Coaches - stop being nice to each other!

Coaches are too “nice” to each other. In our eternal quest for harmony, understanding and appreciation we are avoiding debates that might clarify issues and bring the field forward. We accept each other’s positions without questioning them and seem to have adopted a “if it floats your boat – fine” attitude. This may be useful when we are trying to collaborate with different coaches, but the fact that no exchange happens about the validity of our assumptions is deplorable. As Mark McKergow from sfwork always stresses: Talking about coaching is a different activity from doing coaching. When we do coaching, we need to appreciate all perspectives and accept where our clients are coming from. When we talk about coaching no such peaceful relativism is called for.

Let me give you an example: Integral coaching or spiral dynamics is based on Ken Wilber and Don Edward Beck’s assumption that human development of value systems and worldviews happen in stages in a specific order from “Beige”, survival oriented and instinctive to “Turquoise”, global view and holistic. Both societies and individuals can be categorized as belonging to a stage in the development and if you are on a “higher” stage, you may lead others to developing their consciousness.

This is the opposite of Solution Focus or social-constructionist coaching. These try to avoid an external view of the client and will shy away from categorizing or diagnosing their development stage. Theses approaches assume that the world of interactions between humans is too complex as to be able to find sensible categories. The coach will take a position of a fellow human being in conversation rather than an external diagnose of development stages.

Integral coaches will think that social-constructionist coaches fly blind, social-constructionist coaches might find diagnosing development stages and knowing what the next development level for the client is misguided and borderline unethical. They will think that it is a story that privileges the knowledge of the coach rather than the knowledge of the client.

Yet – we are not having this debate and as we are not having it, we are not learning from one another. Social constructionist coaching and integral coaching are only two examples, there are many more contentious points that we ignore as we are too busy learning the newest “tool” and shiny new approach.

If you are interested in an exchange, learn about our courses, have fun with likeminded people, why not join one of our free meetup and exchanges?

‍