Coaching and Personal Development

Classroom teaching helps many adults to improve their English and maths skills, but to sustain and develop those skills adults need to go on learning outside of and beyond the classroom. Many learners, however, lack both the strategies and the confidence to engage in this sort of self‐directed learning. Non­‐directive coaching is an approach specifically designed to help people become more effective self-­‐directed learners. It has proved powerfully effective in a range of contexts, but we know relatively little about its potential in the field of adult English, maths and ESOL learning. For the past two years, however, the Erasmus+ project, Autonomous Literacy Learners – Sustainable Results (ALL­‐SR), has been exploring that potential through pilots across a range of contexts (including at work) in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. Results suggest that coaching has rich potential to reinforce and extend English, maths and ESOL learning.

This short paper,  shows how executive coaching draws on psychotherapy, and offers insights into using psychodynamic and systems theory in coaching practice. 
To cite this paper:  Western, S. (2006) Look Who’s Talking, Coaching at Work. London: People Management, Vol. 1:2 pp. 31-34.

Required from elligible coachees prior to the 1st. meeting and discussion of the goals and objectives for the coaching program.

Should allow 5 days after completed material arrives, as to analyze the information and draw the basic recommendations to be discussed with the coachee at meeting #1.

This chapter provides an overview of how coaching can be used within the higher education sector. It considers a variety of methods and approaches to coaching and discusses the potential impact it might have on education at this level. It explores the ideas of providing not only university staff members (executives, administrators and educators) but also university students in order to optimise individual and organisational performance.

Psychological and Religious Dimensions of Personal Transformation:
Psychodynamic approaches to the Ignatian Exercises
by Martin J. Egan

Ignatius of Loyola has been recognised by modern psychologists as the innovator of Christian developmental psychology. The depth of psychological penetration displayed by Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises is examined from a psychodynamic perspective. An overview of the series of meditations and practises of the first two weeks of the Ignatian four week retreat, including vignettes from individual experiences, is presented. I propose the Spiritual Exercises are a form of ‘transformative practise’ based on Christian theology. The religious and psychological transformations that can occur through engaging with the Spiritual Exercises are explored.
The thesis draws on the psychological literature addressing the Spiritual Exercises, together with extensive unpublished lectures, given by Jung between June 1939 and March 1940 in Zurich. I argue that Ignatius’ guidelines for the ‘discernment of spirits’ are the key to the psychological dimension of the Exercises. Ignatius’ instructions for the retreat guide/director and the individual’s testing of their inner experience are also shown to be critical. A psychodynamic interpretation of the processes that often occur in individuals during the Ignatian retreat is presented using texts which primarily offer a post-Freudian perspective. Particular attention is given to Jung’s interest in the Exercises, which opens the possibilities of elucidating a Jungian perspective. I also suggest a Kleinian interpretation as an additional approach. The central role of the imagination in the Exercises is highlighted.
I focus on the first and second weeks because I want to draw out how individuals’ experiences in this period of the exercises can be paralleled to stages of psychological development. After the first two weeks, psychological language proves inadequate to interpret the spiritual process Ignatius envisaged. These first two phases prove amenable to psychodynamic interpretations that help illuminate both the Exercises and our understanding of individual spiritual development.

This paper reviews different options for helping people faced with a difficult decision. This can be a particularly challenging context, where the standard solution focused (SF) approach of leaping into the future may not be instantly effective. Ten options for using SF methods to work with decision and dilemma situations are identified. Readers will not be short of possibilities when working with clients facing tough choices.

Make Rain is a business book that helps salespeople, professionals and entrepreneurs sell more in a shorter space of time. The book looks at the mindset and practice of Rainmakers, the top 20 percent of individuals who seem to bring in the lion's share of the revenue into the firms they work for. Make Rain is split into 180 unique insights into how the Rainmakers do it. Each insight is designed to challenge and encourage the reader to change their thought patterns and habits in order to be successful in business and in life.

“This book fills a gap in the crowded library of books on sales. It is very different from all the other books and in many ways it is also much better. Make Rain is a collection of short one and a half page inspirational messages. Each message can stand alone, so the reader will get value already after the first couple of pages. The value of the book simply accumulates as you turn each page. No other book in my library of books on sales can make such a claim! Make Rain is a great book to have with you everywhere. You can use any break in the day to consume a message or two, but do yourself a favour and think carefully about the messages you read. Each of the messages actually has the potential to change your life – for the better.” Hans Peter Bech, Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Building Successful Partner Channels.

Many people use the turn of the year as restart, i. e. they want to leave old things behind, let go of habits and try new things or pursue goals with discipline. So it would be a great moment to add one more point to the list of projects for the new year and actually make it top priority: Unfold your own power and grandeur and live it in each aspect!

Have you ever asked yourself consciously the questions if and to which degree you really live your unique, inherent power? Where are you acting far behind your potential and talents, because you don’t dare?

To live our grandeur and power is oftentimes our biggest fear. Nevertheless, how would it be for you, if you were able to use this fear? Would you like to learn more about that? Then take a look at this article.

The cognitive mental functions give humans a particular advantage in terms of creative solution development. Humans are constantly engaging in a process of internal dialogue across a variety of subject areas. Mental distress may be at least partly remedied by verbalizing, understanding, and perhaps modifying the internal dialogue. In persons suffering from chronic dependency as well as anxiety and depression the described technique may be useful.

Effective communication is central to coaching. Suggestive influencing is expected to occur interpersonally; directly or indirectly, with or without intention. Even without our awareness, we are engaged in a process of suggestive influence. Despite the role suggestions can play in all communicative relationships, very little has been written about how coaches can utilise them to enhance their effectiveness and better meet their coachees’ needs. Although suggestion and suggestibility have been traditionally associated with hypnosis, hypnosis is not required for suggestive influence. When used skillfully, suggestions may affect perception, behavior, cognition, emotion and motivation in a pre-planned manner. They may be intentionally incorporated into a coaching dialogue or added to existing coaching techniques. This paper discusses the nature of suggestions, offers guidelines on how to enhance their impact and describes specific suggestive techniques with accompanying examples which coaching professionals can strategically incorporate in their coaching practice.

Crear significa generar -liderar, no mandar- , y la creatividad requiere dos o más elementos, objetos o ideas previamente inconexos de los cuales se obtiene algo nuevo. Al hacer más llamativo y relevante a nuestra audiencia contemporánea el mensaje de eterna salvación de Jesucristo, la creatividad ayuda a informar, persuadir y recordar tanto a creyentes como a buscadores cuál es el propósito divino para la existencia humana. El coach en liderazgo, Juan Carlos Flores Zuñiga (MA, CPLC, ACC) introduce al líder en una de sus responsabilidades menos exploradas.

This chapter deals with the concept of values as an essential point of reference for coaching, mentoring and professional developmental dialogues. Values give individuals a fundamental orientation for their work and their life in general. In that sense, values may be seen as a central issue in coaching. To argue for the importance of this focus on values, a brief analysis of our current society and of today’s rapid societal changes will be presented. Value reflections can be seen as a fundamental basis for human meaning making and a general orientation in life, which is especially important in the hypercomplexity of modern life and the challenges it presents for individuals. Values are the entry point to our lived knowledge and practical wisdom. According to Flyvbjerg (2001), instrumental rationality needs to be balanced by value rationality, a balance that ‘is crucial to the sustained happiness of the citizens in any society’ (p. 4). Values are the implicit foundation for action and social-psychological resilience.
This value rationality shall be developed by presenting coaching as an art of lingering (or the process of slowing down to think and reflect). To provide a foundation for this understanding, the chapter will introduce the reader to values-based scholarship. The importance of values and their creative inclusion in the coaching process will be presented in the light of three different approaches to coaching. These will include Existential Coaching; Protreptic Coaching (a philosophically-inspired approach), and Third-Generation Coaching (a narrative-collaborative approach). This chapter has three primary aims. First, to present and discuss the state of knowledge about values as a central aspect of the coaching process. Second, to show that values can be included in coaching regardless of preferred models or techniques. Third, to suggest some possible future research in regard to the issue of working with values in coaching.

Het doel van het huidige onderzoek was om de concrete kernwaarden in beeld te brengen die een team op zowel individueel niveau als op groepsniveau ontwikkeld door EAD (EQ Company, z.d.), wat er toe bijdraagt dat het team meer als ‘kudde’ gaat functioneren en daarmee het meest effectieve team wordt wat er kan zijn. Naar aanleiding van een online enquête onder 13 deelnemers van EAD, werd de hypothese betreffende de kernwaarden van emotionele intelligentie gedeeltelijk bevestigd; de focus lag op zelfkennis, zelfregulatie, sociale vaardigheden en motivatie; empathie kwam niet als kernwaarde naar boven. Toegevoegd werd de kernwaarde zelfvertrouwen. De hypothese betreffende de ontwikkeling van transformationeel leiderschap werd ook gedeeltelijk bevestigd; naar boven kwamen de kernwaarden 'intellectueel stimuleren' en 'individuele betrokkenheid'. Hier werd ook epistemische motivatie aan toegevoegd. De hypothese betreffende teamontwikkeling werd bevestigd, wat liet zien dat een teamsessie van EAD leidt tot de ontwikkeling van heldere doelstellingen, open communicatie, wederzijds respect, initiatief tonen, gezamenlijke verantwoordelijkheid en flexibel aanpassen. Ook werd indirect de focus gelegd op empathie. Het huidige onderzoek legt de basis voor kwantitatief vervolgonderzoek.

This paper presents a case study conducted as part of a PhD Thesis on testing Life Coaching as a learning method for fostering emancipation in vulnerable groups (adult patients), using a participatory-action-research approach.
The lessons learnt provides empirical insights on the implications for the implementation of non-medical methods that could allow a shift from a situation of passivity (patient
care) to a new one of participation to the definition of new objectives or projects of life (active citizenship).
This paper was conceived to fulfil an identified need to study and test innovative and non-medical methods for fostering adult patients’ self-determination.

Executive coaching is now seen in many organisations, both private and public, as an essential professional development intervention.  While in the recent past, coaches may have been engaged by individual senior managers, it is increasingly the case that they are used throughout the management structure of organisations.  As a result, many organisations have had to engage the services of teams or ‘faculties’ of coaches, either recruited individually, engaged ‘en mass’ from coaching or management consultancy organisations, or developed internally.  This raises a number of questions, not least of which are:
• Should an organisation use internal or external coaches?
• How should these coaches be recruited and selected?
• How should coaches and coachees be match?
• How should the coaching faculty be managed?
This chapter will offer a tentative model for answering these questions, based partly on the author’s personal experience of being recruited into a corporate coaching faculty, partly on recruiting a coaching faculty for a government-sponsored initiative, and, in part, on recent research findings.

"This master thesis deals with “the meeting” and what it means to meet in a coaching­related context. Based on the dialogue philosophy and the protreptic we determine our idea of the meeting purpose, ­definition and prerequisites/conditions. This work results in 10 markers. We analyze four excerpts from two completed interviews. 
We register the occurrence of the markers in the interviews and discusses whether the meeting took place, and also discuss our markers usefulness as benchmarks for the meeting and thus for the successful interview"

While coaching is establishing itself as an effective human development approach, there is limited understanding of the dynamics of coaching in the context of oppression. This paper summarises a study that examined the use of coaching as an emancipatory approach, and explored how oppression affects coachees, coaches and the coaching process. Building on a crossdisciplinary review of emancipatory approaches, an initial coaching model was developed. Then, a cooperative inquiry was conducted with twelve coaches from Egypt, who used the model with 22 coachees, leading to the development of a theoretical and practical framework for the use of coaching to support the emancipation and development of individuals. This study is possibly the first to research coaching as an emancipatory approach. It provides insights into how oppression affects individuals and describes the individual’s journey to emancipation. It proposes a detailed framework of the processes that support individuals through...

This précis contextualizes Mintzberg's work to expose the cult of leadership and restore management to the front and center, quickly elucidates Mintzberg's (2009) Model of Managing, and makes the supporting point that if managing is indeed a practice then wide vistas open in coaching and training for competency-building.

This brief paper is a rendition of a workshop given at the Society for Existential Analysis 2012 annual conference held in London. For the first time the SEA conference utilised Open Space Technology and the workshop described below was an attempt to encourage conference delegates to prioritise their own ‘experiential knowing’ over external authorities, expertise, or received concepts in order to generate ideas of their own to offer in the OST session. It is an elementary introduction to the ‘Thinking at the Edge’ method devised by Eugene Gendlin, but in keeping with the emphasis of the article there are no textual references, only further reading listed as a supportive resource at the end of the article.

This chapter will investigate the role of parental influence on child athletes and how a parent’s behaviour can affect athletes in variety of ways, from positively enhancing performance through to potentially damaging the health of a child. Parents are acknowledged to represent a significant part of the sporting workforce (Brackenridge, 2006); many children would be unable to continue their involvement in sport without their support. Kanters (2002:22) further indicates that ‘research strongly suggests that parents play the largest role in influencing the healthy development of their own children’.

Memory reconsolidation is currently the only mechanism known to neuroscience that can edit or erase existing emotional learnings. This paper explores the application of memory reconsolidation in developmental coaching as illustrated in Aletheia Coaching, a next-generation methodology that I originated. This application is illustrated with an annotated transcript of a real coaching conversation which clearly demonstrates the application.

Making sense of a situation or issue, particularly if it is confusing, ambiguous or paradoxical, also requires sense to be made of human nature, of the cognitive and comprehension processes of those people who are trying to make sense of the situation. The perceptions of the situation or issue, what is imagined and what is sensed, occur at the boundary of the inner and the outer world and form the basis of the orientation process through which a person actually makes sense of the world. Most of this perceptual flow across the boundary between inner and outer worlds takes place unconsciously and so is often disregarded in typical sense making procedures. Instead of working with human nature as an animated perceptual flow, it is typically viewed as a set of inanimate categories or dimensions, which can be statically and prescriptively described. Rather than attempting to work with human nature in this mechanistic and largely ineffective manner, a human sense making framework is described, which actively engages with unconscious perceptual flows by working with language as a flow of dynamic vectors rather than just a set of simple static descriptions. This human sense making framework enables individuals and groups to orient themselves in complex and uncertain situations, so providing much greater levels of situational awareness. Introduction The behaviour of human beings, by their very nature, can often appear to be complex, irrational and paradoxical. Rather than embracing human nature and actively navigating its rich complexity, it can seem much easier to view it in a simplistic manner by describing it in the prescriptive categories and dimensions of psychometrics. One of the main reasons for using this simplistic approach is that it seems to provide an apparent level of certainty in understanding human nature and predicting human behaviour. The reality is, however, that this simplistic approach often results in situations where human nature becomes idealised and pathologised. Rather than attempting to describe an individual and their personality characteristics by placing them in a tightly defined prescriptive type, or locating them at some point along a trait dimension, an alternative approach is to place the individual at the centre of their own knowledge and experience, inviting them to engage with the dynamic feedforward– feedback perceptual loop across the boundary between their inner and their outer worlds. Standing at the centre of their knowledge and experience also naturally places an individual in the centre of a circle of their perceptions, with the circumference of the circle being the boundary between their inner and their outer worlds. This circle of understanding and awareness is neither fixed nor rigid. It is constantly and dynamically moving as perceptions emerge, exist and evolve along the boundary between inner and outer worlds.

This presentation is taken from Coaching and Mentoring a critical text, (Western S 2012 Sage) it gives a taster of the books content;
1) The historical development of coaching
2) The four discourses that underpin coaching
3) A Meta-theory of coaching