Approach
Dr CC Tan’s Unique Approach to Coaching & Mentoring
An integrative, whole-person, whole-life approach - The Metanalytic Coaching Model
I offer Executive, Organisational and Personal Coaching that is imbued with Wisdom and Clarity. My coaching approach is paradigm-shifting and life-changing.
The big problem that I solve in Executive Coaching is that most conventional generic and formulaic coaching methods focus on process and performance, assuming wrongly that clients are mostly uniform in their perceptions, values, motivations and responses. Because every client is a unique product of innate personality and multiple external influences, conventional coaching often leads, if one isn’t careful, to misdirected strategies, delayed success, frustration, time wastage and financial loss.
But offer a radically advanced paradigm of personal and executive coaching I call the “Metanalytic Coaching Model”. My coaching method integrates a deep insight into a whole lifetime of formative experiences, recognizing cognitive and emotional connections, perceptual and behavioural strongholds that inform habitual world-views, unconscious default responses and reflexive thinking. I facilitate deep insight into self, leading to an appreciation of your unique perspectives and eliciting value-based purposes to enable clients like you to achieve breakthroughs and create novel self-generative responses, new thinking, innovative options, new success strategies and new life.
My own journey has not been smooth. I come to the coaching profession as one who has personally struggled through many years of challenges, eventually realizing the need to rise above my own cognitive and emotional strongholds to forge new strategies for success. I now want to help clients like you achieve the same, but much more quickly, with less pain and loss.
My mission is to help you, as an individual, leader or team member, to successfully navigate personal, circumstantial or work challenges and changes, lead a fulfilled, balanced and healthy personal and working life, attain your full potential and move towards positive personal and organisational changes that empower learning, growth, high performance and renewal.
My Metanalytic Coaching Model integrates my deep understanding of the whole person, family of origin, all of one’s successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies, as factors that shape worldview, responses and choices, with an evidence-based, strategic and transformative coaching framework developed by Columbia University, that draws on adult learning, development theories and concepts, as well as theories from the fields of organizational and social psychology, management education, communication theory, neurophysiology, intercultural studies and other branches of the behavioral sciences.
Leveraging 40 years of work and life experiences in multiple fields and diverse roles
I bring to bear perspectives and understanding of people and organizations honed through a varied personal career of successful appointments to professional, executive, senior management, command and board leadership positions in the public, regulatory, private, military, academic and non-profit sectors, with multiple international military medals and civilian awards. I have extensive international experience in youth training, community development, humanitarian disaster relief and social innovation. My background as a practicing doctor adds a unique understanding of the human condition plus invaluable interpersonal skill sets that enhance coaching success.
I create the opportunity for clients to go back to basic values and motivations, helping people to re-discover themselves and to re-evaluate their aims and priorities to plan for success. Often this results in a new sense of purpose and a fresh joie de vivre which fortifies them to achieve their true life goals. I call this “Going back to basics to go back to the future”.
I understand that coaching must be highly individualised and not formulaic
I understand that coaching cannot be formulaic and generic. individuals are unique products of their life histories, their experiences and the values they have imbibed. Their motivations and responses to life and work events are shaped by the myriad experiences, even traumas, that they have encountered in their personal histories. Individuals form complex emotional and cognitive relationships with circumstances around them, which then shape their perspectives and influence their performance and decisions.
I am aware that success in coaching depends on this realization that that clients cannot be expected to have uniformly logical thinking or identical ability to form perspectives and define purposes. I know that clients’ observations and responses need to be interpreted through their own personal lenses, each one utterly unique.
I therefore utilise my proprietary INSPIRE Self Appraisal Protocol for patients to discover themselves in depth, and then listen, observe and customize my approach to individual circumstances and needs. I help clients to understand how and why they view their world as they do and to reframe what they experience and what they desire to elicit solutions and strategies that are uniquely meaningful to them. Coaching is not about employing standard templates or asking routine “powerful questions”, and I provide personalised approaches to every client.
The INSPIRE Self-Appraisal Protocol
INSPIRE is my specially developed proprietary self-appraisal system. It is an acronym derived from its three core functions: It facilitates Insight and a deep understanding of self and how you respond to everything; it develops your ability to understand the Perspectives from which you see the world; it facilitates your understanding of your true life Purpose, resolve and determination that drives your search for self-actualization.
INSPIRE is an in-depth and highly probing instrument that helps you achieve self-realization and helps me, your coach to identify key areas to work with you. It reveals the source and origins of your personality, values, and drivers. It unearths the origins of positive attitudes that when developed promote growth and renewal. But it also exposes self-defeating strongholds that hold you back and need to be dealt with. It elicits the deepest and innermost aspirations, motivations, and desires that drive your purpose in life.
Neethling Brain Instruments (NBI) Consultant & Practitioner Certification
I am a certified Consultant & Practitioner of The NBI Thinking Preferences Assessment, which is a proprietary instrument of the Neethling Brain Institutes.
As part of your coaching/mentoring programme, I would like to invite you to participate in the NBI Thinking Preferences Assessment. This is a validated and proven reliable psychometric instrument based in neuroscience and psychology that measures the degree and order to which one prefers to use a combination of four primary thinking processes. Gaining insight into the way we prefer to think helps us to understand how we function and makes us more aware of and sensitive to the preferences of others.
The NBI is rooted in solid neuroscience and neuroimaging research into lateralisation of functions in the brain (right and left-brain functions), local versus global processing, thinking and learning styles and cognitive versus emotional intelligence. Yet it is metaphoric to a degree and the results of the assessment are not to be viewed completely literally. Like all models, it attempts to simplify the complexity of reality in order to facilitate appreciation of broad thinking preferences, leading to an understanding of current performance characteristics and potential for progress in different dimensions.
Because the focus is on thinking preferences, the end result is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. The profile is a descriptive, objective analysis of the individual’s thinking choices, with no profile being better or worse than another. Instead, the report describes an individual’s thought preferences. While there is a correlation, thinking preferences and skills are not congruent and there may be a need to train skills in areas against preferred thinking patterns in order to better succeed.
The assessment has a number of implications for how you lead and manage others, how you work in teams, communicate, negotiate, innovate, make decisions, as well as in many other important areas that could eventually lead you to enjoying a more productive and fulfilled personal and professional life. Developing better relationships, making more dynamic contributions in the team and making sound and relevant decisions are but a few of the advantages of understanding your own thinking profile.
The NBI model has been applied to more than 3 million users in more than 30 countries globally and has resulted in significant outcomes: improved relationships, performance, creativity, innovation, leadership, communication, decision making, collaboration and more, for individuals, teams and organisations.
The NBI Thinking Preferences Assessment report will be explained to you in detail during your coaching sessions, with the aim of translating your understanding of your thinking preferences into action decisions to support your professional and personal objectives. processes. Gaining insight into the way we prefer to think helps us to understand how we function and makes us more aware of and sensitive to the preferences of others.
The assessment has a number of implications for how one leads and manages others, how one works in teams, communicates, negotiates, innovates, makes decisions, as well as in many other important areas that could eventually lead one to enjoying a more productive and fulfilled personal and professional life.
“Dr Tan is a good listener, picks up on critical issues, analytical and gives alternative perspectives; gives good advice and is a good prompter to change when necessary.”