Unbeknownst to many residents in his adopted home state of Utah, United Kingdom transplant Alan Fine has played a prominent role in the creation and development of one of the world’s most influential coaching, personal and professional development approaches—the GROW model. The model, originally conceived in the UK during the mid to late 1980s by Fine and collaborators Graham Alexander and Sir John Whitmore, grew out of experience the three had working with a variety of client athletes.

GROW is an acronym representing the four core components in any significant decision-making process. The first three letters are shared by all major iterations of the model. G represents the “Goal” the user seeks to achieve; R, the “Realities” that should be considered in the context of the decision process; and O, the “Options” open to the decision-maker. W is interpreted in a variety of ways. Initially, it stood for “Wrap-up,” while Whitmore took it to mean “Will” in his influential coaching practice.

Fine interpreted W as “Way Forward”—a specific action plan that he feels maximizes the precision and proactivity of the GROW model.

“The ‘Way Forward’ makes the decision process something tangible and actionable, where it becomes very clear to the person making the decision what should happen next,” says Fine.

In the absence of motivating clarity, he argues, “People simply don’t take action.”

The GROW model is constructed upon a deceptively simple insight—that breakthrough performance in any endeavor results more from the removal of internal interference to performance, than from the accretion of information and knowledge.

Fine calls this phenomenon “Decision Velocity”—the speed and direction (i.e. accuracy) of decisions, which drives individual and organizational performance.

GROWth Odyssey

Fine sees the GROW model as a powerful change agent that enables both individuals and organizations to effectively focus on “the critical variables” of decision making. “By focusing on each stage of the GROW model, we gain greater awareness,” he says. “This in turn accelerates our ability to become what Stephen R. Covey calls ‘response-able.’ In the final analysis, this ability to avoid internal distraction and act consciously is what drives genuine change.”

Fine discovered at a tender age the drag created by internal performance inhibitors. A painfully shy child with severe asthma, he had his first taste of competitive athletics in elementary school at age 11 when his brother entered him in a school tennis tournament. Though Fine had only been on a court a few times in his life, he recalls, “Somehow I got to the final, and found myself playing against the 13-year-old school jock; he was captain of the rugby team, and already had facial hair.”

Leading 6-4, 4-0, Fine heard a voice in my head telling him, “You only have to win two more games, and you are the school champion.” He froze, and did not win another game. This experience and others like it became latent seeds that ultimately bloomed into a profusion of performance insight within Fine.

From this time on, tennis and coaching became fixtures in Fine’s life. He began coaching at 13, and began receiving remuneration for his efforts at the ripe young age of 15.

“Coaching was an easy and natural thing for me to do,” says Fine. Eventually he began working with regional and national coaches, and used what he had learned to pay his way through college as a tennis player and coach.

Fine went to college with the intention to become an optometrist, but was so focused on playing and coaching tennis that he dropped out in his second year and started his own coaching practice, replete with pro shop and sporting goods store in his home town of Cardiff, capital of Wales. He was the first full-time tennis coach in Wales. With scant resources, Fine and fellow Welsh native Paul Daly built their club into a hub of Welsh tennis, attracting and developing national-caliber players.

“It was an exciting time for me, one in which I saw first-hand the benefits of coaching,” says Fine. “We were able to create a culture that seemed to excite a high level of energy and excitement about tennis, which translated into a fairly high level of skill in the region.”

As Fine worked with promising students who struggled with pressure and learning challenges, he developed a growing interest in sports psychology: “The impact of internal processes on performance rose to the forefront of my awareness during this time.”

Fine’s interest in sports psychology led him to explore Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game concept, and ultimately into a long-time friendship and collaboration with Alexander and Whitmore, co-creators of the GROW model.

The three worked together for three years in the early 1980s—without monetary success, Fine ruefully recalls—before developing the model that has had such a lasting impact on the world of athletic and corporate coaching.

GROWing From the InsideOut Shortly after Fine and his collaborators developed the GROW model, the partners went their separate ways, with each of the partners utilizing his own approach to the model. Since then, Fine has steadily refined and built upon the original model.

A host of significant innovations to the GROW model occurred at InsideOut Development, which Fine launched in 1985 in the UK, around the corner from Scotland Yard. Fine first came to Utah in 1993 to explore opportunities to explore opportunities with Stephan Covey and the 7 Habits model in the coaching arena. Not long afterward, Fine relocated InsideOut to Utah.

InsideOut, a professional training and organizational consulting firm, now provides executive leadership, training and coaching workshops, performance appraisals and training reinforcement services to a large global clientele. The company trains more than 15,000 people annually using the GROW model and other innovations and programs developed by Fine and the InsideOut team. The company also provides instructional certification, and has certified more than 1,000 facilitators in its product and service offerings.

During the past two decades, Fine and his collaborators at InsideOut have created targeted versions of the GROW model and complementary programs and mater- ials tailored to a wide array of clients, applications and contexts.

Fine’s approach has led him to become a prominent performance trainer and coach for leaders in diverse fields of endeavor—from corporate executives and entrepreneurs to educators and professional athletes. He has received considerable attention in the U.S. and throughout the world for the often-dramatic performance improvements of prominent athletes—including former David Cup tennis star Buster Mottram, squash professional Phil Kenyon, Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) golfers Stephen Ames, Bradley Dredge, Paul Lawrie, David Llewellyn, Colin Montgomery and Philip Price, and Ryder Cup participant and golf commentator David Feherty. He has also coached the British Olympic Fencing Team and the Welsh Amateur Golf Team.

Ames has publicly credited Fine for accelerating his emergence from relative obscurity to win the 2006 Players Championship by an astounding six strokes.

“When I started working with Alan in 2004, there was a noticeable difference in my game,” said Ames in a 2009 Golf Digest interview. “After that, every year has been a great year.” According to Ames, Fine’s guidance helped him remove internal performance interference and to “play more naturally, like Stephen Ames the instinctive player rather than Stephen Ames the technical player.”

Fine sees the GROW model is virtually universal in its application. The model’s efficacy transcends boundaries of culture, discipline and personality.

In the organizational arena, InsideOut works with some of the world’s most respected organizations—including BP, Cadbury Schweppes, IBM and Proctor & Gamble in the corporate world to NASA and the U.S. Navy in government.

“I’ve seen this help people in large corporations and small companies, from high tech to finance, in government and education and athletic settings—on multiple continents,” says Fine. “It just works.”

Faith, Fire and Focus: A Classical Illustration

Monte Belknap can attest to the versatility and effectiveness of the GROW model far outside the domain of business or athletics, in the rarified realm of classical music performance.

Belknap, coordinator of the violin area for BYU’s renowned School of Music, teaches private lessons to more than a dozen of the Y’s most accomplished violinists and other promising students from throughout the Mountain West who have expressed interest in attending BYU—as well as online lessons with a student from Boston. He has also been a conductor, and is also a virtuoso violinist in his own right, having been a soloist and concertmaster with a variety of symphonies and ensembles.

“I became acquainted with Alan Fine and the GROW model through a family friend, and was immediately intrigued about using it for my own performance,” says Belknap. “It helped me focus on important elements of my performance, and in very short order I was performing at the highest level at which I had ever performed.”

Recently, Belknap began using the GROW model as instructional tool to improve the performance of his students.

“By removing the distractions, I find that they’re playing at a completely different level,” says Belknap.

Belknap’s experience highlights one of the key features of the GROW model—responsibility for performance resides within the individual, not the manager, trainer or coach: “As I began implementing this model, my students began to focus on how they want to play and how they interpret the music, rather than what they think someone else will hear when they play. This approach allows me to teach them how to discover how they want to practice, how to see the connections between specific actions and performance improvements, and how to take ownership over their own performance and learning.”

The impact of the system, Belknap says, is immediate and profound.

“This is the most actionable approach I have ever seen for teaching people how to take advantage of their own abilities,” he says. “Putting people in charge of learning for themselves how to remove the distractions and obstacles to their performance, opens up pathways of discovery and empowerment. I have never seen such substantial improvements in such a short time frame.”

Belknap points to the experience of a master’s student who was struggling to play a particular run on her violin. “She had worked for twelve weeks without success on this particular run. When she used the InsideOut approach for focusing on the notes and the pattern of her playing, she played the passage without missing notes and with perfect fluency.”

According to Belknap, these results are related to the phenomenon of what Fine calls “faith, fire and focus.” First, the system improves their belief (i.e. faith) in their ability to improve their performance. As their faith in their abilities increases, says Belknap, “this helps their fire grow because now they’re more excited about practicing. At the same time, their focus improves as they learn more and more about what helps them improve their performance in the most efficient and effective ways.”

The results Belknap has been getting are attracting nationwide attention in classical violin circles. Fine and Belknap will give a joint presentation at the American conference of String Teachers Association (ASTA) in February 2010.

“The GROW process is really Zen and holistic,” says Belknap. “All I know is that I’ve been teaching since I was thirteen, but I’ve never seen students respond to an instructional approach like this.”