About Us

What is the Library of Professional Coaching?

“You’re like the Huffington Post of coaching!” ~ Eric Edmeades

We are pleased to welcome you to the Library of Professional Coaching (LPC). We’re glad you are here and hope you enjoy this Internet-based, free center that provides access to a carefully selected set of resources associated with the field and discipline of professional coaching. Over more than a decade we have built an online library of professional coaching materials, with an initial focus on professional coaching within an organizational setting, but we quickly expanded to include high caliber materials relevant to all aspects of professional coaching. Our library includes a growing pool of articles, videos, research briefs, dissertations and white papers which will serve as the ultimate Internet-based source of information about professional coaching. We strive to be an easily searchable database of trusted, high-caliber, vetted and peer-reviewed content.

In partnership and collaboration with many other coach-oriented organizations, we continue to build the collection with the intention of providing value and service to the entire coaching community: students, new coaches, faculty, practitioners, internal and external organizational coaches and leaders, authors, personal coaches, researchers, and academicians. If you have materials to contribute and would like to see different or additional categories, let us know! We are constantly seeking to improve this offering to best serve the professional coaching community.

We are honored to announce that in an independent survey the LPC has repeatedly been named one of the Top 5 Coaching Sites for Research and Resources worldwide by the annual Sherpa Executive Coaching Survey of leaders and coaches. The survey is considered the most reliable and method-sound survey in the coaching industry, providing data about trends and issues in executive coaching, and has tracked over 90 websites for several years that offer material for executive coaches.

The video below will tell you a bit more about us:

Photos: Where did all the beautiful images on this site come from?

We are grateful to the following photographers for snapping happy photos that we are using throughout this site: Kathleen O’Donnell, Elizabeth Bouve, Bill Bergquist, Suzi Pomerantz, Julia Bergquist. Many of the photographs in the Transformations Magazine were provided by G. Michael Smith.

Founders and Curators: Who Are We?

Glad you asked! William Bergquist and Suzi Pomerantz are the stewards and curators of this growing collection. We were motivated to begin this coach-related venture following a meeting of senior level coaches at an Executive Coaching Summit in 2005. It was at this summit that it became apparent that a resource center specifically focusing on professional coaching was needed to firmly establish the field of Professional Coaching. We started this digital library more than a decade ago and have now published more than 1,000 documents.

We’d love your input and feedback! As you’ll see below, we have each launched successful enterprises of our own, whether books, magazines, coaching businesses, or other sustained ventures, and you may know us from various volunteer roles we all play in the coaching world.

William Bergquist

William Bergquist is co-founder and past Co-Executive Editor of the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO), as well as being co-founder, past executive board member and Symposium Dean for the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO). He has authored or co-authored more than 50 books and is owner and president of The Professional School of Psychology.

Suzi Pomerantz

Suzi Pomerantz is the CEO of Innovative Leadership International LLC, co-founder of the Library of Professional Coaching, Strategic Advisor to the Board of choice magazine, a founding board member of the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO), as well as founding board member and Vice President of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO). Her Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from ICF for many years places her in the top 4% of coaches worldwide and she has been coaching executives in over 300 organizations worldwide for nearly three decades. She is the founder of the Leading Coaches Center and has authored or co-authored 11 books, including bestseller Seal the Deal.

Founding Five:

A group of five founders built the initial iteration of the Library, and it has evolved quite a bit over the years. Without the efforts of these original five founders, the Library would not be here.

Suzi Pomerantz is the author of Seal the Deal, CEO of Innovative Leadership International LLC, a founding board member of the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO), as well as a founding board member and Vice President of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO). She has had her Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential from the ICF for 23 years and has been coaching executives for 28 years in over 300 organizations worldwide. She is the founder of the Leading Coaches Center as well.

Matthew Rochte brings to the table 7 years of effective triple-bottom-line manufacturing practices, 20+ years of business ownership and entrepreneurial expertise (manufacturing, coaching and training businesses, and a national alliance of coaches), and 18 years of executive leadership coaching/consulting. Matthew also works with seasoned coaches on going deeper with their work and studying the art of coaching with an integrated approach. Matthew served as president and on the board of the Minnesota Coaches Association and on the International Coach Federation‘s Ethics and Standards Committee and code revision team.

Garry Schleifer is the Publisher of choice, the magazine of professional coaching. A serial entrepreneur for over 20 years creating and running several multi million dollar private and public corporations, he combines his business experience and coaching training to apply a signature approach of “ruthless compassion” when helping senior executives boost personal and organizational performance to higher levels. A coach for over 6 years and holds his PCC certification with the International Coach Federation (ICF). He also serves as Vice President of the ICF Board of Directors.

Donald R. Tramel is the owner and Vice President of Centura Design & Print Solutions, Inc. He has over 30 years of experience in the graphic/web design and printing industry. Donald’s company has designed and produced multiple publications in the field of professional coaching.

Origin Story of the Professional Coaching Library

The founders identified a common need for a library of resources that will support our shared passion for stewardship of the profession and enable us and our colleagues to discover, learn, explore, and further the profession of coaching. We were aware of a majority of information that was previously inaccessible, either hidden behind private firewalls or otherwise not on the internet. In such an abundance-oriented profession, to see the documentation and research in such scarcity struck us as a profound contradiction. The library is our attempt to bring it all together and make it available to you.

On a local level coaching associations and schools have pulled together physical libraries of coaching books. These physical libraries tend to be limited because access to anything but life coaching books is hard to come by. The business and corporate research, journals, articles, resources, and books are often inaccessible or unavailable to the general public, despite being in abundance. The Professional Coaching Library is set to change all that.

The Professional Coaching Library can be traced back, as in the case of several other major coaching initiatives, to a two day meeting that is held every year in conjunction with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Called “The Executive Coaching Summit” (ECS), this meeting has served as a forum for stewardship of the field, as well as for networking, professional development and colleagueship.

Stewardship was exhibited in the creation during the 2003 ECS of a new journal—the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO)— that became a central venue for more than a decade for the reporting of research, theory and practices in the field of organizational coaching. Stewardship was also evident in creation during the 2004 ECS of a new institution—the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO)—that provided diverse worldwide forums over eight years for distinctive conversations among those who provide, use, and study professional coaching practices within organizational settings.

Several of those who provided leadership in the creation of both IJCO and ICCO, made yet another commitment during the 2005 ECS: they committed to establishing a data base—a Professional Coaching Library (PCL), which later became the Library of Professional Coaching (LPC)—for those who provide, use and study organizational coaching practices.

In March, 2007 the first iteration of the LPC was launched online, thanks to the generous funding of initial donors, sponsors, and patrons who believed in the value of having an online vetted, trusted, curated resource like the Library of Professional Coaching.

LPC Magazines

The curators of LPC decided in 2011 that they could deliver yet another feature to the Library. Much as museums often feature special exhibits as well as offering their general collection, so it would seems that a digital library such as LPC could offer special collections of essays that would be gathered together in digital magazines. As in the case of museum exhibits, some of the essays could be gathered from those already published in LPC, while others could be recruited from other sources or written specifically for an issue of the magazine. Editors were recruited for each of the new magazines and four magazines were created that typically published new issues each four months. These magazines ranged in topic from the study of transformational processes to the role played by senior leadership in community development, and from the nature of deep caring (generativity) to the rich insights offered by Marshall Goldsmith.

The Future of Coaching

In November, 2012, a core strategic group met in Santa Fe, NM to explore the future of coaching and how the Library could best serve the profession. Below is a photo of the participants:

Back Row: Ken Kesslin, Linda Page, Bill Bergquist, Bill Carrier

Middle Row: David Goldsmith, Cheryl Green, Suzi Pomerantz, Jeannine Sandstrom, John Heinritz, Garry Schleifer

Front Row: Anne Miller, Renee Freedman, Agnes Mura, Charlie Smith

Emerging from this Santa Fe meeting was a commitment made by Bill Bergquist (a co-curator of LPC) and Bill Carrier to establish a new coach-focused magazine called The Future of Coaching that would be housed within LPC. This LPC magazine was established in 2013 and has now published more than 20 issues. Topics rang from the status of research on coaching to the ethics of coaching, and from the philosophical foundations of coaching to the ways that coaching is being engaged for the greater good.

Many of the participants at the Santa Fe meeting have served as co-editor with Bergquist and Carrier of specific Future of Coaching issues.

Curated: A Yearly Volume

Beginning in 2015, the curators of LPC decided that a new publication venture be started to further advance the art and science of professional psychology. Every year since 2016, a 150 to 250 page digital volume has been published by LPC. Several of these volumes of Curated have been co-sponsored by choice magazine and the Peer Network Review. These volumes have included articles from LPC, choice and Peer Review, as well as new essays prepared specifically for the Curated volume.