The Psychology of Coaching
A desire to achieve goals and enhance performance in both personal and professional life has seen life coaching grow from nothing to become a thriving industry. But until now there has been little research into the impact of this new discipline nor the effectiveness of the techniques it employs.
Dr Anthony Grant
Modern times are stressful times - few would argue with that. Job security is flimsy in many sectors, creating more stress and longer working hours than ever before. For most, employment is combined with raising a family, running a house, plus an assortment of other time consuming and brain draining activities that leave very few minutes in the day for personal time. Throw all of these factors together and you have a melting pot of life pressures ripe to explode.
It's this heady environment that could explain the skyrocketing popularity of executive and personal coaching which has increased ten-fold in only a few years. According to coaching psychologist Dr Anthony Grant, who recently completed a PhD at Macquarie University on the psychology of coaching, there was only one commercial coach training organisation operating in Australia in 1996 - in 2001 there were at least 12. Grant has over 15 years experience in facilitating individual and organisational change, and is now Director of the Coaching Psychology Unit at Sydney University.
His research explored three key areas in the field of coaching psychology - whether the theories and techniques utilised in counselling and clinical psychology for the treatment of dysfunctionality are applicable to non-clinical coaching populations who seek to enhance life experience and performance; how coaching for enhanced performance impacts on metacognition, mental health and goal attainment; and what the implications of these issues are for a psychology of coaching.
"Ten years ago we saw a boom in the self-help industry. As time has gone by it's become much more socially acceptable to access self-help initiatives such as executive or personal coaching," says Grant. "There is clearly a growing trend for individuals and organisations to employ professional coaches to help them reach their personal and work-related goals."
Grant defines coaching as a systematic process in which a coach facilitates self-directed learning, personal growth and enhancement of the coachee's life experience and performance. It aims to bring about sustained cognitive, emotional and behavioural change which facilitates goal attainment and performance enhancement either in a person's work or personal life.
Despite its high media profile and growing popularity as an occupation and as a service, however, there has been little research conducted into the actual impact of life coaching and the effectiveness of different techniques that are used.
To Grant's knowledge, his PhD study is the first ever to evaluate the effectiveness of those programs that employ models based on clinical psychology and counselling.
"Psychology has traditionally focused on alleviating dysfunctionality or treating psychopathology in clinical populations," he says. "But it also has a genuine and important contribution to make in terms of adapting and validating existing therapeutic models for use with normal populations and evaluating commercialised approaches to personal development to ensure consumer protection and inform consumer choice."
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of coaching on metacognition - the process of thinking about one's thoughts, feelings and behaviours - mental health and goal attainment, Grant analysed a commercially marketed life coaching program, Coach Yourself, which utilises a range of established cognitive and behavioural techniques employed in clinical and counselling practice.
The participants involved were 20 adults whose focus was on attaining specific goals that had eluded them for periods averaging 23.5 months. Some of these goals included establishing a business, attending to neglected financial affairs, and time management. The program guided each individual through a systemised process of self-assessment, goal setting, planning and action, and showed them how to establish a system by which they could monitor and evaluate their progress towards their goals.
According to Grant, the study provided empirical evidence that a life coaching program can facilitate goal attainment, improve mental heath and enhance quality of life.
"It is my conclusion that this particular approach to life coaching can be effective, and it appears that many of the techniques used in clinical practice are indeed applicable to the enhancement of performance and life experience," he says.
"The participants' reported levels of depression, anxiety and stress were significantly reduced, with most reporting a significantly enhanced quality of life. This finding suggests that although the life coaching program was directed at the attainment of specific goals, the benefits generalised to participants' broader life experience, and this provides preliminary evidence of the general value of life coaching in addition to its more specific impact on goal attainment."
While Grant has established that the application of clinical techniques to coaching practice may well be justified, he argues that further research is needed in this area.
"Given that the stigma sometimes associated with participation in psychotherapy can act as a barrier for individuals who would benefit from therapeutic help, life coaching, which is not overtly seen to be a psychotherapeutic intervention, could prove to be an acceptable and effective methodology for enhancing life experience and reducing anxiety, stress and depression in normal or sub-clinical populations," he says.
"Future research should investigate this notion. If life coaching were to be used with this end in mind, this would be a powerful call for the further development of empirically-validated models of coaching, and would further emphasise the need for sound training and ethical practice."
Grant also believes that future coaching research could examine the relative efficacy of cognitive coaching interventions as compared to behavioural coaching interventions.
"This research is of interest to coaching practice for three reasons," he says. "Firstly, this would begin the process of validating and establishing a cognitive-behavioural framework for a psychology of coaching.
"Secondly, such research will assist the design of effective coaching programs. Given that individuals with already high baseline behavioural skills are likely to benefit less from behavioural skills coaching than those with low baseline skills, and that normal populations do not tend to display the behavioural skills deficits observed in clinical populations, it may be that a cognitive emphasis in coaching may be specifically appropriate for enhancing outcomes in non-clinical populations.
"Thirdly, there are a large number of personal development publications which promote a cognitive-only approach to self-development and self-coaching. Empirical research into the relative effectiveness of cognitive and behavioural approaches would provide valuable guidelines for practitioners and the public alike."
One of the major implications of Grant's research is that if life coaching is to avoid the stigma associated with "faddism" and develop as a respected sub-discipline of psychology, it must be able to demonstrate efficacy and develop theoretically-grounded and empirically-validated models of coaching.
"Coaching is a new area of behavioural science that has great potential for forwarding the practice of psychology," he says. "And at the same time, psychology is ideally placed to contribute theoretically-grounded and empirically-validated approaches to the practices of life coaching to enhance the performance, productivity and quality of life of individuals, organisations and the broader community."
