How Newfield Coaches Work Their Magic

How are Newfield graduates able to make such a significant impact on people’s lives? When a Newfield graduate is coaching someone, that person’s friends and family are often awestruck by the changes that emerge in their loved one’s life and ways of being. They want to know how Newfield coaches work their magic.

Well, to start, different types of coaching achieve different goals, so let’s distinguish them:

Transformational vs. Transactional Coaching

Traditional coaches help clients reach a desired destination (from Point A to B), called transactional coaching (one-dimensional). Let’s use ‘Client Kara’ as an example. Kara tells her traditional coach that she wants to make more money to be happier. In transactional coaching, the conversation often stays within the client’s framing of the stated challenge or ambition. It stays within the client’s current perspective range.

Therefore, the conversation aims to assist the client with their stated challenge or goal. In our example, Kara doesn’t have enough money and wants to obtain more money. Based on this interpretation, there are specific actions Kara can take, such as creating a plan to get promoted, to achieve her goal of more money, and arrive at her desired destination. When clients want to close a gap in their lives or achieve specific goals, the tactical and linear nature of transactional coaching is excellent at helping them reach their destination.

Newfield coaches have excellent transactional skills, and they can also enable radical transformation by helping clients change the fundamental way they see their breakdown and are being to access potentialities that would have otherwise remained hidden or dormant. This is called transformational coaching and leadership (multi-dimensional). It takes a client from Point A to B to C to X, Y, or Z – to a new destination that hadn’t existed within the client’s prior notion of what was possible!

Unlike a traditional transactional coach, a Newfield coach helps Kara uncover – and question – the invisible assumptions and beliefs that inform and drive her relationship to and desire for money. Here, the coach partners with Kara and invites her to look deep inside and consider questions such as:

• What is your relationship to money?
• Where did you learn about money?
• What are you assuming about money and happiness?
• Will more money make me happy? If not, what will?

A Newfield coach supports Kara in connecting with her own depth to explore what brings her authentic happiness and to discover possibilities for creating profound joy. Kara may discover how to obtain a pay raise or generate more revenue, and she may discover an unforeseen possibility that ignites her on a creative path. Kara may begin painting again because it brings her joy. Now, she’s on an unexpected yet profoundly authentic path toward greater happiness. She came in wanting a pay raise. Now she’s running off to buy paints and a canvas, her heart zinging with excitement and enthusiasm for the first time in years! Transformational coaching helped her achieve her initial goal of making more money and so much more. It also forever transformed her relationship with money. She is healing old patterns throughout her history with it. That, my friends, is transformation.

Newfield transformational coaching gives clients the space to examine their goals – and how cultural, familial, and historical narratives have shaped these goals. This broader exploration enables the development of greater awareness around whether or not their goals serve them. By questioning their deepest preconceptions, they develop the ability to alter their perspectives before taking action, which can lead to entirely new paths and radical paradigm shifts.

Ontological Coaching: What Sets Newfield Apart

Other transformational coaching and leadership training programs exist, and Newfield’s ontological approach distinguishes our training from all others. Ontological coaching (the term we use to describe our training) pushes the envelope of transformation because it both focuses on the client’s stated issues and how they are showing up in the world.

Ontology is the study of how we are being, and it recognizes that humans are continually expressing their state of being through multiple intertwined dimensions. Our coaches understand these dimensions, and they support their clients in learning how to shift their perspectives and deepen their awareness to be in alignment with their deepest selves. This can dramatically transform clients’ perspectives on their challenges, relationships, and the world.

Here’s an overview of Newfield’s methods and models: 

Personal Development: The Foundation

A unique aspect of our program is that our students undergo their profound transformation by first learning to use our methodologies on themselves before ever using them to coach others. In our Foundations of Ontological Learning course, they embark on a fun and profound journey of self-discovery using all of the models described below. This gives them the first-hand experience required to teach these methods to others.

If you needed heart surgery, would you choose the surgeon who had performed actual surgeries or had only watched instructional videos? That’s how it is with our training: coaches must live the transformation personally to partner with and support others. The best news is that taking the program will empower you to unleash your authentic self, break through barriers, live with more joy, and create better results in everything you do!

The OAR Model

The OAR Model stands for OBSERVER, ACTION, RESULTS. It is useful for overcoming habitual, self-limiting ways of solving problems that only lead to more of the same. Typically, when we want to achieve a different outcome, like Kara (I want more money), our collectively learned response is to change our actions (I’ll make a plan to get promoted).

We believe that new actions will produce new results. But what if clients stopped and first observed their perspectives by asking questions as Kara did, such as, “Why do I want to make more money? Is a hidden cultural belief driving this desire that doesn’t serve me?”

By learning to observe the observer that we are, we can uncover and shift limiting beliefs, which creates the possibility for entirely different actions that produce original results that serve our authentic selves. In Kara’s case, she not only increased her revenue, but she also decided to start painting again – an unexpected yet satisfying result!

Using Speech Acts to Create Better Futures

We think of language as a tool to describe things. And it does. However, language is much more than simply descriptive. Language generates our futures. For example, when a client commits to a new practice, their conversation creates a future outcome that wouldn’t otherwise have arisen.

Every language arises out of its unique history and culture. When one speaks, many of us believe the ideas we are articulating are our own individual ideas. And though we cannot deny that we are creative humans with innovative thoughts, these thoughts are also greatly influenced by our language’s collective culture and history. All humans use common ‘speech acts,’ but typically without much conscious intent. However, Newfield coaches learn to distinguish the ‘speech acts’ (Offers, Requests, Promises, Declarations, Assessments, and Assertions) and are trained to use them deliberately to co-create better and more satisfying futures.

The BEL Model

The BEL Model stands for BODY, EMOTIONS, and LANGUAGE. Many coach training programs focus solely on using cognitive abilities (LANGUAGE and thought). But the BEL Model shows coaches how to tap into – and integrate – these three different yet symbiotic aspects to help clients become aware of their state and explore ways to shift it.

For example, a client says, ‘I love my job.’ But when you ask how their body feels, they say, ‘My stomach is clenched, and my breathing is shallow.’ Their BODY may indicate a different story, which may not match the verbal LANGUAGE being expressed. The body – and the emotions – are different lenses that provide alternate views into a client’s state and perspective.

The Magic of Integrating these Ontological Methods

By learning and combining the models above, our students are prepared to manage the two most essential aspects of ontological coaching. First, as a coach, you must become aware of how you show up for your client. This awareness helps a coach focus on serving their client instead of inadvertently allowing their attention to fixate on their coaching performance or other distracting concerns. Second, as a coach, you must be aware of how you perceive your client. This awareness helps a coach view their client as wise, whole, and capable instead of doing them a disservice by viewing them as broken or needing to be fixed.

When coaches use Newfield’s ontological models and practices to find resonance with the wholeness and beauty of themselves and their clients, they are coaching from a way of being that enables transformation. The coach creates a space in which clients feel safe to allow their authentic selves to emerge. New and exciting possibilities arise in this space – this ‘new field’ – of creativity, spontaneity, receptiveness, and inner knowing. When the coach and client are connected – wholeness to wholeness – that’s when the magic happens.

Using Our Magic for a Better World

As ontological coaches, we recognize that our role is to support people’s unfolding by helping them connect with their depth and wisdom and the new possibilities that can enrich their lives and that of others. The people who resonate with our programs usually care deeply about humanity and want to build the capacity to have a significant impact.

Ontological coaching allows people to connect to their wisdom and bring forth the beauty and unique contributions they can offer the world. Newfield coaches support people in fulfilling their deepest purpose. Newfield trained coaches to invite the wholeness and the amazingness of people to blaze brightly for the sake of all and the betterment of our world. 

Are you interested in becoming a Newfield coach or transformational leader? Check out the Newfield Network programs, or contact Linda Fischer to learn more.

About the Author: 

Veronica Olalla Love, M. Ac., NCC, PCC is the Global CEO for the Newfield Network. She is also an international facilitator for the Newfield Network Programs and is the lineage holder for the Newfield Network’s ontological coaching tradition. In her unique and passionate style, Love invites us to remember the depth of potential we have as evolutionary beings.