Robert B. Dilts - Generative Coaching Volume 1: The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change

Gregory Bateson

* Drawings by Robert Dilts

Acknowledgments

We would like to gratefully acknowledge our sponsors around the world who have embraced our Generative Coaching work and provided a platform for us to share it with so many others.

We equally want to acknowledge the many students who have participated in helping us develop this work, especially those who participated in the demonstrations of the key steps of the process.

We also acknowledge all of the members of the International Association for Generative Change who have joined us in brining this dream to a reality including our fellow teachers, professional members, associate members and other participants in the IAGC community who are passionate about the work.

We want to express our gratitude to Nick LeForce, whose poems open five of the chapters of this book. His inspiring verses give voice to so much of the essence of Generative Change.

We send special thanks to Susanne Kessler who proofread these pages and beautifully embodied the role of a constructive critic.

We are particularly grateful to our illustrator Antonio Meza who did the amazing artwork for this book. Antonios drawings truly represent the spirit of Generative Change and bring the book alive in ways that our words could not possibly accomplish.

Chapter 1

Overview of Generative Change

Background and Beginnings

T he seeds of what we are calling Generative Change were planted over 40 years ago when the two of us met at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s. We were both students of John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the co-founders of NLP. We were also students of Gregory Bateson, who was a professor at UCSC at that time, and of Milton Erickson, the world-renowned hypnotherapist. These teachers were important influences on both of us and on the foundations of our Generative Change work.

One of the other things that we share is that we are both half Irish. Gilligan has the father half. Dilts has the mother half, which was Garigan. So its Garigan and Gilligan. We like to say, with an Irish twinkle in our eyes, that Generative Change has an Irish father and an Irish mother.

And we also both went to all-boys Catholic high schools in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of this was a very generative time socially.

So, we share many things and are also very different in many ways. Our paths diverged for a while after our days at UC Santa Cruz. Professionally, Robert went on to become one of the main developers and trainers in the field of NLP. His NLP University in Santa Cruz is one of the most well-known and respected NLP training institutions. Steve became a major figure in the field of Ericksonian hypnosis and developed his own body of work known as Self-Relations.

After traveling our separate professional paths for some 25 years, we reconnected on a professional level in 1994 and began doing programs together that explored areas of common interest and integrated our complementary developments and styles. One of our first joint ventures was a program titled Love in the Face of Violence. Others included Genius and the Generative Self, The Evolution of Consciousness and The Heros Journey, which became the basis for the book we co-authored on that topic entitled The Heros Journey: A Voyage of Self-Discovery (2009).

As a result of these frequent generative collaborations, our complementary approaches became more integrated and a new, common body of work emerged that we call Generative Change.

The Three Branches of Generative Change

In this chapter, we will present a framework that defines what we mean by Generative Change. Generative Change is a larger area of change work that contains the three different tracks of 1) Generative Trance, 2) Generative Coaching and 3) Generative Change in Business. Generative Trance is the result of the work that Stephen has done over the last 40 years, integrating Ericksonian hypnosis with his own innovations. Generative Change in Business is based on Roberts Success Factor Modeling work and his developments in NLP over the last 40 years and has to do with application of Generative Change to entrepreneurs, companies, organizations and leadership.

Generative Coaching is the fruit of our mutual collaboration, particularly over the last 15+ years. It involves applying the principles of Generative Change to the area of personal development through Life Coaching and Executive Coaching.

The principles and processes of Generative Change provide a deep structure that has many different applications. This deep structure of Generative Change can be applied to many diverse surface structures or issues and situations relating to individual, organizational and social change.

We are going to start with an overview of the Generative Change model and then, in the coming chapters, go into how we apply it specifically to coaching and the Six-Step Generative Coaching process that we have developed.

For a New Beginning

Before diving into that, we both like to begin whatever we are presenting with a poem. We do this partly to honor our Irish roots, but also partly to emphasize that, in creativity, were using language poetically and musically at least as much as literally. That is, we are looking to use language to open a space that includes yet transcends words at the same time.

The great writer Emerson used to say that, in fact, every word was a fossil poem. That means each word has a history in it. Since we are not the first ones to speak them, the words we use carry clues about their origins and their evolution through time, like a fossil. But each word is also a poem, in that no word is really ultimately literal. It always has other layers of meaning.