Talk:Coaching/Archives/2019

Approaches to coaching section
I'm also proposing we add section on the different approaches to coaching. The Complete Handbook of Coaching edited by Elaine Cox, Tatiana Bachkirova, David Clutterbuck has a matrix showing the:
 * psychodynamic (e.g. Kilburg, R.R., 2004. When Shadows Fall: Using Psychodynamic Approaches in Executive Coaching. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 56(4), p.246.)
 * Cognitive behavioural (e.g. Palmer, S. and Szymanska, K., 2014. Cognitive behavioural coaching: An integrative approach. In Handbook of coaching psychology (pp. 106-137). Routledge.),
 * solution-focused (e.g. Cavanagh, M.J. and Grant, A.M., 2010. The solution-focused approach to coaching. The complete handbook of coaching, pp.54-67.),
 * Gestalt (e.g. Bluckert, P., 2014. The gestalt approach to coaching. The complete handbook of coaching, pp.80-93.), Existential (e.g. Fusco, T., O’Riordan, S. and Palmer, S., 2015. An existential approach to authentic leadership development: A review of the existential coaching literature and its relationship to authentic leadership. The Coaching Psychologist, 11(2), pp.61-71.,
 * Ontological,
 * Narrative (e.g. Stelter, R., 2010. Narrative coaching: A community psychological perspective. In Cultural Turn in Sport Psychology (pp. 335-361). Fitness Information Technology.),
 * transpersonal (e.g. Jayne, T., 2018. Using nature as a tool to create transformation in transpersonal coaching. The Transpersonal Coaching Handbook, p.105.),
 * applied positive psychology (e.g. Grant, A.M. and Cavanagh, M.J., 2011. Coaching and positive psychology. Designing positive psychology: Taking stock and moving forward, pp.293-309.),
 * transaction analysis (e.g. Mukherjee, S., 2012. Does Coaching Transform Coaches? A Case Study of Internal Coaching. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring, 10(2).), and
 * NLP (e.g. Grimley, B., 2007. NLP coaching. Handbook of coaching psychology: A guide for practitioners, pp.193-210. Vancouver) approaches to coaching. On the other axis is the contexts for coaching such as skills development, the manager as coach, executive and leadership, and career coaching, see . Its not simple - when coaches are surveyed they report using different methods depending on the context. Notgain (talk) 00:02, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Recent edits
asked me to explain my most recent edits. First let me share some backstory and the lens through which I approach editing this page: I've been editing this page for years, which mostly has meant reverting blatantly or subtly promotional editing: i.e., coaches promoting themselves (WP:COI) or people promoting their favorite coaches (WP:UNDUE), or citation spamming (WP:REFSPAM), etc. That's not the kind of editing that has been doing, fortunately, but I've become hypersensitive (and not in a bad way, I think) to anything that has the slightest whiff of promotional editing or changes that could attract promotional editing.

None of that has anything to do with most of my recent edits, but I'll come back to the exceptions in a moment. Most of the recent edits, as noted in the edit summaries, reverted content forking: the duplication of content on the same topic in two or more articles. Content forking is bad principally because it prevents coverage of a topic from evolving toward the Wikipedia ideal of accuracy and neutral point of view. The material you copied from one article to the other may be exactly the same today, but then the editing continues and the content starts to diverge: essential information is added to one page but not the other, errors are corrected in one page but not the other, perhaps most editors focus on one page and keep it accurate and neutral while the other page gets corrupted by subtly promotional editing, etc. All of this is prevented by keeping content in only one place and not duplicating it.

If it's appropriate for a section in one page to be included in another page, that is accomplished through selective transclusion. I can see that it could be appropriate to transclude in this article. But if so, I would argue it should be transcluded after the "Applications" section. This makes more sense because Coaching psychology is (more) about theory, so "Theoretical influences" comes first in that article and "Applications" comes later there. This article is about practice, so "Applications" should come first and "Theoretical influences" should come later here. Likewise, above proposes a new section that is largely theoretical and thus should go in Coaching psychology, and perhaps transcluded in Coaching. But now I think that transcluding so much material would make this article too long when it would be better simply to have a hatnote at the top of Coaching that says something like: For theories of coaching, see Coaching psychology. And forget all the bloated transclusion.

By the way, Coaching psychology is a brand new article that suddenly popped up less than two months ago, and I didn't even know about it because the article was a total orphan until linked to it (and copied from it) in this article a few days ago. I am happy that the new article is already surprisingly good (surprising because it was apparently created by a student editor, and most student editing that I have seen is not so good). But now the existence of both Coaching and Coaching psychology raises the issues of content overlap, and how to deal with that content overlap, that I have been discussing above.

Now I'll address my recent edits that don't involve content forking. There was a relatively minor edit that moved some sentences from the "Life" section to "Business and executive" because the sentences are more relevant to that section. The edits to the "Origins" section, again, involved removing some content forking but also removed the listing of events in bullet points by decade because the events included are too subjective and selective (WP:POV) and also risk being a magnet for promotional editing. Adding self-help book authors and infomercial gurus opens the floodgates to the gigantic promotion-party that we've seen here before. And these salesmen are not central to the practice of evidence-based coaching today, even if a few of them were mentioned (among many, many other topics) in Leni Wildflower's "hidden history". The better approach is to avoid mentioning individual coaches, which is what we've been doing in this article for years, because it avoids all these problems.

As I said, now that we have the nice new Coaching psychology article, that's the best place to discuss the approaches and theories and evidence base and everything else that was copied and pasted from there to here. Whether some of the Coaching psychology sections are transcluded (not copied and pasted) from there to here, or whether this article simply points to the other article in a hatnote, is a decision we now need to make. Biogeographist (talk) 03:04, 11 July 2019 (UTC)


 * , Firstly, thank you for your thoughtful response. I had not considered selective transclusion. I didn't even know it was possible. But this requires some careful thought. It seems that the topic of "coaching psychology" would focus more on the unique contribution of psychologists and evidence-based practise whereas this article on coaching might cover the coaching industry more broadly including self-help and personal development influences. It would also cover executive and workplace coaching which is largely performed by non-psychologists doing internal coaching, external coaching and managers who have coaching skills. One of the intentions of forming coaching psychology was to provide supervision and evidence base for the non-psychologist coaches in the workplace. The following excerpts from Annual Review of Industrial & Organizational Psychology (Grant et al 2010) hints at the difference between coaching industry, coaching services and what psychologists uniquely have to offer:
 * "'''This rapid growth in organizational demand for coaching has presented both challenges and opportunities for industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologists and for the broader psychological enterprise. First, even though coaching focuses on individual and/or organizational change (a key focus of behavioural science), the majority of individuals offering coaching services to organizations are not psychologists or behavioural scientists (Grant & Zackon, 2004). The majority of coaches practicing today do not use theoretically coherent approaches and scientifically validated techniques and measures (Grant and O’Hara, 2006). Interestingly, while psychologists’ training would appear to ideally equip them for the delivery of coaching services, psychologists have not been seen as uniquely qualified coaching practitioners; either within the coaching industry or by the purchasers of coaching services (Garman, Whiston, & Zlatoper, 2000). Nevertheless, we believe that psychologists have much to offer the field of coaching.'... And this second quote from the same paper talks about 'coaching psychology' and the wider coaching industry... 'The foregoing review positions coaching as an academically immature but still emerging discipline. This is true of both the wider coaching industry and coaching psychology. Many of the challenges facing coaching are a function of its youth. As with all emerging areas of professional expertise, practice tends to precede the establishment of a sound theoretical and empirical foundation. Indeed, coaching practice has been largely disconnected from the peer reviewed literature. Until very recently, the literature on coaching has been spread thinly throughout the wider psychological and business journals. One of the challenges for researchers and theoreticians in coaching has been to establish effective platforms to facilitate the sharing of ideas and research. The journals emerging as key journals in the field find their foundations in a range of disciplines, including psychology, education and business. Such specialist journals include the ‘International Coaching Psychology Review’, ‘Coaching: An International Journal of Theory Research and Practice’ and the ‘International Journal of Evidence-based Coaching and Mentoring’"


 * So I think this requires a nuanced approach Notgain (talk) 09:02, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see anything to disagree with in what you have said, except I think that self-help is outside the scope of this article by definition, since coaching is an activity "in which a person called a coach supports a learner or client", which I interpret to mean in person (and now through telepresence as well) instead of through recorded materials, and covers the history of self-help. I will add a link to Self-help in the "See also" section of this article. Biogeographist (talk) 19:31, 11 July 2019 (UTC)


 * As it stands this article is a bit of an promotion/advertisement for International Coach Federation. It has a brief introduction and skips over any details on coaching service areas and then right into a criticism that the industry lacks regulation followed by a paragraph on training standards. There are 13 occurances of "ICF" keyword on the page (including in reference list). There are 12 external links to the ICF site coachfederation.org. I added one of those in the market section. I understand it is the largest coaching industry association but there are other associations, methods and coaching educators who are unaffiliated with ICF. Add some coverage of Coaching psychology would cover that and also covering the other methods I listed above. Notgain (talk) 14:10, 12 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I seem to remember some previous discussion/issues here related to the various coaching associations. We shouldn't be giving undue weight to any of them in the article body text, although I wouldn't be concerned that there are many occurrences of the ICF in the inline citations unless there are better sources that should be used instead. It would be great to find a good critical/scholarly source (not industry source) that discusses all the associations. I'm not sure what you meant in your last sentence when you said Add some coverage of Coaching psychology would cover that and also covering the other methods I listed above. Biogeographist (talk) 14:42, 12 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Instead of that sentence, I should have said there are sources in coaching psychology as well as spread across psychological and business journals more broadly. Agree with you about critical and I assume peer-reviewed source. By "methods above" I was referring to "Approaches to coaching section". Notgain (talk) 23:43, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Added Too few opinions
The article doesn't mention the tons of criticism exposing this scam. Hence, I added the template (inside a multitg template). --Bageense(disc.) 14:02, 7 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I removed the Too few opinions tag because there is criticism in the last two paragraphs of . If there are other sources you have in mind that should be mentioned, please share them. Regarding your "scam" comment, see also:, which may be what you have in mind. Biogeographist (talk) 04:31, 10 September 2019 (UTC)