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Integral Coaching - A Crucible
for Change
By Dr. Hillary Armstrong PhD.
- Institute of Executive Coaching
The Institute of Executive Coaching,
Sydney, Australia, is a private organisation providing
executive coaching services to major organisations,
locally, nationally and internationally, as well as
providing coaching training to potential coaches.
While in its formative years as a training
provider, the Institute drew upon a diverse range of
management training models to design and deliver training
programs that reflected their practical experience as
executive coaches.
More recently the invitation to private
providers of training to name and clarify their theoretical
and philosophical positioning (Grant 2004) has encouraged
us to examine and clarify the theories we draw on for
our practice. This has been a fruitful process.
However we also take into account that
propositional knowledge is mostly privileged over craft
and professional knowledge (Higgs & Titchen 2001)
and as practitioners, the work of the Institute is proudly
positioned in the latter.
Three basic assumptions shape
our practice: that coaching includes the whole person,
that it has a strength-building orientation rather than
a problem orientation and that it is embedded in spirituality,
i.e. our connectedness with the greater context.
Any theoretical frameworks
we employ have to express these assumptions.
Coaches at IECA view coaching through three lenses,
the crucible of the coaching encounter; how we understand
the landscape in which coaching sits; and the practices
we therefore choose.
Integral theory provides
the map of the landscape as we see it. Its strength
is to recognise the importance of 'outsight' as well
as 'insight', intersubjectivity as well as social systems,
science as well as spirituality. Experiential learning
provides the structure of the coaching process and strength-based
forms of psychology the tools to elicit what works rather
than what isn't working, and operate in a 'here and
now', 'looking forward' perspective.
The coaching crucible is
the spiritual dimension of coaching encounters.
For information on the programs run by
the Institute
of Executive Coaching
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