The initial search on the part of Natalie and John to find a focus for their coaching dialogue is not unusual. In many instances, personal life is mentioned early on by a coaching client-given that they often do not have any other setting in which to talk about these issues. Conversely, work life may also be the central focus of a coach’s work-not only because the coach is being paid by the client’s organization and the coaching is engaged during work hours (and in the work place), but also because the coaching client has gained much of his or her meaning-in-life from work and because the other domains in life seem to be profoundly impacted by what occurs on the job. Unfortunately, the training and past experiences of many professional coaches- particularly those who identify themselves as “life coaches” or, more broadly, ”personal coaches” – do not prepare them for this organizational work. They encourage their clients to follow their bliss but are often not themselves quite sure about the nature of organizational bliss and how one might follow it in an organizational setting.
Somewhere around the early 1990s, the field of professional coaching began to split apart – for good or ill. Many of the early practitioners of professional coaching came out of a personal growth background. They had conducted encounter or sensitivity training groups, been involved with est-oriented facilitation, done career counseling, or served as a marital counselor or therapist. These experienced practitioners saw professional coaching as a new way to “package” what they were already delivering or as a way to move beyond the intensive, small group format (which yielded impressive but short-term impact). They saw sustained work with a “client” on a one-on-one basis as a perfect venue for unrestricted exploration of issues in their client’s life, whether these issues are about marriage, friendships, finances, emotional life or even spirituality.
There is a second group of professional coaches. They represent a second perspective following the “split.” Like Natalie, these coaches tend to come out of HR backgrounds or are organizational consultants. Many of these men and women have been marketing themselves as “organization development” consultants. Like the personal coaches, they find the field of professional coaching to be quite tempting both as a new way to package the services they were already offering and as a way to work more closely with individual clients in the challenging task of implementing a new organizational initiative. The problem is – as Natalie soon discovered- the client is hurting at an individual level. Someone like John wants help in reducing their personal stress. Almost twenty years ago, David Morris (1991) provided us with an insightful analysis regarding the nature and meaning of pain. He observed that prior to the discovery of analgesics (painkillers), patients had to live with pain and therefore had to assign some meaning to the pain (for example, a sign from God that one must lead a more virtuous life or a sign that something is indeed wrong with my leg and I have to have it taken care of by a doctor). Once the pain killers became available (early 20′” Century), patients wanted, first and foremost, an absence of pain. ‘While the physician wanted to use the pain as a way to discover what was injured or diseased, the patient wanted the pain to go away.
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