The Future of Coaching: Status, Direction, Strategies and Tools

William Bergquist and William Carrier

The Future of Coaching is concerned with the very heart and soul of professional coaching—it addresses the challenge of coaching’s future status, direction and long-term goals. It also offers the strategies and tools needed for this challenging future. Much as individual professional coaches assist their clients in focusing on their own individual future and the future of organizations with which they are affiliated and often lead, so it is important that the field of coaching itself address this fundamental coaching question: what will the future be for this human service field?

Issue Thirty Six: Coaching to Problems Being Faced and Decisions to be Made

Many of the services being provided by professional coaches (especially executive coaches) focus on the problems being faced by a client and/or on the decisions that a client must make. Along with my colleague, Agnes Mura, I have even identified a specific branch of professional coaching as “decisional coaching.” This branch exists alongside of what Agnes and I (in coachbook) identify as behavioral coaching and aspirational coaching.

The present issue of The Future of Coaching is devoted to this critical coaching function. As a professional coach, one must have strategies and tools for effective problem-solving and decision-making in their coaching arsenal whether majoring in decisional coaching or focusing occasionally on problem-solving and decision-making in their personal or organizational coaching practices.

We approach the matter of problem-solving and decision-making in three related ways. First, we offer essays that have previously been published in The Library of Professional Coaching (or are now being published) that offer a general perspective on the environment in which mid-21^st Century problems must be solved and decisions made. A second set of essays focus specifically on the processes of problem-solving (as well as cautions against focusing on problems). Finally, in the third section of this issue, I have chosen essays that concern the challenge of making decisions.

Issue Thirty Five: Generativity and the Deep Caring of Professional Coaching

One specific set of developmental issues are likely to take “center stage” in mid-life. It is during this time when professional coaching is most likely to be engaged. These issues concern what Erik Erikson identifies as the matter of Generativity—caring deeply for that about which we care—as it contrasts with Stagnation—a failure to care deeply about anything at this specific period in life. Erikson offers the following summary description regarding the deep caring that is central to Generativity: “Caring is the widening concern for what has been generated by love, necessity, or accident; it overcomes the ambivalence adhering to irreversible obligation.”

The state of Generativity is important for coaching clients to appreciate and set forth as one of the meta-goals in their life and work– especially when contrasted with a state of Stagnation in life.  A professional coach is perfectly positioned to assist their clients in finding one or more of the four modes of Generativity in their interactions with colleagues, in the leadership they provide in their organization or community, and in the deep caring way in which they attend to those people and projects of greatest importance in their life. We offer fifteen essays in this issue of The Future of Coaching that focus on the application of Generativity theory to the practice of professional coaching.

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