My main focus as a trainer is the interface between coaching and therapy: enabling coaches and therapists to enhance their practice by drawing on knowledge and skills from the neighbouring discipline. Therapists have been showing an interest in coaching for some time now, and many have undertaken a second training as a coach, as I did a decade ago. In recent years, more and more coaches have been seeking to learn about aspects of therapy, and some have decided to undertake therapeutic training. What looked ten years ago like a contraflow system increasingly resembles regular two-way traffic.
For Coaches
As a dual-trained coach-therapist and experienced trainer, I work to enable coaches to broaden and deepen their practice without operating beyond the ethical boundaries of the coaching profession.
Coaching is an effective means of enabling people to make changes in their working and personal lives. However, many coaches have learnt from experience that the process of forward movement is sometimes sticky, and sometimes becomes stuck fast. When this happens, coaches can discover that they are under-equipped to work with the psychological complexities of their clients’ experiences and the coaching process. Coaches can also be uncertain as to whether and how they should work with the powerful emotions ̶ including sadness, anger, anxiety and guilt ̶ that sometimes come into the coaching space.
This is where there is real value to be found in drawing on ideas and skills from the psychological therapies. There are many ways for coaches to work with psychological complexity and emotional turbulence (both their clients’ and their own), to expand the compass of their effectiveness without stepping unethically beyond the bounds of their competence. Trainings such as the forthcoming workshop on Coaching with Emotions are designed with such an expansion in mind.
For Therapists
As someone whose therapeutic practice has been enriched by the encounter with the world of coaching, I train other therapists to integrate aspects of coaching theory and practice into their existing way of working.
Experience teaches most open-minded practitioners that no single theory or approach can do justice to the range and complexity of therapeutic needs. This experience is strongly borne out by the research evidence. It is therefore not surprising that recent decades have seen increasing numbers of therapists embracing integrative and, more recently, pluralistic ways of working. One developing area of integrative and pluralistic practice is the adoption of coaching ideas and skills.
There is much that therapists can learn from the world of coaching about the value of adopting, at times, a future-orientated and strengths-focused stance. Coaching can also teach us about motivation for change; about the value and complexity of goal-setting; and about styles of questioning that raise clients’ awareness of the intricacies of selves and situations. Integrating these skills and theories from coaching can enable therapists to be effective with a broader range of presenting issues.
York Coaching 