Seth Braun and the 4 Gateways model of coaching

September 17, 2011

Seth Braun and the 4 Gateways model of coaching

I just attended a talk by (Seth Braun), who does coaching seminars based 4 gateways. There was some stuff at the beginning about how supposedly the same word for Crisis in Chinese is opportunity. He works within a framework in which a crisis or a problem is an opportunity. Society is at a tipping point between the industrial revolution, which deals with things, and a new paradigm which deals with energy and information, where we are managing creativity. He talked about how society is on a spiral that embodies three different mindsets: Traditional, Modern and Post-Modern. People tend to live in, or embody, one or more of these paradigms. People who embody these tend to hate the other two: traditional people think the modernists and Po-Mo folks are gonna bring us all to hell. Modernists think that traditional people need to lighten up, and the post-modernists are just too out there, etc. He drew a spiral to illustrate this. As we go from one to the next, the idea is to transcent and integrate. Next he started to describe the “four quadrants of human experience”. Thinking	Feeling
Acting	Being

I just attended a talk by (Seth Braun), who does coaching seminars based 4 gateways. There was some stuff at the beginning about how supposedly the same word for Crisis in Chinese is opportunity. He works within a framework in which a crisis or a problem is an opportunity. Society is at a tipping point between the industrial revolution, which deals with things, and a new paradigm which deals with energy and information, where we are managing creativity. He talked about how society is on a spiral that embodies three different mindsets: Traditional, Modern and Post-Modern. People tend to live in, or embody, one or more of these paradigms. People who embody these tend to hate the other two: traditional people think the modernists and Po-Mo folks are gonna bring us all to hell. Modernists think that traditional people need to lighten up, and the post-modernists are just too out there, etc. He drew a spiral to illustrate this. As we go from one to the next, the idea is to transcent and integrate. Next he started to describe the “four quadrants of human experience”. Thinking

Feeling

Acting

Being

He added bits to this as he went along. Archetypes for each Quadrant

Magician | Lover
Warrior | Sovereign
Everyone is coaching all the time. It basically comes down to there is two kinds of coaching: good coaching and bad coaching. Actually good and bad are not as useful as “effective” and “ineffective” coaching. Next he did a coaching session using this framework for one of the participants. The steps were

What would be a successful outcome for this? 1a. Decide whether to approach this from a consultant or coaching place.
Get the voices from the coaching client, write them on pieces of paper and put them on the ground in a circle that the client can walk around.
going around the circle, ask questions from the perspective of the relevant archetype. 12 o’clock is the Sovereign, 3:00 is the Magician, 6:00 is the Warrior and 9:00 is the Lover.

Questions for each Quadrant

What do you think about this? | How do you feel about this?
What are the risks involved in doing or not doing this? | Are you ok with that?

If the client isn’t ok in the place of the sovereign, he had her go through the process again. In a full version, he would have the person go through the process three times. In each of the quadrants, different methods can be used. Models for each Quadrant

NLP
Landmark Education
Hypnosis | “closed eye process”
Dance
Bodywork
Goal Setting
Take action | Prayer
Meditation
At the end, there was a Q&A. One bit that I found interesting was the distinction between “coaching” and “therapy”. Coaching is about the future, while therapy is usually about the past. People tend to have insurance that covers therapy but not coaching. At the end, Seth shared his vision of the “Next Greatest Version of Fairfield”, which is related to a project he is working with called the “Next Greatest Version of America”. A natural thought that occurred to me was to ask the question “What is the next greatest version of Bob?” Food for thought, I don’t have an immediate answer. Seth is putting on a “level 1” training for this work in Fairfield on October 1. He also has an upcoming Men’s Mastery Course the weekend of September 23-25 as well.