Guest post contributed by Charlie Smith

Thirty years ago if you said “coach” people mostly thought of a handful of sports figures. Today it seems there are millions of coaches — business coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, project coaches, career coaches, coaches’ coaches.  Coaching may be today’s version of the “Philosopher’s Stone” – that magic sought by alchemists in the Middle Ages, which could turn base metal into gold. Visions of impossible wealth and power and the very idea captured people’s hearts and minds. Coaching, done well, is such a gift.

At its heart, coaching is commitment to another’s success.  The base metal in modern life is everything that suppresses people’s vitality and willingness to reach beyond the predictable.

For a long time I’ve sought simple ways to reliably transform this base metal. The sometime magic of new possibility keeps me playing the coaching game, yet it often reminds me of playing the slot machines in Las Vegas. Every once in a while, I pull the lever and in the next moment there is an explosion of energy and excitement.  When people commit to each other’s success, this kind of energy, attraction, and excitement are the products of their intentions, regarding whatever they care about.

What’s always in the way, with coaches or clients is:

• People feeling like they have no power to act
• Personal, professional and organizational identities that stop us from listening
• Ignorance of what works
• Resignation, and compliance
• Absence of dialogue
• Having to be right
• Behaving like victims
• Moving to solutions before agreeing on problems
• Losing commitment to goals in the face of events
• Control is more important than winning
• Unwillingness to commit to performance aspirations beyond normal
• Avoiding each other’s domination

As I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations over the past forty years, I shifted from seeing organizations as static objects, to seeing them as interacting energy fields.  I came to see that simple tools are what’s needed to let people change what they see and to see more clearly the energy that makes things work (the absence of which stops progress).

Shifting the paradigm of coaching to one where the systems with the most energy in focus will prevail permits a degree of quantitative and qualitative measurement, and intervention, not previously possible. When you begin to see coaching as an energetic phenomenon, everything changes.

Merlin was King Arthur’s “coach.”  In The Once and Future King by T.H. White, Merlin, Arthur’s mentor, had an uncanny ability to know the future.  He gave Arthur this insight into how he knew what was going to happen before it did:

“Ah, yes.” Merlin said, “How did I know to set breakfast for two? Now ordinary people are born forwards in time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too.  This makes it quite easy for ordinary people to live.  But unfortunately I was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forward from behind.”

Merlin is my hero.  He is the quintessential example of standing in the future to empower what’s needed in the present.

For years I’ve been creating and testing tools to help people move toward an inspired and unlikely purpose.  The Merlin Navigator is such a tool that I want to introduce here.  I am finding that it reliably allows you to evaluate and predict the chances of success in any project, based on how people are using their energy — their power to act.  It provides instant coaching guidance that eliminates blind spots and facilitates success.  The Merlin Navigator helps deal with conflicting objectives and tells you exactly where you need to pay attention in order to dramatically improve your chances of success.

I’m very excited that The Merlin Navigator platform is nearly ready to go public.  I will write more about it in this blog as that launch date approaches.

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