If your message stream is anything like mine, it’s been flooded with chatter about AI, ChatGPT, and companies rushing to embrace this wonder tech before it potentially takes over our jobs.

Whether you are an employee, a manager, a coach, entrepreneur or consultant, the changes in how we work, brought about by AI, are about to upend many jobs. Of that I'm sure.

Many outcomes that life coaches currently help their clients with today will be replaceable soon by AI coaching chatbots. AI Coaches that can 'read' the entire body of coaching knowledge, captured in printed word, in a single afternoon and create a constantly improving expert matrix of what to do when - from tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of coaching conversations are coming to the marketplace soon. And when it hits the mainstream, it will disrupt the coaching industry in both good and bad ways.

In fact, I highlighted the huge disruption coming our way back in 2018 when we launched our course Coach Right: Do Less, Earn More. Make A Difference.

And the capability of AI technology (like ChatGPT) today is WILDLY better. It has cracked a major problem: how to generate engaging and human-like responses to humans' questions.

Paving the way for AI coaching conversations directly on your phone that feel much more human-to-human, and far less chatbot. The results are very exciting.

I asked ChatGPT to create a simple formula for what a coach does to create higher performance for clients. Because increasingly that's where the biggest value can be unlocked for clients.

Here’s ChatGPT’s response:

“Performance = Assessment + Goal-Setting + Strategy 

Where: 

Assessment = Initial evaluation of the client's current performance level and identification of areas of strength and improvement. 

Goal-Setting = Specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound (SMART) goals set in alignment with the client's overall objectives. 

Strategy = Identification of potential obstacles and development of strategies to overcome them."

A solid first answer.

Thankfully, what ChatGPT doesn’t understand yet is that coaching is all about the relationship between you and the person you are helping.

A coach is someone who excels at:

1) helping a client see new potentials

2) identifying what the interferences are (e.g. mindset, habits, strategies etc.) and

3) blowing away the interferences so the client can achieve the outcomes they want.

Thereby unlocking higher performance.

Those kinds of skills are highly valuable. And increasingly in demand.

Here's this idea expressed as a simple formula:

Performance = Potential - Interferences

As NLPers and coaches, we help individuals (and teams) clear out the stuff that gets in their way and then help them get really focused on the few things that truly will move the needle to create the outcomes they want.

But doing that well requires a set of uncommon skills. Skills that AI can't yet match.

Skills not taught in practitioner or master practitioner courses or traditional coaching training.

But before we delve into what those are, let's talk about the rise of virtual coaching and some key differences you need to know about if you coach people over Zoom or other virtual platforms.

To your success,

Tom