Why the Integral+® Coaching Pathway Is Needed
Is there a problem with the Coaching Industry?
The unregulated nature of the coaching industry presents several issues for coaches, industry leaders and those who engage professional coaches. These issues include:
- Professional Coaching is still a hobby for the most – anyone can legally call themselves a coach.
- The quality and experience of coaching is highly variable.
- The understanding of what coaching is and is not is largely misunderstood.
- Coaching has lost its voice among other methodologies being sold as coaching. Coaching as a term has become interchangeable with terms such as training; mentoring; remedial therapy, counselling, etc.
This and other factors are causing a dilution of the power and potential that coaching has to offer. Customers, particularly organisations, are left to deal with the negative consequences of having engaged a ‘coach’ only to discover they are not offering the Return on Investment (ROI) promised. This impacts the field of coaching as an industry as well as the organisations using coaches.
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Problems with the Professional Coaching Bodies:
There are several national and international Coaching Bodies, federations, and boards around the world. You might already be aware of some of these governing organisations.
Unfortunately, the problems above, exist within these bodies as well:
- These bodies and boards are self-appointed, unregulated and amount to very little more than a hobby group of like-minded individuals engaged in a collective ideal.
- Most of the international bodies have been established for over 10 years and in those early days, the understanding of “what coaching is” and “Is not” was not well-defined. Today, this is pervasive across the industry.
- Almost none of these bodies has a true clear working definition of what coaching actually is. In other words, if they cannot define it, how can they govern it?
- Members of these bodies are accredited by very basic rudimentary coaching capacities (such as relying on processes or techniques like the G.R.O.W. model). They are then promoted through the ranks to levels such as “Master Coach” using simple criteria such as quantity of hours in active coaching.
Unfortunately, if you are poorly-skilled in the basics of coaching to begin with, 10,000 hours of practice simply makes you an experienced poorly-skilled coach and not a Master of Coaching.
Problems with Coaches:
If we take all of the above into consideration, it becomes apparent that finding a highly skilled and embodied, developed practitioner of coaching, who has the exceptional cognitive capacity needed for transformational conversations, is seldom found. Some of the problems here are:
- Most people cannot choose a coach training program that will deliver real coaching skills and knowledge, because they do not know what to look for. It then becomes a cost or convenience-based decision. This invariably leads to potluck experiences and disappointment.
- Coaches are often unaware of their own level of development (Stevens, 2020) and the maturity required to coach another human effectively. They do not have access to the developmental and awareness-based assessment tools to discovery where they are and what their needs are, before they coach a client. The problem with this is that immature coaches (unaware of their or their client’s stage of maturity) and trying to coach clients with a later, more mature stage structure.
- They will work with almost anyone that wants to engage them, without knowing if their client is ready, and where that client is from a maturity or development perspective. This will inevitably lead to a coaching conversation with zero actual human development.
Ready to make the next step in your coaching career?
If you’re interested in becoming a Professional Coach, book a 15 minute chat with Madeleine to learn more about our accreditation pathway and start your journey to becoming a more effective coach today.
