A Six-Phase Facilitation Method, Phase 1

Integrated Facilitator's Manual — Narrative and Operational Guide

Methodology and practice

The project responds to a gap between institutional discourse on inclusion and the daily experience of adults with motor disabilities, who usually have family or social-service support but lack a methodical structure to organise that support into a coherent life project.

BeyondWheels is a facilitation method structured in six phases. Its purpose is to accompany adults with motor disabilities in building their Life Map, a living document where identity, aspirations, barriers, resources and goals stop appearing as isolated pieces and start forming part of a single journey. The method was born from the Erasmus+ partnership formed by CarpoACE Europe (Spain), SOLIS SRLS (Italy) and Poraka Nova (North Macedonia). Its intellectual creator is Kenneth Iversjo, a psychologist, coach and trainer who has lived with tetraplegia for decades. Iversjo does not speak from a theory learned only in books. He speaks from the daily experience of living with a spinal cord injury and from his training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, coaching and strategic analysis. That combination of personal experience and professional training explains much of the method's philosophy. The questions it proposes arise both from professional practice and from situations he himself has had to face throughout his life.

The project's core message is condensed in one phrase: beyond disability, but aware of it. We do not work with diagnoses, we work with people.

The method starts from a simple premise, though its consequences completely change the way of accompanying a person: disability is a life circumstance, but it never exhausts the identity of the person who lives it. This view coincides with the biopsychosocial model developed by the World Health Organization in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO, 2001). From this perspective, a person's functioning depends on the relationship between their health condition, the physical and social environment, the supports available and the barriers they encounter. Two people with the same injury can develop very different life projects because the opportunities, accessibility, relationships and resources around them are also different. BeyondWheels adopts this way of understanding disability and shifts attention from diagnosis toward the person and their life project.

The method rests on four pillars. Psychology provides models for understanding how you build your identity, how you interpret your experiences and how your beliefs influence the decisions you make. Coaching organises the conversation through questions that help order ideas and discover one's own answers. Strategic analysis invites you to observe the environment realistically to distinguish opportunities from obstacles, and it takes concrete shape in the tools Iversjo integrates: the neuro-linguistic-programming logical levels formulated by psychologist Robert Dilts (1990), the Wheel of Life, reframing and a person-centred SWOT analysis. Dilts (1990) holds that changing a higher level, identity or purpose, automatically transforms the lower levels of behaviour and capability; BeyondWheels applies that logic by asking first who the person is and what they work for, before asking how they look for a job. Project management turns reflections into concrete goals, planned actions and periodic reviews. These four pillars are not there to give the method a technical appearance. They exist because sustainable employability only arises when there is coherence between what you are, what you want and what you do. This idea connects with the work of American psychologist Donald Super (1980), one of the leading researchers on career development. Super argued that choosing a profession is part of the development of one's own identity and that working also means expressing the self-concept each person holds. Decades later, psychologist Mark Savickas (2013) expanded that view through Career Construction Theory, where a professional trajectory is understood as a story each person builds from their experiences, values and decisions. BeyondWheels shares that logic when it proposes building a Life Map before designing an employment pathway.

The facilitator who uses this method does not occupy the place of a guru, a mentor who dictates the path, or a therapist. They are a companion. They listen, ask, and help structure thinking so the person finds their own answers. They do not decide for the person, do not interpret their life, and do not promise results that no one can guarantee. This way of working is related to motivational interviewing, developed by psychologists William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick (2013). Their research shows that changes tend to last longer when the reasons to act come from the person themselves rather than from the advice or pressure of whoever accompanies them. For that reason, BeyondWheels values a good question more than a quick answer.

Four starting dimensions

Facilitator training sums up in four dimensions what the facilitator has in front of them in every session, and it is worth keeping them in mind from the first conversation. Reality: the person faces objective barriers, architectural, social or systemic, that no reframing dissolves. Desire: they hold personal and professional aspirations of their own, even if these sometimes arrive silenced. Potential: they possess internal capabilities and resources that their own trajectory has made invisible even to themselves. And risk: they can lose motivation after years of guidance focused exclusively on what they cannot do. The whole method rests on holding all four at once, without letting any one erase the other three.

Its practice is guided by six principles.

●        Centred on the person, not on the diagnosis.

●        Based on structure, not on improvisation.

●        Based on questions, not on advice.

●        Realistic, not motivational.

●        Progressive, not heroic.

●        Bounded, not therapeutic.

The last principle demands precision, because it is the one that protects both the beneficiary and the facilitator. The facilitator does not perform clinical functions. They do not provide therapy or counselling for trauma, depression, anxiety, addictions or abuse, and refer such cases to qualified professionals. They do not issue medical, legal or financial opinions. They do not decide for the beneficiary, not even on matters such as how to disclose their disability. They do not guarantee results. They do not replace the professional supports the person already has; they work alongside them. This boundary responds to an ethical standard widely accepted in psychology, social work and healthcare professions. Respecting the limits of one's own intervention protects both the person being accompanied and the professional accompanying them.

This same logic of boundary-setting underlies the distinction of roles documented by employment specialist María Isabel Guijarro López and volunteer coach María de los Ángeles Tornero Gómez (Guijarro and Tornero, 2018): separating the figure of the volunteer coach from that of the employment specialist allows support without supplanting, and clearly defines who performs each function. María José Romero Ródenas, professor of Labour Law and Social Security and director of the White Paper on Employment and Disability, adds that employment policies for people with disabilities require professional profiles able to distinguish between emotional support and employment guidance (Real Patronato sobre Discapacidad et al., 2023), a distinction BeyondWheels incorporates as a structural principle.

The method also sets a simple rule during sessions: the facilitator speaks about 20% of the time and the beneficiary the remaining 80%. Coach John Whitmore (2009) holds that the coach's silence is the space where the coachee's awareness germinates, and this distribution serves a very specific purpose. Many people discover what they really think while trying to explain it in their own words. Speaking forces you to order memories, connect experiences and detect contradictions that go unnoticed when they remain only in the head. The facilitator's silence, far from representing passivity, becomes an active form of listening and of creating the space reflection needs to appear.

The facilitator's stance: accompanying without directing

Facilitator training spells out, in two columns, what the boundary principle demands in the practice of each session.

The facilitator MUST	The facilitator will AVOID
Acknowledge objective barriers: validate the reality of the physical and social environment.	Overprotecting or “rescuing”: not making decisions for the person or minimising their challenges.
Challenge with empathy: ask about alternatives and latent resources.	Minimising real barriers: avoid toxic phrases such as “if you want to, you can” or “it's all in your mind”, which generate a lack of understanding.
Foster autonomy: let the beneficiary define the what and the how.	Confirming impossibility: avoid phrases such as “of course, it's very hard for you”, which reinforce a limited identity.

 Phase 1. Identity and current situation

Phase 1 builds the ground from which the whole journey sets out. Before the facilitator can accompany a person in building their life project, they need to understand from what internal position that person inhabits their relationship with the world of work. The central question of this phase is who this person is today in their working life and who they could begin to become in order to build a future with greater autonomy, meaning and possibility. When someone starts a professional journey, they often feel tempted to talk immediately about the job they want, but it is far more useful to pause for a few minutes and observe the starting point, because if you build a route without knowing where you begin, any direction can look valid.

Two instruments operate in parallel. The first is the logical-levels questionnaire, developed by neuro-linguistic-programming consultant and trainer Robert Dilts (1990), which proposes that human experience is organised in interconnected layers: environment, behaviour, capabilities, beliefs and values, identity and purpose. The deeper levels, beliefs, identity and purpose, strongly condition the more visible levels, conduct and action, and lasting change proves elusive if the intervention only touches behaviour without first exploring conviction, self-perception and the person's sense of identity. BeyondWheels adopts this hierarchy to explore the beneficiary's working self, how they see themselves in relation to employment, training, professional activity or entrepreneurship.

Training translates these levels into the iceberg metaphor: the visible part above the surface, environment and behaviour; the deep part below the waterline, capabilities, beliefs, identity and purpose. The image helps explain why intervening only on what is visible rarely produces change that lasts.

Level	Question that opens it
1. Environment / context	Where am I?
2. Behaviour	What am I doing?
3. Capabilities	How do I do it?
4. Beliefs and values	Why do I believe I can't move forward?
5. Identity	Who am I with this disability?
6. Purpose	Why do I want to carry on?

Environment covers external circumstances: employment situation, accessibility, available supports, economic conditions, environmental barriers. Behaviour explores concrete actions: what the person does, what they avoid, how they look for opportunities, how they organise their time. Capabilities probe recognised and hidden competences: what they know how to do, what skills they have developed over their life course, what adaptive skills they have forged in facing barriers. Beliefs and values unpack the ideas that organise their reading of reality: what working means to them, which ideas help them move forward and which hold them back. Identity addresses their self-definition: how they describe themselves in relation to work, how much weight the disability carries in that self-perception, and what identity they wish to strengthen. Purpose explores deep motivation: why they want to move forward, what they want to contribute, what would give their project meaning.

The facilitator does not read out every question; they choose two or three per level that fit the conversation and let the beneficiary's own words guide the following ones. When the beneficiary answers “I don't know”, that answer is valuable information: the level is noted, the session moves on, and the point is picked up again after the Wheel of Life, because that tool sometimes reveals what the questionnaire had not reached.

The second instrument is the Wheel of Life. A circle is drawn with eight or ten areas, health, personal autonomy, relationships, training, work, finances, environment, leisure time and life project, and the beneficiary scores their satisfaction in each from zero to ten, not as an objective grade but as a subjective perception of their life balance. The tool was created by American trainer Paul J. Meyer in 1960, founder of the Success Motivation Institute, and has since become a standard executive-coaching instrument for visualising imbalances between life areas and choosing priorities for intervention.

This view connects with the quality-of-life research of psychologist Robert L. Schalock (2004), one of the leading international references in intellectual disability, whose work shows that wellbeing depends on multiple interrelated dimensions, none of which can be understood in isolation. Although BeyondWheels addresses people with motor disabilities, it shares that holistic view of the person and avoids reducing the life project to employment.

BeyondWheels adapts the Wheel to motor disability to identify strong areas that feed transferable resources and fragile zones that affect employability. There is also a neuro-affirming version of the tool, developed by autistic author and advocate Helen Edgar in her project Autistic Realms (2025), which adapts the instrument to non-normative realities in order to honour authentic needs rather than impose an ideal of productivity; it should be noted that this is an outreach resource, not a peer-reviewed article, and it should be cited as such.

A Phase 1 session runs ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes. The opening sets the frame: this is taking a photograph of where the person is now, with no need for perfect answers. Work on the logical levels takes between sixty and seventy-five minutes, starting with environment and behaviour and, if the beneficiary's energy allows, moving on to capabilities and beliefs, while identity and purpose usually require a second session. The Wheel of Life is administered in a later session, with scoring, graphic mapping, exploration of each score, tracing connections between areas and choosing priorities. A final ten-minute summary lets the facilitator reflect back a synthesis of what has emerged, which the beneficiary can correct or expand. That material makes up Zone 1 of the Life Map.

Phase 1 usually takes two sessions, sometimes three, and resisting the urge to compress it into one protects the quality of the diagnosis. The facilitator stays alert to the dominant narrative, the phrase that keeps returning, “I won't manage it”, “I need someone to give me a chance”, “I'd like to but I'm afraid”. Recorded word for word, that phrase will become the anchor of Phase 3.

A common mistake is letting Phase 1 slide into a therapy session. The questions can trigger memories of childhood, grief, loss or other deep experiences, and the facilitator notes the key words and moves on, without probing the wound, without trying to resolve it, without taking on a therapeutic role. If the beneficiary needs more support than the method can offer, the facilitator refers them to qualified help; BeyondWheels can continue in parallel, but it never replaces appropriate professional support. Psychologist and coach Kenneth Iversjo (2026), who lives with tetraplegia, insists that this structure protects both the facilitator and the beneficiary.

At the end of Phase 1, the facilitator has a logical-levels questionnaire completed with key words, detected resources and identified blocks, a Wheel of Life with scores, priority areas and noted connections, the dominant narrative recorded in the person's own words, and a draft of Zone 1 of the Life Map. Employment-support specialist María Isabel Guijarro López and volunteer coach María de los Ángeles Tornero Gómez (Guijarro and Tornero, 2018) note that this kind of initial diagnosis is decisive for the success of personalised pathways, because it allows later interventions to be adjusted to the person's reality rather than to the professional's expectations.

Operational summary of the phase — Objective: understand how the person perceives themselves, what narrative they hold about themselves, and how they interpret their current situation. Key tools: Wheel of Life, logical levels, guided reflection. Central question: where are you now, and what is or isn't working in your life at present?

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