To What Degree has Coaching Grown Out of Psychotherapy?

I’d like to go back to a question Andrea asked in mid-February. What parts of coaching have evolved from psychotherapy. Vicki has developed a “map” that will provide an overview. I’d like to look at this in terms of coaches who explicitly explore links between coaching and psychotherapy and also to look at ways both fields seem to overlap in their ongoing evolutions.

I hope that Vicki and others will jump in, but I’ll suggest that more recently, we’ve seen approaches from psychotherapy adapted to coaching, sometimes with minimal “translation” necessary. In 2001, Bruce Peltier published “Psychology and Executive Coaching“, with chapters on “The Psychodynamic View”, “The Person-Centered Approach”, “Cognitive Psychology”, “Systems Theory”, etc. More recently, the “Handbook of Coaching Psychology” (just published in the UK and soon to be published in the US) has chapters on “Integrating Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology”, “Cognitive Behavioral Coaching”, “Existential Coaching”, “Gestalt Coaching”, etc. Many of the major approaches to psychotherapy are applied to coaching in each book, I have just listed some sample chapters. Manfred Kets de Vries at INSEAD (one of the world’s leading business schools) has written “Coach and Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders” as well as “The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations“.

The “miracle question”, used by some coaches, began in Solution-Focused Therapy. Here it is, described by Steve de Shazer (more details at http://www.brief-therapy.org/steve_miracle.htm) :

After we finish here, you go home tonight, watch TV, do your usual chores, etc., and then go to bed and to sleep . . .

And, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens . . .

And, the problems that brought you here are solved, just like that! . . .

But, this happens while you are sleeping, so you cannot know that it has happened.”

“Once you wake up in the morning, a) how will you go about discovering that this miracle has happened to you?” OR, b) “how will your best friend know that this miracle happened to you?”

Solution-focused brief therapy goes back to the 1980s. In 1995, “Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions” was published. We have also seen narrative therapy migrate into narrative coaching more recently. I would not be at all surprised to see this trend continue, particularly as psychologists sense new potential markets for their approaches. If so, the boundaries between “what are therapy techniques” and “what are coaching techniques” are likely to blur even more.

There is much more to be said, and I’m looking forward to others jumping in.