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.

Coaching creates an environment that enables the client to think clearly, before moving on to consider and implement more effective choices than otherwise might have been the case, leading to enhanced performance and change. Without a coaching relationship, it is down to individuals to identify and work toward change and make improvements on their own. With a coach, the premise is that individuals not only change and raise performance more quickly and effectively, it also opens up new possibilities. The platform for this raised performance can be found in the quality of the coaching relationship within the environment created and held by the coach. The foundations for this platform lie within the coach’s presence: how the coach shows up in the coaching relationship. This chapter explores the ebb and flow of the dialogue between coach and client, within the context of the coaching relationship, coaching environment, and the coach’s presence.

Coaching has matured into a vibrant discipline, one aimed at facilitating the development and wellness of both individuals and organizations. This chapter discusses self-determination theory (SDT) as an approach of considerable utility to coaching. SDT is an empirically supported and yet highly practical framework that is focused on fostering high-quality motivation and performance, as well as psychological flourishing. It is especially concerned with the processes and conditions that facilitate or undermine people’s self-motivation, optimal functioning, and well-being. In SDT, the fundamental psychological needs are those for autonomy, competence, and relatedness—needs understood to be relevant to functioning across gender, development, socioeconomic status, and cultures. Satisfaction of these needs is critical for self-regulation of daily behaviors and for positive experiences and life satisfaction. An SDT approach to coaching emphasizes that a facilitative coaching context can be created by supporting satisfaction of clients’ basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

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 begins by providing an overview of the theoretical basis for integral coaching. Then, it discusses constructive developmental theory and the concept of “vertical development”, and presents the theoretical basis. The chapter highlights what makes integral coaching unique and sets it apart from other schools. Integral theory is an integrative metatheory, which means that it attempts to explain all of reality through the integration of data and theories from all major domains of human inquiry, including the hard sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. The chapter provides a brief description of levels, and then goes into greater depth regarding a particular approach to coaching with levels of self-identity described by constructive developmental psychology. It summarizes unique features, as well as highlights other ways integral coaching is unique. The chapter concludes that the various approaches to integral coaching offer a powerful way of supporting whole-person development in a complex world.

Professional health and wellness coaches (HWCs), along with allied healthcare professionals trained to use basic coaching skills, offer the promise in assisting patients to prevent or better manage their chronic disease in making sustainable healthy lifestyle changes. While the HWC does not assume the traditional expert approach of many types of healthcare professionals, there is an element of sharing health information with clients. Specifically, when the HWC believes that objective information might help the client in advancing the coaching process or the client requests information, information is shared, after permission is granted by the client. The HWC strategically employs interaction skills by asking open-ended questions, providing affirmations, responding with perceptive reflections and summary statements in order to engage the client, define his or her focus, resolve ambivalence, evoke motivation, and move toward action.

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.

To survive and thrive in the business of coaching today, practitioners need to stay well informed. Coaches who own and operate a business must be knowledgeable—not just about the skills of coaching, but also about the best business strategies for keeping their business alive. This chapter offers a review of some business essentials, which includes: being a coach-entrepreneur; global data about the current demand for coaching; anticipated coach earnings; business practices to help avoid unnecessary risk; and marketing strategies that work best to attract clients. To be a coach in business, one needs a steady source of paying clients. Since coaching is, often short-term work, with clients staying for an average of 3 to 6 months, one will need to be marketing as a coach, in one way or another, on a regular basis. The chapter provides three strategies for attracting clients that are: networking; online visibility; and community building.

This chapter covers the question of what is culture, how to create an ideal meeting space, and the areas of consideration when coaching and managing from this perspective. For a successful relationship to begin and ultimately thrive across cultures, there are three equally important ingredients: safety, trust, and presence (STP). All factors are interdependent—each can only happen when the other two are present. This applies to one-on-one relationships or partnerships, work groups, and social engagements. These elements are even more important when people of different backgrounds come together. In a coaching relationship, the Coaching Core Competencies offer a rich coaching structure or framework for achieving STP. The areas of consideration discussed include immigrants, expatriates, refugees, third culture kids, cross-cultural people, language, cross-cultural communication, workplace, and location.

This chapter illustrates the process of creating an immunity-to-change (ITC) map. The ITC process has been successfully used nationally and internationally, with individuals and organizations in the professional sphere as well as in personal life. In order to experience the power of this exercise, one has to fully engage in it with the expectation that one will uncover something intriguing and potent. One should think carefully about each entry they make in their map, pushing themselves to be as honest and growth-oriented as possible. The chapter presents a blank ITC map, which contains Column 1 for improvement goal/starting commitment, Column 2 for doing and not doing instead, Column 3 for naming the fears and worries, uncovering the hidden commitments and Column 4 for big assumptions. As organizations look to provoke and nourish insight, innovation, and continued development, ITC is a tool for transforming cultures in these directions.