What is coaching, actually?

So you’ve heard of this thing called coaching, but you’re not too sure what it is, why you should care, or what it could do for you. Isn’t it what they do in sports? You’ve already got a good brain on your shoulders and are doing well in life, so surely it’s not relevant to someone like you.

The field of coaching psychology is a relatively new one, really only taking off in the 1980s. It stems from a range of fields, notably psychological science, pedagogy and learning, adult learning theory, humanistic psychology, person-centered approach, positive psychology, and solution-focused theory.

Coaching literature dates back to athletics in 1918, when debate began considering that sports coaching involved more than instructing, delving into teaching and optimising performance. Business coaching was not too far behind this, when Gorby (1937) was one of the first to write about this in his paper on how coaching techniques could be used to increase productivity and profit in business. Over the twentieth century, business was the key focus of coaching psychology, particularly in relation to the concept of management and manager as coach. In the 1980s, a shift began to occur as the concept of life coaching, health coaching and family coaching began to emerge. Coaching psychology began to consider the essence of enacting and sustaining change at the emotional cognitive and behavioral levels to lead to goal attainment and increased performance in personal or professional life (Stober & Grant 2006). Initial definitions of coaching looked like this:

Coaching is about collaborating with clients in a solution-focused, results-oriented process. Coaches facilitate the enhancement of performance, but it is the client that guides the process (Grant, 2015).

However, over time, the definition of coaching evolved to more firmly grasp the depth of peer-reviewed literature and theoretical underpinnings of the increasingly evidence-based and data-driven profession:

Coaching psychology is for enhancing well-being and performance in personal life and work domains, underpinned by models of coaching grounded in established learning theories and psychological approaches (Adapted from Grant and Palmer, 2002 as cited in Palmer & Whybrow, 2008).

Coaching psychology is notably different from psychology, counselling and mentoring. Psychology is a regulated profession, undertaken by therapeutic practitioners who have a minimum of six years of university study and supervised experience, and practitioners must be registered with the Psychology Board of Australia and listed with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). Counseling is an unregulated profession, undertaken by practitioners who have qualifications in counselling. Psychologists tend to use a suite of models, theories and frameworks to inform their practice, and tend to apply therapy to explore the root cause of a person’s problems or challenges. Counselling, on the other hand, tends to consider this same ‘past-looking’ focus as well, but leverages tools such as empathy and active listening to provide advice to the client. Mentoring, on the other hand, doesn’t tend to be formally administered and can be done by anyone. It is a professional practice of sharing advice, guidance and ideas to colleagues and friends, and does not necessarily require qualifications. To be effective, however, especially over time, mentoring requires a range of skills on self-awareness, communication and leadership.

Coaching looks to support clients to unlock positive, transformational and empowering change within their lives. The focus is on the present and the future, and allowing clients to journey through the emotional, complex and multidimensional process of individual change in a way that they find effective because it’s relevant to them. Coaching uses the concept of unconditional positive regard alongside ‘Socratic dialogue’, or the idea that the client is the expert on themselves and that the coach plays a facilitation role to help them unearth these ways forward, rather than playing a socio-educational role using therapeutic approaches (Passmore and Fillery-Travis 2011).

For those who may not have experienced coaching, it can be easy to wonder whether they couldn’t just get this sort of conversation from a friend, which is a great point. While coaches often play this facilitation role, that does not mean that the practice of coaching is not deeply grounded in a range of theories, models and frameworks. While the key skills that a coach might use within their coaching practice will focus on powerful questioning, active listening and mindful presence, in the background there are a suite of theory and peer-reviewed literature feeding into the bigger picture of how their coaching practice operates.

When it comes down to it, the real value that arises from coaching is the emotional distance that the coach has from you, which allows them to leverage their toolkit of theories, frameworks and models about psychological science, learning, change management and solution-focused theory to be able to offer you the right questions to help you to unlock new perspectives, and fresh ideas and approaches to ways of thinking and doing. A skilled coach can gently help you cut through your unconscious biases and your entrenched ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, softly elevating your perspectives to support lasting change and fresh growth in way that feels tailored to your values, worldview and personality.

References:

Allen, K. (2016). Roots of Coaching Psychology, Theory, Research, and Practical Guidelines for Family Life Coaching. Switzerland. Springer.

Gorby, C. B. (1937). Everyone gets a share of the profits. Factory Management & Maintenance, 95, 82–83.

Grant, A. (2015, February). Putting the psychology into coaching, and the coaching into psychology: Lessons from the road (less traveled). Presented at the 5th international congress of coaching psychology, San Diego, CA.

Palmer, S., & Whybrow, A. (2008). Handbook of coaching psychology: A guide for practitioners. New York: Routledge.

Passmore, J. and Fillery-Travis, A. (2011) A critical review of executive coaching research: A decade of progress and what’s to come. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research, 4(2), 70–88.

Stober, D. R., & Grant, A. M. (2006b). Toward a contextual approach to coaching models. In D. R. Stober & A. M. Grant (Eds.), Evidence based coaching handbook: Putting best practices to work for your clients (pp. 17–50). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.