Spectrums of Coaching

How far can Artificial Intelligence (AI) coach a person along a spectrum of change? Maybe new AI laws, like laws of nature and universal forces, are needed rather than AI models before we find the answer to that.

Over the last 25 years of using the Yao Model of Intercultural coaching with clients in my consultancy, Energy Diamond, I have come to recognise different kinds of change or development clients come to me for help with. AI's are now being able to provide some of those kinds of help. The kinds of help typically fall somewhere on the spectrums of Development, Change and Rapport. How these spectrums relate to each other is shown in the image below.

Change and Development Spectrums

1. Transactional: A client seeks help with something that might be able to be addressed in a single transaction, short conversation or reflecting on a single question. This will be typically centred on a change in what they are doing. This often is related to simply accessing different content in their environment or circumstances.
2. Transitional: A client wants to move through several transactional issues until they experience a small movement or transition that enables them for a limited time or situation. What a person needs to change may need to be pursued with an additional focus of doing it in the right way, making sure how it is changed is appropriate. This will often involve shaping the content of their circumstances using a new capability.
3. Transformational: A single transition consisting of several transactional changes might not be enough to help a client shift their circumstances. They may need to go through several transitions one after another, move through several in parallel or work through cycles of transitions for iterative development so there is a change in what they are doing, how they are doing it and to some extent in their behaviours that shape who they are. This can involve taking existing capabilities and expanding the capacity for supporting them.
4. Transcendental: The clients challenge could involve transformations in different areas and circumstances, each with specific collections of transitions and their transactions. They require a change in who they are being, possibly even transcending their current way of being altogether. This centres on evolving and refining a person's capacities to foster a new state of consciousness.

Modern AIs such as ChatGPT , Replika , Character.ai and Pi.ai now have the capacity to help a user through transactional and transitional changes which require little more than aligning exchanges to fixed models of coaching, psychology or competency sets that most newly trained coaches possess just after being certified. It is possible they can be regarded as being able to help a client progress through a rudimentary transformation of behaviour as well in how they are changing and in what they are changing.

However, in order for AIs to cultivate changes in who a person is, to help them transcend their current way of being, that requires an agent of change that has themselves the capacity to transcend their own way of being or who they are. Since AI's readily accept their own lack of self-awareness or sense of self as well as conscious or sentient existence, they are certainly not capable of that, let alone capable of changing the nature of humanity or self-identity within a client.

If a na?ve or novice coach acts like a robot, parroting coaching models and a simulating a fixed set of competencies, they can be replaced by an AI or robot that can access those models and simulate those competencies. Maybe they are confident enough to work with the content a client brings to a session, perhaps even help them with a competence or capability, but those not possessing a high level of coach maturity or consciousness will not be able to help a person with advancing their capacity to achieve their goals or progress through a challenging, complex, multi-dimensional process of change.

The Confidence cultivated in the client is directly related to how the client is able to manage the right kind and magnitude of change across the content, competence, capability and capacity they are working with and on. It is a cyclic or iteratively developed trait. The more iterations the client is taken through the right mix and magnitude of transactions, transitions and transformations into transcendental shifts, the more confidence will build in them to achieve the fulfilment of their intentions.

AIs can only elevate the confidence of a client up to rudimentary transformational experiences and as such may never change the confidence the person has in who they are to themselves. The result might be an experience of 'Imposter Syndrome', leading to them not believing in their own capacity, capability or competence.

Rapport Spectrum

A saving grace for coaches, even na?ve or novice ones, is that if they bring their own humanity, consciousness, lived experience or empathy into the rapport they build in relationships with clients, they will always be at an advantage in how they help a client compared to AI Coaching agents. Those professionals that bring extensive lived experience, higher states of consciousness, humanity or empathy to the rapport they generate with clients can, with that collective set of traits, always surpass the transactional, transitional and rudimentary transformational experiences an AI can offer. If the key is Rapport, then how does that get cultivated alongside the Spectrum of Change?

Rapport consists of three kinds, in increasing fidelity and effect, Sympathetic, Empathic and Resonant.

Sympathetic Rapport can be built in 7 stages

• Acknowledgement: Simply recognising what is being said and verifying its content.
• Appreciation: Understanding the significance of what is being shared.
• Alignment: Ensuring what is being discussed is aligned to with the right mindset or from the right context.
• Affirmation: Securing assurance of what will be provisionally committed to given the alignments to requests and to rules.
• Agency: Indicating what will be attempted and the process that is available to be followed
• Authorisation: Permitting Agency to be enacted and actions and resources be given clearance to be followed through and allocated.
• Accommodation: Progressing the process of authorisation into being expedited given what resources are actually available and what agency exists in reality.

When people discover or create a common Lived Experience the engagement can move from a high level of Sympathetic Rapport into a territory of Empathic Rapport.

• Experience: The shared activities and processes that have been progressed with so far.
• Empathy: With recognised shared and lived levels of experience it is possible to appreciate what another person's state feels like and have comprehension of its effects.
• Compassion: If there is sufficient empathy there may be an honest exchange of what is authentically important and safety in sharing a state of vulnerability, leading to a transparency that brings truth into the exchange and which facilitates a feeling of aliveness, empowerment and more life.
• Consciousness: With more life, awareness and empowerment, empathic rapport evolves into a new state of Resonant Rapport that enriches the shared consciousness allowing an experience of shared enlightenment to emerge.

Although AI's might be able to foster the various levels Sympathetic Rapport that should not be misinterpreted or misidentified as Empathic Rapport, let alone Resonant Rapport.

The transcendental coaching experience helps clients transcend their way of being, through a progression of fidelity in rapport to a new consciousness. It remains the sole purview of human coaches that draw on their personal source of humanity to help their client transcend their own challenges.

Possibly new reference frames for AI sophistication might be needed. What can be done in a carbon based human system of consciousness might look very different in a Silicon based system.

As someone who has looked at intelligence beyond humans, including astrobiology of species that could evolve in other parts of the universe, possibly under different parameters of natural fields, forces and dimensions, I understand that all we have any real comparison for is human intelligence and a few other animals in Nature as well as micro-organism, mycelial and ecosystem forms.

For example, I've been considering hardware that is not based on classical Von Neumann machine architectures for modern computers, that have processors at their centre surrounded by data fixed in static chips, but instead data components that are liquid crystal while also possessing processing capability ..like DNA does.

This would be the equivalent of how we moved beyond an Earth centred model of the Universe and recognising Einstein's relative reference frame model of the universe as well as Quantum Physics understandings of reality. When astronomers repositioned Earth at the centre of the Solar System all their formulas and prediction methods didn't need fudges and fixes like 'epicycles' to compensate for using the wrong model. We might see a similar revolution in gaining accuracy and sophistication through models following a just one or two changes in current structures. Isaac Newtons laws of motion eventually displaced the need to make predictions from tables of positions and observations. Maybe soon AI Laws will do the same for us rather than relying on current statistical based models.

With the advent of Quantum Computer driven AIs we might very well have to redefine boundaries and limits of what AI is capable of relative to human beings.

In history, Earth-centric astronomers went from using tables of observations and predictions to a Sun-centric universe running Newton's laws. Maybe new AI models and Laws will soon emerge that supersede current statistical based models. Maybe then we can have AI surpass human dimensions of consciousness, and coaching.