice giving, et cetera, like we talked about in last week's episode. I'm not proposing necessarily what we might call self coaching. In my observation of clients and people in these groups, people aren't very good at self coaching. They're just not, that's the power of having a coach, getting a coach. So if we keep the preparation exercise simpler, where we just have people download their thoughts in response to a question, like, tell me why that's a problem.
Why is that a problem? Why is that a problem? Why is that a problem? As you drill on something like that, the person's thoughts are revealed, and then we can work on those thoughts and their fruits. So summing up, there's power in scaled coaching experiences and in scaled coaching communities. I'm a fan. I'm especially a fan. If the scaled coaching community is open and honest about what it can do and what it can't do.
I'm a fan if the facilitators behind that community, the owners, the coaches, if they decide to become masterful teachers around the principles that the community agrees on. If the owner of the community and the coaches in the community decide to become great facilitators, where they draw the knowledge and experience out of the participants in a way that makes all participants better off. And if in their coaching, the actual coaching they do, if they invite people to prepare themselves.
Before receiving that coaching so that it's less advice giving and more actual coaching and engagement with the person's thoughts and with the impact of those thoughts. I think it's more work to do what I'm saying. I wonder whether I would ever persuade myself to attempt it. I don't know yet, but this is my hypothesis for how a good thing can become a better thing. And I'll talk to you next time.