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.

This chapter focuses on evidence-based approach to coaching that helps others grow, learn, and develop. It describes how viewing coaching with intentional change theory (ICT) suggests techniques and an approach that can be more effective than typical approaches to problem-centered or person-centered coaching. According to ICT, sustained desired change occurs when a person, or group, is moved along five discoveries, in sequence, and iteratively continues cycling through them. A tipping point is a psycho-physiological transformation from a person being in the negative emotional attractor (NEA) into the positive emotional attractor (PEA). The PEA and NEA states are described in terms of three axes: positive to negative affect; neural activation in the default mode network versus the task positive network; and having a dominant hormonal arousal in the parasympathetic nervous system versus the sympathetic nervous system.

This chapter presents three different client’s stories that illustrate aspects of systems at work in our internal, external, and interaction worlds. It illustrates coaching possibilities in each domain so that the reader may discern where they habitually focus and where they might be drawn to explore further. As coaches, one should take responsibility for knowing one’s own internal systems, for understanding and helping make visible one’s client’s internal and external systems, and for modeling constructive interaction in the moment to the best of their ability. Coaches are always attending to the self as instrument, cultivating a dynamic capacity to be present to what is happening in the environment and simultaneously within themselves so that coaches are wholly available to act in the emerging moment. Taking up the study and practice of working with systems can increase their capabilities, and enrich what they take with them on their journey.

The ultimate coaching resource is a coach’s ability to connect with and form meaningful relationships with clients. This chapter explores the aspect of coaching deeper than technique or behavior. It identifies the advantages of maximizing a robust coaching relationship with clients, because therein lies the active ingredient for best outcomes. Clients may need clarity around a situation to generate momentum or congruity. The most important role the coach play is to develop relationships with clients that invite them to enter deeply into their inner wisdom. The chapter explores the coaches way of being, which includes how they see and think, and the state of their hearts. It also examines how coaches can tap into their most authentic selves to facilitate success in the coaching relationship. Coaches have the opportunity to spark excellence in clients’ lives through the relationships they develop with them.

This chapter focuses on individual coaching rather than team coaching. If the client and the coach do their work well, the resulting leadership transformation in the client—improved skills, enhanced competencies, behavioral changes—should naturally lead to a new transition to a higher level of leadership capability and, perhaps, even promotion. The coach’s transformation, therefore, can become his or her next step, or transition, toward greater effectiveness and efficiency in the coach’s practice. The chapter point outs that, executive coaching is a cyclical process that engages both client and coach in a reciprocal relationship of give and take, where both parties benefit from an objective-or goal-driven relationship between coach and client. For simplicity’s sake, it is a process starting in transition, moving to transformation, and finally back to transition for both parties if each fully commits to his or her respective role in the coaching engagement.

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.

This chapter proposes that mindful compassionate coaching (MCC), an approach underpinned by mindfulness, compassion, and body wisdom, is just what is needed to support individuals, teams, organizations, and society as a whole to not only cope, but to thrive and flourish in this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. It discusses some relevant research, principles, behaviors, and practices for MCC, building on previous work, grounded in awareness, and compassion. MCC offers a safe, gentle, yet powerful way to coach, promoting mental and physical well-being, enhancing emotional intelligence, creativity, cognitive functioning, compassion for self and others, and wisdom, all of which are particularly relevant in VUCA world. It can support individuals, teams, organizations, and society as a whole, to turn toward and transform difficulties, including overarching crises for humanity such as excessive consumption, and unethical behavior, ultimately promoting a sustainable collective response to our pressing challenges.

This chapter talks about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that is becoming business as usual for leaders across industries and sectors around the world. The rules of thinking, acting, and being in complex contexts are fundamentally different from the rules that govern the more predictable world, so leaders need to be able to shift back and forth. Understanding the fairly simple (but not easy) rules of complex systems means that leaders can use the complexity to their advantage instead of having it always be a force they are fighting against. The chapter discusses the habits of mind to support leaders in complex situations. Like leading for complexity, coaching for complexity requires more than learning a new set of tools and approaches. It also requires one to grow into a whole new way of seeing the world—both conceptually and instinctively, and one to redefine what coaching is and what expertise is.

Hermeneutics is at the core of virtually every human interaction and search for understanding. What does a person mean by what they say? That’s hermeneutics. This chapter defines hermeneutics, gives a brief history of its use, describes three key elements to a hermeneutic approach, and applies them to the field of professional coaching. Hermeneutic phenomenology is the study of experience together with its meanings. Three tenets crucial to a hermeneutic phenomenology, and thus hermeneutic coaching, are the hermeneutic circle, dialogue or immersion, and the fusion of horizons. The concept of a hermeneutic circle is gained by considering fluctuations between the perspective of a phenomenon as a whole and as something composed of individual parts. A horizon in hermeneutic phenomenology is everything that can be imagined, everything known or possible for a person in his or her life world. The horizon is the extent of the life world.

This chapter presents an evolved integral and developmental approach to learning, and assessment and evaluation of delegates, which is aimed at deepening the transformative process for individual and collective growth and the value creation for individual and organizational clients. The Integral⁺ Practice of Leadership and Coaching™ is a unique adaptation of Ken Wilber’s (2000b) integral framework and its application for leadership, coaching and its concomitant development and training, and thus evaluation. Coaching can be transactional, transitional, and/or transformational: leading to growth through expanding the meaning-making systems of the client along his or her development into maturity. To ascertain what needs to be achieved from the coaching, it is very important for the coach to do a preliminary evaluation of the needs, awareness, capacity, availability, and potency of the client, the stakeholders, the leadership and the organization as a whole.

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 results from coaching research suggest that coaching offers a number of positive benefits including having a positive impact upon leadership. This chapter begins by reviewing the broader landscape of coaching research. It then explores the specific research underpinning a range of “key” factors relating to coaching including the coach, client, organizational clients, and the relationship between the coach and the client. The chapter provides a brief description on: the development of coaching research; coach factors; coachee factors; coach–coachee relationship factors; tripartite relationship and client factors; the role of coaching supervision; and methodological approaches in coaching. Executive coaching is frequently used by corporations to help executives develop their capacity to deal with change and to give them support in reaching their organizational or work-related goals. A key focus within the coaching psychology literature has been on understanding what factors and attributes differentiate the most successful coaches.

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.

Presence is neither a coaching technique nor a methodology. It is a simple product of what we do with our attention, moment by moment. Traditionally, presence has been thought of in the coaching world as a competency for coaches. This chapter expands this understanding to frame presence additionally as a crucial outcome for coaching clients that supports every other element of the coaching engagement. Presence is the very foundation for resilience, providing the inner conditions to access every other competency available to the client, regardless of the challenges that the client is facing. Presence also fosters the development of sustainable physiologically supported behavioral change and is thus a crucial meta-competency for the client as well as for the coach. The chapter examines the implications of this more comprehensive understanding of presence for us as coaches. It looks at what it means to practice presence as a coaching competency.

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.

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.

Organizations that seek to explore new areas—markets, technologies, processes—often look to collaborative teams to develop creative responses. Team coaching has demonstrated the potential to be consistently effective across diverse organizational cultures. The coaching process supports teams to produce excellent results and become self-managing. Several fields of academic research have contributed insights about group process consultation, of which team coaching is one method. Developing the one-to-many relationship with a team requires a thorough understanding of group dynamics. A team coach must also have a deep appreciation for unconscious assumptions, habits, and biases and how these manifest as behavior in a team setting. In an ideal coaching engagement, the organizational sponsor of a new team will bring in the coach to participate in the team’s formation. Research supports the long-standing consensus among coaches that working agreements, or norms, are crucial to a team’s success.

This chapter presents a brief discussion about subject–object theory. The simple but profound premise of subject–object theory is that human beings are run by that which we are subject to; what we aren’t aware of will have influence or control over us. Said in even simpler terms, one can’t change what one can’t see. Conversely, the more one can see, the more awareness one has, the more choice one has. The chapter presents two coaching examples: first is of a senior female leader in healthcare and the second is of a young man who was a partner in a successful start-up. The chapter describes how coaching supports our clients to notice. Supporting clients to see and shift the observer they are or the perspective they have is at the heart of the ontological approach to coaching. The chapter further discusses the coach’s blind spot and how one can shift perspectives.

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 highlights the common elements of coaching and creates an overall “framework of understanding” within which a coach, whether new to the profession or already a seasoned professional, can serve clients in a manner that is distinctly recognizable as coaching. It also includes some suggested best practices that support coaches in increasing their coaching expertise and proficiency. The chapter discusses about the spectrum of a coaching. As it continues to develop, coaching consistently reveals itself as a dynamic, evolving process of pursuing human behavioral changes and attaining goals that defies definition and resists containment. Within this process, an effective coach is a masterful facilitator who serves clients in moving from where they are to where they want to be—coming full circle back to the origins of the word “coach”.

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.

Life coaching is the heart and soul of professional coaching. The roots of life coaching reach deep into the soil of human history. Three most notable “roots” in recent times are the helping professions, leadership mentors and advisors, and the human potential movement. This chapter discusses the coaching principles that arise from shifts in consciousness. Some of the principles include: partnership principle; holistic principle; wholeness principle; balance principle; empowerment principle; creativity principle; and acceptance principle. As the coaching industry began to grow in the 90s, an international coaching association called the International Coach Federation (ICF) accredited three coaching schools: Coach U; Coaches Training Institute (CTI); and the Academy for Coach Training (ACT). The chapter presents an example of a coaching relationship that highlights that the personal empowerment perspective encompasses all types of coaching including Executive and Leadership Coaching. It offers life coaching tools and techniques, and presents its strategies.

This chapter outlines a meta-view of career coaching as a framework for the coaching engagement and utilization of theories, models, and tools. Coaching conversations are often referred to as a “dance” between coach and client. The career landscape in the 21st century has undergone a significant shift away from the traditional linear path of “climbing the ladder” at a single employer or within a single career path toward increasing mobility and career switching. A useful framework for career coaching is the meta-view, Adaptability Development and Authentic Purpose Targeted (ADAPT) career coaching. The chapter attempts to add more substance to the framework by providing sub-categories under the micro and macro perspectives that include a combination of tools, perspectives, and proposed best practices to support career coaches in their exploration with clients rather than to create content that could be passed on directly to clients.

To help us understand coaching’s complex, dynamic history, and ways in which that history informs coaching today, this chapter focuses on the influences of relevant root disciplines, impacts of influencers’ backgrounds on the early discipline and its practices, and socioeconomic factors that led to the rise of coaching as a distinct discipline in the late 20th century. It addresses historical research observations and explores the possible future for coaching. Coaching has a broad intellectual framework that contains the synergetic, cross fertilized practices and theories of many disciplines. The chapter depicts the emergence of coaching root disciplines and some of their relationships, which clearly demonstrates interrelationships and influences among and between disciplines where coaching borrowed theories, models, and practices. Coaching is a multidisciplinary field that, to be sustainable, must continue rapid innovation while encouraging diversity and inclusion and an integral balance within a loose, open social network.

This chapter focuses on emotions of clients and coaches throughout the coaching process and includes examples of how emotions impact coaching individuals, teams, and organizations. It describes coaching and differentiates it from consulting and therapy. The chapter introduces Emotion Roadmap™ to help guide leadership coaches as they influence clients emotions to achieve coaching goals. It opens with a real case with the permission of the client. Statements about each person’s feelings and thoughts are based on conversations with the client. Throughout the chapter, the case demonstrates how successful coaches influence emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. While there are different models for understanding emotional intelligence, all of them can be assisted from a coaching perspective by using the Emotion Roadmap™. The Emotion Roadmap™ is a systematic, rational approach to managing emotions. The Emotion Roadmap™ comes from the creative integration of other theories and models.

This chapter focuses on the importance of including vertical development as a critical dimension in the current discourse around leadership learning and development. It helps the readers to understand vertical development and outline the leadership maturity framework developed over the last five decades. The chapter discusses how a coach can facilitate greater maturity in adults by applying the knowledge of vertical development to tailor their coaching to the client’s “stage” of development. Studies of adult development from earlier to later stages of maturity reveal characteristics that apply to all vertical development, regardless of the particular theory: all human beings actively make sense of experience, establishing and operating from a worldview based on their sense-making. The chapter outlines some of the many implications of this evolutionary lens for how coach see, relate to, work with, and coach individuals toward a more capable, joyful, compassionate, and wiser way of being.