Self-care is crucial in coach development, argue Alexandra Barosa-Pereira, Wendy-Ann Smith, Duminda Rajasinghe, Bob Garvey, Stephen Burt, David Clutterbuck and Csigás Zoltán, drawing on their research
Coaching seems to be a trendy profession that everyone can access because it’s viewed by some as ‘only’ about setting a relationship with a client, asking questions, and supporting the client to connect to their own solutions.
Many senior professionals who consider that their experience matters and see themselves as good listeners come to coach training to get a credential, then realise it’s not ‘only’ about having the profile and the experience. Our research shows that a big part of becoming a coach comes from intentional self-care!
A study we’re conducting (Rajasinghe, et al) offers a unique research-based contribution to the literature, exploring the question of how coaches grow from novice to experienced coaches. Self-care has been found to be a crucial component in coach development.
In this study, many of the 31 experienced coaches interviewed have moved beyond the craft skills (techne), underpinning theories (episteme) and performance orientation into something more meaningful for them and their clients through a holistic process where self-care is central.
Sometimes coaches tend to present the number of clients and hours, and even the status of their clients or the fee they charge, to demonstrate their seniority, skill or success as coaches. They can assume their coaching or business success is synonymous with maturity, and it’s a position professional bodies have been advocating. However, one of the first analyses taken from the interviews was that experienced coaches are not necessarily mature coaches in essence.
An individual who trains to become a coach embarks on a never-ending experience of personal and professional growth, requiring attention to learning about themselves as well as others. Along the way, coaches develop different kinds of awareness. For example:
- awareness in the moment
- reflective awareness
- self-understanding (making sense of oneself and own behaviours)
- awareness of self, enabling them to connect with, understand and manage feelings, energy, physical phenomena and inner dialogue.
- being aware of and understanding and enforcing their own boundaries.
Some of our interviewees referred not only to becoming aware of their energy as generating resources for their coaching session and overall life (embodying it) but also to learning how to manage energy between themselves and the client. They also described how positive energy could flow in that space for things to change for the client. Self-awareness and self-management are about self-care.
But it’s also a process of awareness of context and its impact. How life experiences past and present impact the self and consequently the coaching. Coaches describe transition and impactful moments in life as influential on how they show up to coaching. At other times they question what was happening in the coaching, prompting more reflection, decisions and the undertaking or refinement of self-care practices such as regular mindfulness and time-out between sessions to cleanse and centre themselves.
Therefore, we can assume that becoming a coach involves not only inner development but also the creation of the meaning of the reality that surrounds the coach and how they take care of themselves along the way. While describing their developmental journey, our interviewees revealed thinking systemically or described their view of life and their coaching practice as a dynamic process. They become aware of how to develop a coaching mindset and being aware of the context, they find themselves intimately connected with a self-care process.
This movement of creating meaning seems also to be an acceptance of letting go, while evolving to a place of not having to know, not having to be attached, being comfortable with vulnerability, and with space of absence.
Becoming a coach is in fact a process of self-care, where coaches discover their uniqueness, their capacities. Our research shows that this process involves:
- Continuous reflective practice, alone or with others’ support (therapy and supervision), considering both what’s happening with self and while relating
- the use and/or development of meditation/‘mindless’ (often termed ‘mindful’) state (the state where coaches are at their best in this role)
- being nurtured through learning from experience on-the-job, experimenting, experiencing success and failure while acting, observation/modelling/repetition, feedback from others, interaction, and debate with peers, studying and researching
- the use of intuition, which is acquired through working reflectively on self-understanding, coaching experiences and other developmental opportunities consciously and intentionally so intuition can be used spontaneously in the interest of the client
- the coach’s ability to cope with the stresses of the role and manage ethical dilemmas which involve the manifestation of the previous points.
This study clearly shows that becoming a coach is a highly individualised process in which professionals need to make self-care a priority in their practice.
Reference
D Rajasinghe, B Garvey, W A Smith, S Burt, A, Barosa-Pereira, D Clutterbuck, Z, Csigás and E Griffin, forthcoming