Conventional coaching focuses on utilizing a person’s strengths to encourage the development of behavioral competence to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. While this has been in practice for a long time and, to some extent, delivers results, it has limited capacity to create a lasting positive change.
Making change, like improving the way of doing things, is not difficult, but creating change that lasts goes beyond the coaching session, is not. This is what Coach Masters Academy is trying to solve with its innovative science-based approach.
Dr. Ben Koh, the Founder of the academy, was with the CEOViews team to share how they are helping coaches and leaders around the world revisit their approach to achieve sustainable results through their coaching interventions. Ben is distinguished by being one of the first 500 recipients worldwide to receive the Master Certified Coach credential the highest coaching accreditation in professional coaching awarded by the International Coach Federation. HRD World Congress has conferred him as one of the 101 Top Global Coaching Leaders for 2018.
Unique Contribution: Making Good Leaders Great When leaders are under pressure, they start heading for some serious pitfalls if they need to be adequately supported. With more than 20 years of experience delivering C-Suite coaching services globally for executives in leading corporations, Dr. Ben has brought the benefits of coaching to organizations helping leaders raise the bar on their performance and managing their success. His understanding of the dynamic relationship between the needs of individual contributors and the organization’s objectives allows him to deliver high-stakes coaching that directly impacts business performance.
Coach Mastery Academy is an institution, but it’s more of an academy driven by the goal of using mastery coaching to create positive change.
Our Journey
Coach Mastery Academy is an institution, but it’s more of an academy driven by the goal of using mastery coaching to create positive change. We have a patented coaching framework Awareness, Clarity & Choice Conversation to effect a positive change. Helping our coaching clients experience the impact beyond the coaching session is the kind of change we seek to create.
Coach Masters Academy began in 2010 with a simple mission to help educators adopt a coaching approach to engaging students. Dr. Ben realized in his early career that coaching has a tremendous power to inspire and change an individual. He got to work with thousands of students and help them in their personal development with the help of a coaching program. This is where he witnessed first-hand the massive impact it has on young adults in huge numbers. Coaching can inspire change, and what needs our attention is to engineer a process that is based on science. In this process, Dr. Ben understood that human nature always resits the change process. While they know the benefit of positive change, they hesitate to process change. How can one overcome this? This is what Dr. Ben is trying to achieve with Coach Masters Academy!
A Science-Based Approach to Create Perspective Shift in thinking
Effective personal development occurs when one is increasingly clear about what they want and, more crucially, why they desire it. Once the “whats” and “whys” are made clear, the “hows” will follow naturally. One of the finest coaching methods to help someone experience personal change is to focus on identifying one’s beliefs and principles and aligning one’s behaviour and actions based on this basis.
When people’s minds open up, they are more receptive to change. Here is where Dr. Ben ingeniously blended Gestalt Awareness with transformative learning theories to reimagine the coaching process.
Instead of changing the client’s choices within the current set of perceived possibilities, which only addresses the situation and symptoms of the client’s issues, the transformative coaching approach enables sustainable change by causing a shift in the client’s mindset and emotional framing of their reality. The coaching process generates new awareness and understanding to produce a “felt shift.” The client’s perspective in dealing with his problem changed. This renewed vitality inspires determination to take action.
Staying relevant & delivering quality.
Speaking about what has kept Coach Masters Academy moving ahead, Dr. Ben says three main pillars. The first is a very carefully structured instructional design on how the science must be applied in a coaching conversation. The way CMA has designed the training is not just based on experience but on a very systematic skillset drawn from the instructional design. That’s where students are instructed adequately with a very clear system of learning, the framework.
Next comes the faculty members’ preparation. They invite like-minded partners to join at the beginning stage. But then, as they begin to gain momentum, the faculty members are all graduates of Coach Masters’ Academy, in which they all complete at least 200 hours of training with us. The selected members are already familiar with the framework to be used. Therefore, they find a certain degree of consistency and uniformity, which they try to preserve as the DNA of the system.
