The Coaching of Variety: 260,000 Options to Manage Your Happiness

The Coaching of Variety is a complete, integrated taxonomy engine. It helps a person choose from a catalogue of factors (conditions) and changes everything they want and set out to do in life. It holds more than 260,000 factors to choose your tastes from and almost 10,000 recommended changes, a practical aid to personal growth that you can try on the Happiness Play platform.

The Coaching of Variety provides the ingredients for understanding your own happiness. Starting from the areas that make up your life, you arrive at a set of tastes and changes that you then work on with a professional (a coach, a mentor and so on). It is the ideal complement for people who like to be enriched with ideas and are not sure of their options in life.

How it works, in three steps

Choose an area of your wheel of life: love, leisure, home, health, personal growth, money, professional development, or family and friends.
Pick your factors: the conditions you need or would like in that area. You do not need to dig into verbs to understand each option.
Select changes that move you towards them, with a commitment date. A reconstructed final sentence summarises your choice, and you can rewrite it in your own words for more accurate reflections.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 was a major revision carried out between November 2010 and April 2011 by a team of three programmers and two content-management consultants, with the support of four sector experts and ten beta testers. It added the suggestions collected over four years:

New divisions in the taxonomies, so desired factors are easier to pick.
Some factors broadened and limited, so you can understand why you are changing.
Nine restrictions to label factors and changes easily, which makes it faster to customise instances of Autocoaching.
The option to rewrite the final sentence, for better semantic accuracy and more meaningful reflections.
A new search engine that relies on the rebuilt final sentences to give the user better information.

The numbers

The system grew from 74,000 factors to 80,003. Because synonyms, antonyms, quantifiers and qualifiers are applied, the number of final options rises to 261,473, so users can choose their personal tastes in each area of their wheel of life.

Area	Factors	Suggested changes
Love	7,150	1,046
Leisure	1,434	149
Home	1,923	310
Health	1,231	300
Personal growth	1,913	466
Money	1,033	160
Professional development	22,527	3,148
Family and friends	42,792	4,209
Total	80,003	9,788

Many changes that gave redundant information were dropped, down to 9,788 suggested changes. All of them are mapped to specific factors, and generic mappings were avoided.

This version is available in the Happiness Play app, and in Happiness Play Pro, which is only for companies. Read about organisational wellbeing. To turn your choices into a conversation, see our 12 good coaching conversations.

The research behind it

The Coaching of Variety is the engine at the heart of the Happiness Play tool (formerly Autocoaching), and it took more than three years of research. It supports the coaching process with options of tastes and changes to work on later. The whole database is covered by a patent in the United States of America, number 23175-001.