What Is Coaching?
Coaching has a variety of descriptions. Most orient around the shared creation and exploration of agency, insight, and partnership. My current personal definition for coaching is the reflective practice of being present while helping challenge and support another to find their space of optimal growth, balance, acceptance, and freedom.
ICF Definition
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaches honor the client as the expert in their life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:
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Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
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Encourage client self-discovery
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Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
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Hold the client responsible and accountable
Being a Client
Clients and coaches meet as equals. We mutually establish how we want to work together and how we can best help hold ourselves accountable to what you need and want. My role as a coach is a supportive one. I reflect on what you bring to the session and act as a "thinking-partner". Sometimes I will challenge you and point out paradoxes of thinking and action. Other times I will help explore and probe for the origins of an established way of being or thinking that may or may not be serving your best interests any longer. Sometimes I will ask you to complete a reflective exercise or read/listen to a relevant resource. Regardless of our direction together, I will always be in service to what is most wanted and needed for you. Should it become clear that another type of coach, therapist or healthcare provider would be better suited to help you, I will refer. Working with compassion, courage, and humour, I am keen to work with anyone interested in engaging in the coaching process.
Coaching and Leadership
Successful leadership of any process, program, or people begins with the ability to truly lead oneself. Without authentic insight and awareness of one's genuine self, responsible and effective leadership of anything of value is essentially impossible. This is a key theme in my coaching work.
Existential Coaching
Informed by existential philosophy and humanism, existential coaching is a form of exploration around what it really means to exist....What it means to be human, to be alive in a world with others, to let go of deception, to lean into taking full responsibility for one's life... All of it; the good, the bad and the ugly. By embracing such a candid and courageous exploration, "existential coaching is an approach with an entirely pragmatic objective: to help people live their lives with greater deliberation, liberty, understanding, and passion." (van Deurzen & Hathaway, 2012. Existential Perspectives on Coaching. Basingtoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan)
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Much of my coaching work is through an existential lens.
Physician Coaching
Since some of my clients are physicians, I want to acknowledge that coaching is a relatively new construct in the medical profession. Available literature shows that it has positive effects towards better managing work/life balance, ameliorating workplace communication, understanding personal values and meaning, directing individual and team development, enhancing present moment awareness, mitigating symptoms of burnout, fostering resilience and improving overall job satisfaction (Boet et al see "Evidence"). As an active physician and a professional coach, I feel very fortunate to work meaningfully with physicians at all stages of their careers.
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Symptoms of burnout are classically described as feelings of exhaustion, negativism and reduced personal efficacy at work. Burnout exists in almost every profession that involves serving humanity. It is a complex, insidious, and ultimately destructive phenomenon.
"Burnout is not a problem: it's a place in the workplace and professional landscape where, given the right circumstances, anybody can go at anytime...If a satisfying, fulfilling career is the road you're on, burnout is the ditch running alongside it." (Malcom Ogborn. Sudden Leadership. A Survival Guide for Physicians. 2022. p 176. Friesen Press. Altona, MB. Canada)
A great deal of my coaching work involves riding/being alongside a client as we explore their experience with burnout, awareness, meaning, and regeneration.
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A Note on Burnout
Organizational Coaching
An organization is the sum of it's parts - Its teams and groups. Its culture and leadership. Its direction and purpose. The common driver of all of these entities is the individual. Having trained as an organizational coach, we can work with any and all of these domains.
