Transcript for:
Understanding Laddering in Coaching

We're going to explore briefly an introduction to what we call laddering. Laddering is what we would call a micro skill and what that means is that we use this in every coaching situation in various ways. And our approach to it is that this is not bladdering from a hierarchical perspective. So it's not about a ladder of inference or something like that, where we're trying to move toward something. It's much more valuable in the way we use it in order to create awareness and also to help people to go much deeper into themselves.

So awareness and insight are... some of the key outcomes of any laddering type of process. So the way we talk about it is we talk about what we call multi-dimensional laddering.

So we're going to explore that a little bit more, but that means it's up, it's down, it's forwards, it's backwards, and there's a fluidity to it and there's also some rigidity to it. So we're going to talk about different ways that we use it. So in essence, laddering is an incremental questioning approach that we can employ with our clients at any point in the coaching conversation, though there's some spaces and places where it tends to work a little bit better.

And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.