Introduction

Okay, so folks, let's start this one again.

About the Speaker

Okay, I'm Lear. I'm a consultant and coach, and I'm going to be talking to you today more about the coaching side of things.

Why Most AI Falls Short at Coaching

You all here today are probably pretty familiar with tech, familiar with AI, and AI is brilliant in consultant mode. It gives plenty of advice, suggestions, and ideas, but it kind of sucks at coaching unless you prompt it in some detail. And I've tested a load of the kind of AI coaches that are out there.

And most of them kind of do tend to tell you, here's what you should be doing. That's not what coaching is.

So today I'll just kind of explain a bit more around what coaching is and isn't and how to best prompt yourself for an AI coach.

Coaching versus Therapy Boundaries

Just one little highlight is just that, yeah, the coaching side of things starts to go into questions. Those questions can start to go quite deep into your past because sometimes, you know, the things that are blocking you today from doing the right thing in the right way are things that surfaced a long time ago. So it can sometimes feel a bit like therapy.

If therapy is what you need, though, please do stick with the human. Bots really ain't there yet, much as I love them.

The Coaching Tech Landscape

So current landscape, as with everything AI at the moment, is going crazy. Things are emerging nonstop.

As you'd imagine, there's tons of stuff emerging around the health care corporate fitness health areas.

No clear winners yet. For the personal coaching side of things, I tried out a bunch of the current tools. None of them are particularly overwhelming.

There were a few that had been getting really good academic reviews and had been studied and those ones have just disappeared. So yeah, you might as well just stick with creating your own coach bot for the moment, I guess.

Evidence of Emerging Competence

And one thing that's really interesting is just earlier this year, AI coach bots for the first time were actually able to demonstrate proper coaching competency.

The ICF, which is one of the big bods in all things to do with coaching, has these kind of sets of competencies, checklists, and you get various examiners kind of go through transcripts between an actual coach and coachee to see, is this person a competent coach?

And the transcripts that involved a bot with a coachee are now demonstrating the level of competence that you would want to see of an at least beginner level coach, which is pretty impressive.

Where AI Coaching Shines

The bots are extremely good if you want to achieve a particular goal. If you want to, I don't know, drive new business, grow your business, write an essay, write a book, whatever it is, clear, tangible goals like that are exactly the happy place that AI is really, really good at coaching you, prompting you, reminding you, keeping you on track. They're brilliant because they're available 24-7.

They can nudge you along the way, remind you to do the thing that you know you should be doing, help you course correct when you need. And obviously, money-wise, they are fabulous.

Coaches cost, on average, probably about 100 an hour, maybe cheaper. Quite a lot more if you go into corporate coaching, several hundred an hour, some of them charge. But yeah, if you already have Claude ChatGPT paid versions, even the unpaid versions, you can get a reasonably good version of coaching for your practical goals quite easily.

So if you know, for example, I want to get a six pack by Christmas, that's definitely not happening. which kind of makes me wonder, did I choose the wrong profession?

Where Human Coaches Still Win

But I still reckon that us human coaches have a role.

If you've got really naughty, complex problems, if you're looking more at inter or intrapersonal stuff, if you want to figure out relationships in work, where your confidence issue is coming from, what's happening with your inner critic, improve your communication. That's the kind of area where it's a bit more subtle, it's a bit more personal, and that's where human coaches really win.

They can read subtleties. They can read your body language, your facial expressions. Notice that while your words might sound full of enthusiasm, the rest of you ain't matching.

Little things like that matter. They'll dig into the details that matter like that.

Designing Your Own AI Coach

So, I'll be showing you in a moment the prompt that I put together for Claude, but this is the broad outline.

Role and Ethics

So, first off, obviously, usual thing, you're defining its role. Unsurprisingly, I'm suggesting you make it into an ICF expert coach. ICF because it's the Federation and saying it's an ICF expert coach lets it know that yes, it should have a lot of focus around specific competencies, ethics, kinds of models to use, et cetera.

However, this is AI, so you kind of have to double down on what exactly you mean. So just saying an ICF expert coach isn't enough. It's also useful just to remind that means you follow the ethics, you follow the competencies, you use coaching models and questions.

If you are focusing on a specific goal, you'll probably find it useful to say that the role of this coach is one who specializes in your area of interest. So if you know you want to work on new business and sales skills, maybe it's an ICF coach who specializes in sales. That can help a little bit.

Structuring the Session

For the instructions, one of the things that's a little bit unusual is that I really recommend you get the coach to check with you. The reason for this is 1a coaching conversation should go through a bit of an arc. You spend a bit of time exploring a topic, opening it up, figuring out the options before you start to close it down, narrow it down to specific answers.

If the bot knows how long you have, it can take you through that journey correctly. If not, it'll either start closing down almost immediately or it'll keep on opening up and never get to any conclusion. So work out what your duration is.

How long do you have for today's session? And okay, here's what I'm going to do today with what I've learned.

Obviously the bot can help you with actions, follow-ups. It can do a brilliant job in terms of memory, building up a personal psychological profile.

And 1I usually also tell it, please do focus on one single question at a time. Bots love going very verbose, stacking a bunch of questions together. In a coaching situation, you'd normally expect to just maybe get one single question and have to kind of answer that.

The dreadful thing about coaching is that a lot of the work is on you as a coachee. The questions themselves might sound simple, But it's kind of interesting how being forced to articulate one single question and come up with a really long answer to that really helps you with clarity.

Choosing a Coaching Style

Third area, coaching style. And this was kind of tricky to define. There is no single set of dimensions of coaching that everybody agrees on. Oh yeah, these are the variations of coaching style to look for.

So after a bit of research, I figured that these are likely to be the three areas that are most useful for you folks if you're defining your bot. First one's really self-explanatory, gentle and supportive. Or do you want to coach that really provocative and challenging?

Second bullet, the default mode should go to the first half. It should be relatively structured and model driven. That's what you told us in the earlier instructions as part of its role. However, if you are starting to find the models and the really structured approach is grating on you and you want something a bit different, consider going a bit more emergent and creative.

Same thing applies with the third bullet point. The default mode of the coach will tend to focus very much on being very practical, very goal oriented. Again, if you're finding that bugs you, ask it to be a bit more exploratory, transformational, reach down inside you rather than just focusing on practical things to do.

Setting Goals with Your Coach Bot

So the final one, I've just left it as optional and I haven't included any example of a goal in mine because I want to use my AI bot, coach bot is a general coach. If you have a specific goal though, chuck it in here and that'll make it easier. Again, use the usual smart framework because the more specific you are, the easier it's going to be for the bot to help you achieve that.

But you can actually work with the bot and get it to help you to say, okay, what would amazing look like in the next three months?

Live Demo: From Advice to Coaching

So with that, let's take a look at what you get from a bot.

What Generic Chatbots Do

So just using bog standard chat GPT, I'll just do a demo of what your kind of default mode is. So if I say to chat GPT, you are a coach, coach me on procrastination. The kind of answer that comes back with, yeah, this is not coaching.

This is useful advice, might be sensible, practical steps for me to work through, but it's not actually trying to help me in any way with myself. What on earth is going on for me with procrastination? Why am I procrastinating? What's underlying it? Why am I putting things off?

It's sensible. But it's the kind of good advice that tends to go in one ear and out the other.

And that's the difference that coaching usually makes. Because it doesn't give you simple answers, because you're not listening to somebody else telling you what to do, you actually have to come up with these answers for yourself. And that's where a lot of the nuance comes in. And that's where it really starts to help.

Configuring a Better Coach Bot

So let's swap over to Claude. As you can see, I've been playing around with my AI coach here quite a bit around the topic of procrastination strategies.

Honestly, never do that. Never, ever. Almost.

So, the instructions that I've set up, I'm using, you can use either Claude or ChatGPT for this. I've done it as a project with instructions because if I just did it as a general chat, it's... just means that I can't really easily reuse it and repurpose it.

So, what I suggest is, if you have the paid version of either of these, you can just set it up as a project and have this as a kind of a permanent, here's how you work. So, as I mentioned, you instruct it to be a coach, you tell it to stay with ethics and competencies, use frameworks, and not to offer direct advice or suggestions, focus on a single question. Instructions, like I said, yeah, check on how long it is and double check with the person at the end.

Are they ready to wrap up with? Because, hey, maybe I'll be willing to do a bit longer. For support, just at the end, please build up a profile of me and focus on spotting the things I mightn't be aware of about myself. Play those back to me.

And then questions, just again, reminding it one bloody question at a time. Please don't stack and go with conciseness.

The style information that I have here, this is open to you in terms of what style you want. I've chosen this particular set of styles from the dimensions. You might have something else that would suit you much better.

A Short Coaching Exchange

So let's see what happens now with this AI coach with these instructions. Help me with my procrastination. It's been listening too long. Help me with my procrastination.

Okay, sensible enough. Let's go with three minutes. Not very long for a coaching thing.

Okay, what am I progressing? You can start to see here the difference between a coaching question versus the instructions that you'd normally get from AI.

What am I protecting myself from? having to do the difficult thing, usually. If it's vague, undefined, and feels very big, and I don't know exactly what to do or where to start, that'll probably be difficult.

Start writing out a task list and figure out what it is that I have to do. Obviously.

Oh, damn it, I hate that question. Okay, I'll leave that as being the end of that particular coaching topic. Actually, no, I'm just going to ask one different question.

What have you noticed about me that I might be unaware of? Let's see what it comes up with for this. I've only been using this particular thing for a few days, so I'm not quite sure what it will say.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, this is why I hate coaching. Anyway. Coaching in public is not fun.

So I just wanted to do that as a quick demonstration for you of the kinds of questions that you'd be looking to see as being good from a coach bot.

What Good Coaching Questions Look Like

So the first bit's obvious and practical.

The next questions, they actually start to get a bit deeper. They are looking at me. They're helping me to figure out what the devil is it that I am up to.

Why am I not doing the thing that I should be doing? What's making it difficult? What stops me from doing it right when I notice things?

And yeah, it is almost entirely incorrect in saying that I wait until the discomfort forces me into things. But yeah, I'll go away and have a think about that, but I'm not answering it here today.

Let's maybe leave it at that for now. Slightly uncomfortable.

Q&A

So, okay folks, so that was pretty much it for the presentation. Does anybody have any questions for me?