There are principles of personal and professional ethics driven by common historical standards and ideals, and others specifically created for the profession of coaching. This chapter explores ethics in both the historical context generally and in the professional context specifically. Ethics is usually a case of critical and informed thinking, but there will always be gray areas and the more case studies are available as examples, the more they are helpful. The chapter presents five sources of ethical standards. They are the utilitarian approach; rights approach; fairness or justice approach; common good approach; and virtue approach. Each of these approaches helps one to determine what standards of behavior can be considered ethical. The chapter summarizes the historical contributions and challenges faced by the major coaching associations as they seek to uphold ethical practices for the profession. It then reviews the common ethical principles and guidelines, and presents case studies.

While coaching in educational contexts is already having a positive impact, it has an even brighter future. The concept of coaching as personalized learning conversations resonates with educators. The use of coaching in education has continued to expand since the turn of the century. Globally, schools, colleges, and universities have been deploying coaching interventions and approaches with the aim of improving student outcomes. As this field has matured, and educational institutions have identified multiple ways of improving outcomes for learners, two complementary approaches have emerged: the facilitative approach and the dialogic approach. This chapter provides a brief description about facilitative approach and the dialogic approach. It compares coaching to other interventions such as mentoring and counseling. The chapter focuses on the use of coaching in educational organizations and presents two major education-specific approaches: the GROWTH system and instructional coaching. It discusses the shared features of facilitative and the dialogic approach.

This chapter explores the key concepts, tools, and strategies for coaching people toward improved health, well-being, and performance using Acceptance and Commitment coaching (AC coaching), a holistic and multi-component coaching version of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). AC coaching is a pragmatic form of coaching, underpinned by functional contextualism and relational frame theory. The chapter introduces the ramp model of AC coaching, emphasizing the need for clients to expend effort and take the time to practice (both within and between sessions), and to develop and regularly apply the skills that enable psychological flexibility and improved health, well-being, functioning, quality of life, and flourishing. Coaching theory and practice revolve around helping motivate clients to achieve their values-based goals and live purposeful lives. Coaching theory assumes that clients are whole, functioning people who are looking to improve their lives.

Persons have varying approaches to spirituality and understanding these approaches serves the coaching relationship as coaches adapt to the spiritual beliefs and practices of clients in order to best serve them. Within the range of spiritual engagement afforded by the client’s beliefs and practices, the coach can serve the client well by recognizing the numerous resources spirituality provides to the client and incorporating spirituality appropriately into the coaching relationship. This chapter discusses about mutual resourceful relationship of coaching and spirituality. It provides some examples that illustrate the resourceful aspects of spirituality. They are: meaning and purpose; grit and resilience; identity and growth; ethics and decision making; and gratitude and safety. The chapter then describes coaching as a spiritual resource. Finally it focuses on incorporating spirituality into coaching by creating awareness of client spirituality; being open to spiritual growth; letting the client be the spiritual expert.

This chapter describes the essence of awareness, and practices for cultivating and using awareness strategically for ongoing learning and choiceful action. It is important to understand that awareness is filtered by perception, which occurs through the experiential and phenomenological observations of our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Mindfulness and emotional intelligence are part of the vertical strategies for self-awareness development. They both validate the Gestalt approach, which is rooted in awareness enhancing methods. Gestalt thinking and theory offer a time-tested, results-effective model of awareness-centered coaching. The chapter discusses the seven dimensions of presence: embodying one’s values and beliefs, creativity, emotions and emotional range, heart-based relations, communication and voice, intuition, and scanning and field sensitivity. It then offers two Gestalt-based coaching tools to work with awareness patterns, the Cycle of Experience and the Unit of Work.

Coaching is a unique personal relationship that is focused on the person being coached and his or her potential, rather than the client’s presenting problem or situation. Coaching occurs in a clearly established partnership between the coach and the client. A coaching conversation is an intentional, purposeful, deliberately designed conversation within a consciously designed relationship. Coach and client have a clear agreement to focus on the growth and transformation of the client. This chapter presents the coaching competencies for coach trainers. It discusses the common coach training methodologies and the role of practice in coaching training. The chapter describes the types of coaching schools. There are two major types of coaching programs: those housed in a dedicated coach training school or organization and those more academically oriented programs associated with a college or university.

This chapter provides a brief description on executive coaching. The coaching content, the conversational content between client and coach is private to the coach and the client throughout the coaching process. This means that the coaching client owns the right to what he or she has discussed at each meeting, absent the coaching goals that are public. This means that the coaching assessments taken by the client, including the 360-degree assessment are the property of the coaching client. The chapter also discusses the historical context of executive coaching. Looking at executive coaching in its historical context gives us ideas about where we want to continue to grow the practice of executive coaching. The chapter concludes that more good research and writing is needed on executive coaching. Pioneering work that executive coaches are conducting now with group and team coaching needs to be encouraged with wisdom.

This chapter introduces multiplicity of mind models and describes the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. It focuses on four coaching applications of IFS used by coaching thought leaders: strengths-based inner family model by Margaret Moore; inner team coaching and IFS by Isabel D’arenberg; concentrated coaching model by Mark Hurwich; and Willo3™: an organizational model by Toufic Hakim and Laura Crandall The four models of IFS in coaching are novel and creative applications of IFS that serve as unique tools for cultivating human potential and thriving through personal and organizational transformation and shapeshifting. As coaches and psychologists continue to break new ground in applying the principles of IFS, beyond the healing process of IFS therapy, one can imagine future models that allow people to map their personalities or cultures, better understand and balance over-developed and under-developed capacities, and offer at-will tools for self-transformation, even daily.

The psychodynamic approach has traditionally been the preserve of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. This chapter highlights those concepts that are most relevant to coaching. There is an extensive literature available for those readers who wish to explore the model and its evolution. The psychodynamic model highlights the role of emotion in human functioning. By explaining the emotions that lie outside ones conscious minds, but so often drive their behaviors, the psychodynamic model offers coaches the depth of understanding needed to help clients like these achieve transformational change. The psychodynamic model is an invaluable tool for understanding the client but sharing unfiltered hypotheses or using technical terms would be unhelpful and inappropriate. The chapter presents the stories of three senior executives and illustrates the value that psychodynamic concepts and techniques can offer and will encourage one to discover more about this powerful and fascinating approach.

This chapter gives a high level view of the key pillars of professional standards. The significance of establishing and holding professional standards comes from the fact that coaches are a rapidly growing community of practitioners with an increasing number of clients receiving the services. One could argue that professional standards are and should be the responsibility of the independent professional bodies and indeed they are. There is tremendous work that is happening by all coaching bodies to establish standards, educate their membership on those, and communicate them to recipients and buyers of coaching services, and to government bodies. In order to build a professional–personal brand characterized by high quality standards, things that one should do are: obtain coaching skills training; become a member of a professional body; establish a personal development plan; work with a supervisor; and become accredited. Finally, the chapter presents an overview on regulation of coaching profession.