Coaching in the Metaverse

Do you know what the metaverse is?

Well, it is really in its infancy and is constantly evolving, but the way to think of the metaverse is as a series of virtual worlds that you can visit when you are using a Virtual Reality (VR) device such as a VR headset. These virtual worlds can be realistic, fantastical, and/or augmented with the real world through Augmented Reality (AR) devices. Like the physical world, other people can join these virtual worlds and it is possible to “meet” in these immersive virtual settings. As you look around you can see, explore, and sometimes interact with the virtual environment and see other people moving around and interacting too – typically in the form of a virtual representation of themselves called an avatar.

What has the metaverse got to do with coaching?

As coaches, we all know that coaching works best when we are face-to-face. Whilst coaching we listen at a deep level, but we also collect valuable information from what is not being said, through body language, emotions, social signals, and micro-expressions in our face. How we arrive and take off our coat, our salutation, how walk into a room, our handshake, we connect on a spiritual level when we physically interact. It is this complete picture that forms the very essence of coaching. There is also an explicit physical action when meet face-to-face, we must travel somewhere. We enter a new/different environment. Our senses are engaged as there are different sounds, different smells, different temperatures. This change enhances our awareness and draws us away from our previous state.

However, meeting physically isn’t always possible. Nobody could physically meet during Covid lockdowns, and this was a time when many people struggled to adapt, and coaching was invaluable. We have seen an increase in virtual coaching through well-known videoconferencing tools such as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet. This increase became exponential during Covid lockdowns. Virtual coaching works, and it has one key benefit over meeting face-to-face: accessibility. Anybody with a computer, decent Internet connectivity, and ideally a webcam, can connect to a coach anywhere in the world.

But during a virtual meeting, what happens to the physical benefits we mentioned above? There is no travel, no arrival, no handshake, and during most video calls you can only see head and shoulders. As a coach, we lose valuable physical data – but this can be counterbalanced with the benefit of accessibility. Like many aspects of life, there are trade-offs to consider: face-to-face versus virtual; physical data versus accessibility.

As a virtual alternative, the metaverse starts to address some of the limitations of video calls, particularly around the physicality of meeting face-to-face. With the metaverse you do indeed travel to a meeting, but the journey is immediate, and the location may be a virtual office, a beach, a mountain, or something extraordinary such as a different planet. When we meet in the metaverse we can look around and observe, we see a different environment, we are immersed. We see a physical representation of the people around us. We can see them move, wave, and provide some visual cues such as folding their arms, and moving their head. Some VR/AR headsets, such as the Meta Quest Pro (https://www.meta.com/gb/quest/quest-pro/), have internal facing cameras that track facial expressions and reproduce them on the avatar. Some metaverse worlds can simulate an avatar handshake, or other touches, and transmit a physical interaction through haptic feedback in controllers. The metaverse provides a more traditional face-to-face environment than a video call.

But this comes at a cost. There is a physical cost of a VR/AR device that is needed to enter the metaverse. The Meta Quest Pro is ~£800 at the time of writing, but other models are available that are cheaper but do not provide advanced capabilities such as avatar expressions. There is the cost of technology adoption. We are all proficient at walking into a room for a face-to-face meeting, but using a headset to join the metaverse and meet with a coach requires a level of expertise. Whilst the technical bar for entry will get lower as the technology evolves and becomes more widely adopted, there is a technical barrier to coaching in the metaverse. And then there is the cost of using avatars as a physical representation. Most people create avatars that are quirky but similar, to their own appearance, but you don’t have to. You can use an avatar to project an image, a façade, which isn’t a good start to a coaching journey.

The future of coaching

Whilst the metaverse is still in its infancy, it is almost guaranteed that coaching in the metaverse will become an acceptable “face-to-face” alternative. Avatars will become more realistic, more representative of the physical being they portray. Behaviours and mannerisms will be more widely and precisely reflected in our virtual selves, facilitating non-verbal communication. Virtual meeting spaces will continue to evolve and become more interactive. The cost of entry will continue to fall.

Are you interested?

As a coach and a technologist, I have embraced the metaverse and see many of the benefits outlined above. If you are interested in being coached in the metaverse, please contact me for more details and to give it a try. You will be surprised!