Coaches Corner: The Transformative Power of a Topic

Hi, again - sorry I've been slow to get back with you. When posts disappear from the front page, I often lose my connection with them. I'm glad I checked today, since it was on the top of the page. I will check out the link to the video soon.

I am glad you understood what I was thinking about regarding change and the unknowns - the yes, no, maybe.

I follow you on your clear example of how coaching helped you in certain issues that you began to engage intentionally. My guess is that there are also various other examples you could bring up of you working through a challenge with coaching, that may not seem to have clarified yet before the coaching.

I may be making a deal about language, here, and it's not necessary, but I wonder if you follow me on it. As you state your principle, it almost sounds like a law of nature in its generality and its seeming to define the end of a story. So, literally, I think, in a manner of speaking, it is wrong to say, incorrect to say, "If you could have worked through this challenge on your own, you already would have."  At a particular point in time a pleasing solution or resolution may not be apparent or manifest, but that is not the end of the story, both with coaching or with no-coaching. A door has not been shut. There is not necessarily futility without coaching at a particular moment in time. Some situations, I propose, might require very long inner and less visible non-linear and even messy processes to resolve in the finest way. It seems to me that it is not so to say that "you already would have" worked it out if you could.

So I am simply putting forward this point that is important to me, and is probably a detail of language and presentation, but I wonder if in addition to the examples you can give where coaching helped, you can see where with more time beautiful resolutions might occur seemingly spontaneously. We've heard the terms "gestation" and "incubation" as a couple of metaphors that try to capture this longer, broader view. Fine wines and cheeses actually require some time to gain their distinctive flavors and qualities before they are bottled or packaged. Whereas, fresh spring water and exactly ripe fruit are probably best taken in at that moment.  So, I am saying that,  "already would have" is not always the case - that it depends. Sometimes solutions and resolutions are in process though not yet manifest. There may even conceivably be situations in which coaching and therapy interfer with an important process. Can you visualize that possibility? I'm guessing, Huy, that you follow me some and agree to some extent.

There was one study, probably a meta-study, about change and psychotherapy that I was greatly relieved to read at the time. Though not exactly on point, I think you might like hearing of it. If I remember it correctly it attributed change to several different categories. The biggest factor (40%) was called something like "extratherapeutic", that which goes on outside of therapy in larger life. Implied in this I think may be things like latency and readiness for change. The next big category that accounted for 30% of change had to do with the "therapeutic relationship" (coaching relationship). 15% was attributed to something like hope, faith, placebo and such. Only 15 % had to do with the actual approach - I found that so interesting, fun, and relieving because there has been so much expressed certainty and emphasis and inter-school, inter-specialty controversy and competition about which approach is best. This had been refined further to which approach is best for which circumstances, based on evidence.

Coaching and particularly "integral coaching" may be more effective than most manner of helping engagement, and yet I am still a bit humbled by the complexity of life and change and contextualization of change and meaning.

Shifting gears a little, this next meta-study that I think you'll appreciate is my current favorite. I love it. It's from an article in "American Psychologist" from November of 07 where the author, Bruce Wampold, was receiving an award for excellence in research. I'm going to place a link here to a summary of it on a friend of mine's website. (I think I may have posted this somewhere on ILC in the past.) If you like, go to, 'click here to read "Psychotherapy, Trust, and Love"'. In case you are interested, I got the actual 19 page article by just going to the public library and asking reference to find it. If I recall, Wampold doesn't use the term "love" in his results, as does Spense. In this study, he is looking at change and where it comes from. A number of favorite theories, approaches and perhaps myths are recast or dispelled. Rest assured though, it is suggested, that one persistent statistical conclusion is that psychotherapy (and therefore coaching, I say) is efficacious. (Of course further questions could be asked about how that's measured and in what grand or less grand contexts that is true. I'm not asking those now.)

Whew, Huy, I went on a bit here, just to stick with my "yes, no, maybe" point around your somewhat unequivocating statement. I hope it is helpful and certainly not overdone. Thanks.

It sounds like good stuff you are doing, learning, and presenting. I look forward to hearing more.

"Like many people I know, I am able to earn a living doing what I'm good at."

Are you here to interact with the members for free or are you here to market yourself? We should be absolutely clear on what your intentions are.