How Coaching Works – The essential guide to the history and practice of effective coaching: Joseph O’Connor and Andrea Lages

The authors set out in this book to:

• Review the present state of coaching
• Provide an overview of how coaching has grown
• Explain some of the main types or schools of coaching
• Bring together in one model the key elements of these different approaches to coaching
• Explore how to measure the results of coaching
• Explore what terms like “transactional” and “transformational” coaching mean
• Speculate about the future of coaching.

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Useful gems

• As part of my training, I was introduced to NLP but I am not an NLP practitioner. Although I use a handful of NLP-inspired tools, there is a lot for me to learn about NLP coaching and the context in which those tools sit. From that perspective, I liked the summary of NLP coaching, and the specific idea that first, second and third position can be used not just as a tool with which to explore a situation, but also as a tool to explore different “types” or predispositions – i.e. whether the client is stronger in first position, second position or third position, and what this might mean for his/her ability to balance all three positions
• In the afterword on the summary of Positive Psychology Coaching, there is a helpful list by Carol Kauffman of resources that a coach can use when helping a client to assess strengths
• In the summary dealing with Ontological Coaching there is a useful example of how a coach can work with a client to explore negative self-assessments (page 148 – 149). The flow of questioning here would sit very well alongside Cognitive-Behavioural Coaching techniques
• As part of the authors’ integrated coaching model, they set out on page 170 as neat and simple a description as I have ever seen of the beliefs that a coach needs to demonstrate in his/her interactions with clients:
  • An optimistic view of human nature
  • We construct our reality – what we can construct we can also deconstruct
  • Choice is better than no choice and there are always more choices
  • That their coaching skill and methodology works

This struck me as simple and elegant

• As a coach who sometimes uses Cognitive-Behavioural Coaching techniques I particularly appreciated a statement made as part of the authors’ integrated coaching model: “The most important skill is for clients to be able to reflect on their own thinking. Until they can do that, they cannot make a distinction between thinking and belief.”

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Why I rate this book

• I did not find the first part of the book – the history of coaching – particularly useful. I found the statements rather generalised and they did not chime with my own experience of coaching in the UK in the early 1990s. I mention this not as a major criticism, but simply by way of saying “if you don’t get on with the first part of the book, don’t give up. There is plenty of value in the later parts”
• Part Two concentrates on different coaching models. The authors explain each model; distil its key elements; and, in some cases, invite well-known practitioners or influencers to add an afterword. These coaching model summaries are great. They are clear and accessible, and each of them is supported with a very helpful bibliography. If you find a particular model appealing or interesting, the book gives you more than enough information to equip you to research it more deeply. The book summarises the following models:
  • The Inner Game, GROW and Co-active Coaching
  • Integral Coaching
  • NLP Coaching
  • Positive Psychology coaching
  • Behavioural coaching
  • Ontological coaching
• The authors’ integrated coaching model appeared to me more like an abstract of the foregoing summaries of coaching models rather than a distinctive model. The authors are clear that their integrated model is a synthesis of the other coaching models. Even so, I felt it was a bit unwieldy. Something visual to bring the salient points together would have been a helpful addition
• The book has enormous ambitions, setting out as it does to review the history of coaching, current practice, some key models and to produce a new synthesised model. What the book does well is to keep this clear and simple as well as keeping it to manageable length. There’s enough in the coaching summaries and the thoughts around the integrated model to make this a useful read, even if other chapters were not as useful to me.

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Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: A & C Black Publishers Ltd (29 Oct 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0713682612
ISBN-13: 978-0713682618
Dimensions: 2.3 x 14.8 x 22.8 cm

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