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Coaching - the birth of a new profession?

How often do you get to write about the birth of a profession? I'm writing a fair bit about the young profession of coaching, and it's a real privilege. My first coaching article was published by Coaching at Work magazine. It focused on bullying, and argued that coaches are a potential antidote to this scourge of the workplace.

Before Christmas I went to lunch with my aunt who is a psychodynamic work coach.  I realised that her approach, with its ability to encompass the role of the unconscious and the undertow of emotion in organisations, fully backs up my article. She's lent me some books on the subject and I'm slightly overwhelmed by the non-stop depth - can't a day at work just be a day at work? But I am also fascinated.

After Christmas, I wrote another article about health coaching, and it seems coaching is also part of the answer to preventing long-term conditions like diabetes, obesity and Alzheimers which are bankrupting the NHS.

Coaching essentially is about producing personal change. It's not some faddy nonsense. It's going to have to work out an arrangement with therapy at some point because the two disciplines are joined at the hip. But coaching is a solution, therefore, to a lot of things. It actually IS kind of one size fits all. What important issue doesn't involve personal change? Maybe we can use coaching to wean ourselves off consumption? To get families out of poverty? To make bankers grow up?

Coaching deserves to be professionalised, and it is gradually doing that. It is fascinating to observe.


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