The origins of the field of Developmental Coaching and why it matters!

The field of Developmental Coaching and where it all began…

This might sound odd, but coaching itself is actually not a new field – in that it has been emerging in alignment with the Human Potential Movement dating as far back as the 1930s, through the works of Alfred Korzybski (General Semantics), Jean Piaget (Theory of Cognitive Development) Victor Frankyl (Logotherapy), Abraham Maslow (Hierarchy of Needs), Carl Rogers (Unconditional Positive Regard), Fritz Perls (Gestalt Theory), and then later, Timothy Galway (Inner Game of Tennis), among many others.

The Human Potential Movement was a?counter-cultural rebellion against mainstream remedial psychology of the earlier 20th century.

The latter group (that helped form Esalen in California), broke away to study the structure of health and well-being. This included the renowned work of Virginia Satir, who actively encouraged therapists to shift their focus to relationship education to help clients discover “more joy, more reality, more connectedness, more accomplishment and more opportunities for people to grow”.

The human potential movement then gave rise to the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), as well as the modern Developmental Psychology movement (championed by people such as Robert Kegan, Jane Lovenger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and Ken Wilber et al.).

With its basis grounded in the field of the Human Potential Movement and Developmental Psychology, Developmental Coaching is a relatively new field, separate from Therapy, counseling, mainstream Clinical Psychology, etc.).

Developmental Executive Coaching differs from today’s performance-based coaching modalities...

It is interesting that around the same time Esalen was formed, Jean Piaget was in the final stages of studying and developing his stages of cognitive development theory.

I bring this up, because in our view, Stages of Ego (or Cognitive) Development, sit at the heart of Developmental Coaching and differentiate it from Performance Based Coaching, (which is based on the field of Behaviourism).

Developmental Coaching, then, focuses on the?‘meaning-making’ structures, that drive and modulate a person’s actions and behaviours, toward higher levels of?vertical growth, by expanding the overall perspectives (meaning-making structures) that a person can reference in making sense of the world.

As our meaning-making structures grow, so do our values change and mature (Grow up).

Developmental Coaching ?– The importance of Development in Coaching

Leadership?starts?with self-leadership and self-development. This is the work of?waking?up, growing up,?cleaning?up, and showing up.

The first three, have to do with our inner game. The personal work we do within our consciousness. This is the developmental work we engage in. The fourth (showing up) is where we enact real change in reality. It’s how we actualise our potential in the real world.?

Waking?up?is about the disidentification with the Self through our state experience. That is through presence and mindfulness (attending to what is in our awareness), we can realise the release of the egoic conditioning of the Self and Self-structures that limit us.

Growing up?is?about maturity – being able to take multiple perspectives under pressure and responding appropriately. The more perspectives we can take, the more complexity we can hold, the more we can influence the environment, and the less influence the environment has upon us.

Cleaning up?is about clearing the mental barriers and prior intentions, beliefs, values, identity structures, and shadow projections (upon others) that get in the way of us achieving potential.

Showing up?is the enactment of all of the above. It’s where we?make meaning matter. Here we ground our development in contextual appropriation. Abraham Maslow called this self-actualisation.

As coaching is contextual, meaning that the approach depends on the contextual elements present (mindset, heart set, skill set, tool set), Coaches in particular, need to do this work on themselves, prior to commencing the work with others.

Here, mere cognitive understanding is not enough!

A Coach needs to have done the work themselves, in order to craft their questions and messages accordingly, to facilitate their clients to wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up…

In other words, a Coach cannot coach someone at a later stage of development than themselves. If they do, they'll inadvertently be coaching their clients through earlier value systems, which can do more harm than good.

This self-driven work sets the Developmental Coach apart from all other modalities and coaching styles. Through the process of the Coach themselves waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up, they are able to facilitate the self-organisation and self-management of their client's developmental growth.

In other words in Developmental Coaching, the client does the work!

In conclusion, I'll finish with a quote from Margaret J Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers.

“Self-organisation is not a startling new feature of the world. It is the way the world has created itself for billions of years. In all of human activity, self-organisation is how we begin. It is what we do until we interfere with the process and try to control one another”.