A coaching psychologists walk down memory lane

Ever wondered what you need to coach? What you bring to coaching? What have you to offer? Ever thought about your coaching journey? Or even wondered what is this thing some people call a 'coaching psychologist'? Or for that matter what is this notion of 'being' an Evidenced-Based coach?

2017 saw the late Tony Grant give a talk whereby he recognised the many parts of ones experience that feed into their 'becoming a coach'. I use becoming on purpose as one may think you only need to be aware of all these elements of what you bring to coaching to then be a 'great coach'. However, I would argue unless you do something with this awareness there is great potential for you to perhaps fall into consulting and or mentoring or 'just' coaching rather than powering up your coaching by 'being a coach'.

In recent months, while writing the acknowledgements for our (Myself, Ilona Boniwell and Suzy Green) soon to be publish book Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace I dug back into the lecture slides (I have included a few below) that have travelled from Wollongong, Australia to Paris, France. Tony Grant, has spoken of all the influences in coaching and I wanted to be reminded of my thinking in my early days. I wanted to discover if and how it has changed. I was struck by what I found.

By way of explanation in practice I will use my journey to highlight the how Tony's thinking.

Through-out my training as a psychologist, I was always struck by the prescriptiveness of intervening - how does that motivate or support people to change - which is fundamentally what we need them to do. That is change behaviour, change thinking, and how they are experiencing the world and themselves in it, along the way tweaking identity - in this sense coaching is no different. Think about this in relation to identity - you have been unhappy for many a year, you are known to be unhappy, and deep down wanting change, however there is a certain comfort in remaining unhappy as the idea of identifying as a happy person is unimaginable and also frightening - so compliance to an intervention to bring about happiness is difficult.

In fact, many years ago I gave a lecture to 4th year psychology students on compliance and adherence, and drew some giggles and nods of agreement when I suggested perhaps they could look to their approach to their university work and assignments, and let that inform their understanding and practice of compliance in the therapy room.

While I was training as a psychologist I was already coaching, having trained with Tony Grant and Michael Cavanagh at UoS. Positive psychology was emerging in Australia and was a natural fit within coaching and my humanistic preferred leanings in psychology. I have always been attracted to the concept of the 'growth tendency'. For me this allowed me to have weaknesses but also believe I and others could continue to develop over time well into adulthood after the rush of learning and growth during toddlerhood and adolescents.

As a teacher and coach within the domains of positive psychology and coaching psychology this concept of 'being a coach' is not new, in fact I have always quietly thought that if you were not practicing what you preach you are but just a preacher.

The Illawarra Institute of Mental Health and academics (led by Lindsay Oades my internship supervisor at the time) at UOW in collaboration with various community agencies were undertaking a vast array of experiential studies with the mentally ill and well functioning individuals using positive psychology tools within the growth processing framework (Hope, Identity, Meaning and Responsibility).?I decided to create and lecture using their framework within a well known coaching conversation model - the GROW model - to help students think about how they could influence adherence and also the how and what of self determination theory from goals, motivation and psychological needs -see slide below. I thought this made coaching pretty interesting.

From here I found myself being more explicit in including more models and theories, such as Hope, Self-Regulation, Transtheoretical Model of Change, motivational interviewing - readiness for change.....etc. My coaching and positive psychology students are struck by the awareness they personally gain from using the understanding of these models in their practice coaching. Imagine how powerful their coaching will be with even just a little understanding of these theories.

Wellbeing - Emotions - Engagement Model (Smith, W-A, 2020). Adapted from Grant, (2012); Salanova, et al. (2014); Schaufeli, & Salanova, (2020).

Eventually, I turned to the now well tried and tested PERMA model of wellbeing as a basis of coaching conversations, sometimes explicitly when the coach would ask for positive psychology information and coaching and by that I mean there would be an element of psychoeducation or implicitly whereby the areas the coach would want to work on was a natural fit for wellbeing - I would argue is all coaching at its heart. The only difference between perhaps coaches and positive psychology coaches is that PPcoaches now and understand the science supporting the areas they are working on.

To more recent slides explicitly speaking to 'Way of Being' by Christian van Nieuwerburgh, yet I think this model of effective coaching is too simplistic. We know humans are just not simple. We bring with us the whole host of life experiences, skills, and knowledge to inform us and how we show up in a coaching relationship - or any relationship for that matter. So I return to Tony Grants multilayered model of 'Being a Coach' - is how I wish to title it - that is evidenced-based coaching.

What do you bring to your coaching? How does it or can it inform your coaching? An executive coach must bring executive experience an executive coaching company would tell you. It is a fallacy of course. As a good coach well-grounded in theory from psychology which includes positive psychology to inform their understanding of their practice will serve an executive well.

Sound interesting....I think so.. let's chat, nourish you and power up your coaching in my virtual coach development groups commencing November, 2021, and receive a copy of my latest publication Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace.

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