By Patrick Williams, EdD, MCC, Founder, Institute for Life Coach Training
Excerpted from the book From Therapist to Coach by David Steele (Wiley, 2011)
A coach is a partner who is hired to assist the client in going for greatness in any and all domains of their life. People may not always need a coach, but I believe they do deserve a coach.
Coaching is an important new profession that developed from the fields of counseling, consulting, adult learning, and other helping strategies in human development. The coaching relationship is very distinct from just using coaching skills. Coaching is a co-created conversation to empower the receiver of the coaching in which an expert/client paradigm is intentionally absent. It is a unique professional relationship in which a client explores with the coach (over time) how to live life more fully and “on purpose.”
Coaching has a unique paradigm, one focused on growth and empowerment, but much of the foundation of coaching goes back many decades and even centuries. The drive to pursue life improvement, personal development, and the exploration of meaning began with early Greek society (in the Western tradition). This is reflected in Socrates’ famous quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Since then, people have developed many ways of examining their lives. In modern society we no longer need to focus on the pursuit of basic human needs–such as food and shelter–enabling us to pay attention to higher needs such as self-actualization, fulfillment, and spiritual connection.
Coaching today is seen as a new phenomenon, but as a field it borrows from and builds on theories and research from related fields such as psychology and philosophy. So coaching is a multidisciplinary, multi-theory synthesis and application of applied behavioral change. As coaching evolved in the public arena it began to incorporate accepted theories of behavioral change as the evidence base for this new helping relationship. However, in recent years, more and more research has been done and evidence-based theories developed to begin creating a body of knowledge and evidence that coaching can call its own.
Contributions from Psychology
What has the field of psychology brought to coaching and what are the major influences? I would propose that there have been four major forces in psychological theory since the emergence of psychology in 1879 as a social science. These four forces are Freudian, behavioral, humanistic, and transpersonal. Both the Freudian and behavioral models grew out of biology and were focused on pathology and how to “cure” it. The humanistic approaches of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow were a response to the pathological model; they attempted to make space in psychology for those elements of being human that create health and happiness. Finally, the transpersonal movement arose in the late 1960s in a further attempt to include more of what allows human beings to function at their best. Its focus was on mind, body, and spirit and included studies and experiences of states of consciousness, transcendence, and what Eastern traditions and practices had to teach Western theorists and practitioners. A more recent approach, the integral model of Ken Wilber and others, is emerging and may become a fifth force, integrating all that has come before and offering a holistic and even multilevel view of the various modalities for understanding human development and our desire to evolve mentally, physically, spiritually, and socially.
In recent years, several other approaches have arisen as adaptations of one or more of the original four and have been taken up by many coaches. Cognitive-behavioral psychology grew from a mix of the behavioral and humanistic schools. I say this because much of cognitive psychology embodied wisdom and learning from behaviorism and even operant conditioning. But when the humanistic aspect was included, it became a way to use those techniques and theories of change to increase choice for the individual. In coaching, then, you can utilize what we know about shifting the mindset and behaviors by using a process of inquiry and powerful questions that guide the client to understanding her or his ability to respond rather than react to personal situations. Responding comes from viewing the multiple choices available in cognition and behavior rather than just reacting habitually.
Positive Psychology builds on two key principles from humanistic psychology: a non-mechanistic perspective and a view of possibility as opposed to pathology as the essential approach to the client. Humanistic psychology arose as a counterpoint to the view of Freudian psychology and behaviorism that people could be viewed as products of unconscious and conditioned responses. Humanistic psychology arose to promote the emphasis on personal growth and the importance of beingness and the phenomenology of the human experience. Along with each revolution in psychology, a changing image of human nature has evolved along with greater insights into how to effectively work with people.
Looking back at the psychological theorists of the twentieth century who laid the groundwork for the emergence and evolution of personal and professional coaching is important for understanding the origins of our profession. It is important for professional coaches to know that quality coach training and education is based in a multi-dimensional model of human development and communication that has drawn from the best of humanistic psychology, positive psychology, integral psychology and others models in this field. Coaching also draws from fields such as organizational development, adult learning theory, and systems theory.
Many of the same techniques that originated in clinical psychology are useful in assisting clients to reframe their experience and to discover their strengths. These techniques include powerful questions, guided imagery (Psychosynthesis), empty chair technique (Gestalt therapy), time lines and future pacing (NLP), and even techniques and theory from Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne), client-centered counseling (Carl Rogers), and life-stage awareness (Carl Jung, Frederic Hudson, Carol Gilligan, and Robert Kegan, among others).
The Curse of the Medical Model
Somewhere along the way, the helping professions (spearheaded by clinical psychology) adopted, or were co-opted by, the medical model. It’s important to understand how this view is in direct opposition to the coaching model. The medical model sees the client as being ill, as a patient with a diagnosis in need of treatment or symptom relief. While there clearly are some serious mental illnesses that benefit from clinical psychology or skillful psychotherapy, many people in the past were treated and labeled for what were really “problems in living”–situations or circumstances that did not need a diagnosis or assumption of pathology. In the past, people seeking personal growth typically had nowhere to turn but to therapists, seminars, or self-help books. Sadly, many of these seminars and books also were problem-focused rather than looking forward for the powerful strategies of healthy life design.
Today, many clinicians find themselves on a dead-end street blocked by a corporate managed health care system where the main concern is financial profit, not mental health delivery. Unfortunately, most diagnoses pathologized people who weren’t really mentally ill. These diagnoses became part of the clients’ permanent medical records, leading to embarrassment, insurance rejection, and other unnecessary problems. I believe society is ready for a life coaching model in which a relationship is sought to create a future–not to get over a past–and certainly not to get labeled with a diagnosis for their effort.
I believe psychotherapy and counseling can treat diagnosable mental illnesses and are effective (although the research on this point is often inconclusive). However, these longer-term treatments (if you expect insurance to foot the bills) are often viewed as too expensive. Increasingly, the benefits of a relationship in which change and insight occur over time are not supported in the medical model. The counseling professions, in my opinion, fell into a trap after adopting the medical model and third-party payment for services. Now, in order to survive, counselors and therapists are reducing fees and psychologists are even trying to obtain prescription privileges for psychotropic drugs, moving further into the medical arena. G. W. Albee (1998) says that psychologists (and therefore other therapists) have “sold their souls to the Devil: the disease model of mental disorders” (p. 247-248).
Conclusion
The core of the coaching profession is grounded in sound academic and scholarly theories that preceded coaching, and it will be strengthened by the validation of theories and evidence-based research as the profession moves forward. All the amazing tools that have grown out of modern psychology support coaches in assisting clients to create change as desired by our clients. As the recent emergence of positive psychology demonstrates, new developments become available all the time.
The hallmarks of coaching are its synthesis of tools from other fields and its proclivity for innovation. With all of the research going on today, coaching is developing its own evidence-based theories. It has borrowed from what has gone before, much as psychologists borrowed from philosophers. As coaching grows as a profession, it is developing its own research base of effective strategies and tools within the unique relationship that is the coaching alliance. This short survey of the history of coaching is an attempt to glean the practical from the scientific. How does all the knowledge and theories inform your coaching business? How do you know what skills work best and also fit your style? Knowing that the skill sets and competencies of coaching are not invented out of thin air adds credibility to an emerging profession, and finding practical uses for the theories in coaching relationships makes a difference in people’s lives.
Professional coaches support their clients in walking a new path toward desired change. They do so by bringing multiple perspectives to their work and appreciating the unique gifts and strengths of each individual client. At the same time, they can see how the client’s work fits within the context of how human beings generally develop over the course of a lifespan.
I believe coaching has arisen as a profession because of the shortage of real listening in our society today and the lack of true connection that many people experience. These factors arise from the socioeconomic conditions of rapid change, technological advances, and the instant availability of information. Carl Rogers once said that counseling was like buying a friend; hiring a coach is similar. But, of course, it is much more than that. A coach is a partner who is hired to assist the client in going for greatness in any and all domains of their life. People may not always need a coach, but I believe they do deserve a coach.
Excerpted from the book From Therapist to Coach: How to Leverage Your Clinical Expertise to Build a Thriving Coaching Practice< by David Steele (Wiley, 2011) available here
