
Abstract
Recent coaching research indicates that a positive change in the emphasis of coaching may be achieved through a move away from prioritising competencies, accreditation schemes and process models, towards a greater emphasis on the personal development of the coach, relational working with coachees and a focus on meaning-making rather than goals. This paper provides first-hand evidence through a biographical account. It draws from autoethnographic elements of my PhD thesis on the construction, composition and performance of coaching identities, to offer a narrative that shares insights gained during my ongoing journey towards becoming a pluralistic coach.
Introduction
Rajasinghe, Garvey and Smith et al (2022) provide extensive qualitative evidence that rather than a linear, stepped and staged journey derived from compliance with externally imposed frameworks, coaches perceive professional maturity to be achieved through a non-linear biographical journey that emphasises personal development and relational working. This aligns with my own doctoral research (Pendle 2023) and my journey towards becoming a pluralistic coach. This brief article seeks to convey a narrative sense of both that journey and the impact of my PhD research on it. It is presented in three sections: the opening narrative, the historical narrative and the doctoral narrative.
Opening narrative
Coaching first came into my awareness as I began my counselling training in 2001. Counselling’s professional organizations appeared to be looking over their shoulder at this emerging, and potentially competing, area of professional practice. Counselling publications were referring to coaching as “the new kid on the block” (Caroll, 2003) or a “counselling cousin” (Feltham, 1995). I initially assumed that it was some cognitive, corporate practice solely concerned with increasing profit for the company. As a counter-cultural commando on a subversive mission to facilitate an increase in self-awareness and the existential fulfilment of my clients it seemed antithetical to my ambitions and so I dismissed it. Roll forward several years and I am now a fulltime university lecturer in counselling. Despite years of personal therapy, the need to make changes in my life (improve physical fitness, lose weight, overcome assorted self-defeating behaviours) is only achieved when I set goals, strategize and envision preferred scenarios. I learn that insight within therapeutic sessions does not always equal change. I start to doubt the humanistic, Rogerian creed I have been proclaiming. This, along with pressure from my university for the counselling subject area to appear more engaged with “business”, means that I look again at coaching with renewed interest.
When I start my tentative coaching practice, it is like being let loose in a fast car on a motorway after years of riding a tricycle in a playground. It is exhilarating to work outside of the hermetically sealed counselling room and see people making concrete changes on the back of a short number of sessions. I joke to my colleagues that coaching involves drinking vast amounts of nice coffee, meeting a lot of nice people who then go away and do amazing things before returning and to give you the credit for what they have done. Enthused, energised and now beating the coaching drum within the university, I start a master’s degree in coaching psychology. My practice increases, I mix with lot of creative, interesting people and I do not doubt I am on the right path. Along the way I conduct research on the potential for pluralistic coaching (Pendle, 2015).
Historical narrative
(discovering a pluralistic, constructivist perspective)
I have always struggled to position myself philosophically. I cannot find the hard, certain ground that some of my friends, family and colleagues seem to stand resolutely on. Instead, it feels more as if I occupy a patch of sand on an exposed shore and have to shift and morph in a fluid response to the pulls and currents of the winds and tides. For much of my life I seemed to occupy two broad versions of reality. Because one version worked under one set of circumstances and the other worked under an alternative set of circumstances it appeared impossible to resolve them. Not only that, there was no reason why I should. In fact, resolving them seemed an impossibility (as they were diametrically opposed to one another). It seemed that if I wanted to resolve this tension, I would need to choose one or the other. However, making such a choice would mean denying a part of my belief system and leave a range of my experiences impossible to articulate. So, I lived with the tension of two realms of experience and dual belief-systems. Moving between them as-and-when was convenient.
In the first of these the motor car, the washing machine, the importance stressed at school on maths and advances in the positivist sciences were unwelcome but convincing evidence that in the final analysis I existed in a clockwork, Newtonian universe. As someone with little interest in the sciences it made the world a disappointing place in which at the very best (as a non-scientist with no interest in sports, woodwork or technical drawing) I would be a second-class citizen. This seemed to be in keeping with the expectations perpetuated in my secondary modern school that I would spend my working life engaged in meaningless, alienating and uncreative activity. This appeared to be a disappointing and unexciting version of the world but one it was necessary to navigate.
However, the texts I had been drawn to (e.g. Wilson,1979; Castenada,1970) had led me being attracted to the notion that there are different versions of reality and that all of these might have some validity: that it might be possible to move between these realities like some modern-day shaman. This was the world of vivid archetypal dreams, poetry and literature, moments of intuitive and profound insight, and coincidences that appeared (at the time) meaningfully serendipitous. This world was a lot more inviting and felt too substantial to be simply dismissed. This second perspective I loosely aligned to, that of the visionary outsider described in Wilson’s volume The Outsider (1956)which is based on a semi-mystical, existential worldview. With hindsight it might also have been possible to align them with Bruner’s two modes of thinking: logico-scientific and narrative (Bruner, 1986).
I arrived at Dartington Hall as a theatre student in 1984 and began to understand that the creative work of my tutors was defined by different approaches to theatre that were in turn defined by different philosophical and aesthetic perspectives. One of the tutors worked from a Jungian perspective and created exciting large-scale outdoor pieces of “ritual theatre” involving giant puppets, masks, drumming and fire sculptures where archetypal figures and mythological narratives would be invoked and bought to life. Another tutor worked from a Marxist philosophy and would produce studio-based Brechtian epic theatre with a focus on historical materialism. One tutor (who was a Christian) specialised in image-based, physical theatre that drew from an embodied sense of character and imagery formed from the actors’ voices and bodies. Our dance tutor was a postmodernist who believed that the universe was a chaotic place, that there was no single style of dance to be adhered to and worked with pedestrian choreography (Brown, 1987). Different styles, philosophies and aesthetics that were totally irreconcilable and yet somehow together they integrated into an amalgam that gave the students a coherent and exhilarating educational experience. The postmodern dance tutor also taught us that we could draw from eclectic theatrical sources and combine them into novel and exciting combinations that had the potential to create new aesthetics. In such a creative atmosphere it seemed unnecessarily restrictive to pledge my allegiance to one artistic school, philosophy or brand.
When I trained to be a counsellor I was introduced to the different therapeutic approaches: person-centered, cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, existential, transactional analysis. Each approach bought with it a different model of how the human personality worked and how it could facilitate peoples’ growth. I loved the different theories of personality. Each class I would be sold on yet another model of the personality and yet another cluster of therapeutic interventions. Along with my tutors and peers I would try to ignore the discrepancies between these different models which theoretically made them irreconcilable. They all had a research base, and all seemed to work, yet they could not all be true as their theories contradicted one another. I hid from this anomaly behind the fact I was on an integrative course and that my integrative approach was a work in progress.
In 2013 I read a book on taking a pluralistic approach to counselling (Cooper & McLeod, 2011). The authors align a constructivist, postmodern philosophical stance with a humanistic-existential ethical perspective and argued that different therapeutic approaches worked for different people irrespective of whether their ontological assumptions clashed. Therefore, they argued, we should not seek out a single unifying theory of the human psyche but instead accept that we live in a messy universe that incorporates multiple, sometimes contradictory, worldviews. As I read these words, I felt a sense of homecoming.
Doctoral Narrative
(who you are, not what you know)
For many years I plied my trade drawing crowds and entertaining them with fire juggling and feats of escapology as a street entertainer in the historic city of York. By doing doctoral research that got me access to some of the most renowned coaches I hoped to emulate the process I had adopted to create my street performing identity. As an aspiring street performer, I learned the most from hanging out with the more experienced and successful performers (Pendle, 1990).
The time spent listening to stories on the pitch while waiting for my turn to perform and later reviewing the day in the bar were the times the most valuable learning occurred. To this end there were numerous trips to Covent Garden and the Edinburgh fringe festival in order to meet the most renowned performers in that world and hear their stories. By using a narrative research approach that involved sitting and conversing with experienced and successful coaches I hoped to emulate this process. When I began my PhD, I imagined the top coaches as a group of highly accomplished stage magicians. They had been able to create personas that filled those spending time with them with energy, motivation, vision and feelings of unlimited potential. Like the street performers I had idolised in the past I imagined they could give a polished performance that would leave their audience euphoric, breathless and wanting more. I told my supervisors that I felt like a wide-eyed child wanting to penetrate the mysteries of the backstage world to find out how the coaches did it; driven by a naive wish to emulate.
The literature of coaching inherently suggests that successful coach identities are constructed from a series of specialisms and competencies that the aspiring coach gains expertise in through training and study. There is an implicit invitation to the prospective coach to make a number of choices in which they effectively join a club (choose a tribe), decide on a type of coachee (enter a specific area of the marketplace) and adopt a particular orientation (choose a specific coaching approach). Such an approach diminishes the uniqueness of the individual coach and suggests that a successful coaching identity is composed of elements external to the coach which are absorbed and then faithfully reproduced within their practice. These are “off-the-peg counselling identities and inevitably coaches commodify themselves in such a process.
While the street performers taught me to develop a necessary attitude of self-belief verging on arrogance, the coaches I interviewed have taught me that, in developing my coach identity, who I am is as important as what I know. While the detail of this will be outlined in a forthcoming publication, without exception all the interviewees gifted me with narratives of highly individualistic personal development journeys that have been the foundation of the coaching identities they have constructed. None of them made reference to accreditation schemes, competencies or adopting a schoolist approach to coaching.
Conclusion
Pluralistic coaching practice is located within a constructivist philosophical perspective whereby different approaches work for different people. It is humanistic in that the coachee is clearly understood to be the expert on themselves and their situation. It is relational, with the coach required to psychologically connect with the coachee and use their skill set to craft their coaching to reflect this individual connection. It means coaching can never become mechanical and repetitive. Each coaching relationship needs to be approached differently and homed in order to become a unique encounter. It is something I aspire to, can get better at, but will never completely achieve. As a pluralistic coach I am in a constant state of becoming.
References
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