Coaching 2.0

The need

The coaching industry emerged in the early 1990s, with business coaching, then life coaching.

The initial Coaching 1.0 ways of thinking made it possible for coaches to help lots of people. But it wasn’t clear how exactly coaching works or how it could best be practiced.

A better way

So we have developed a better way to think about coaching.

Coaching 2.0 provides a complete way to understand coaching, from how it works to the benefits it can offer. It rests coaching upon solid intellectual foundations and sets it up to have a truly transformational impact upon the world.

An overview

Watch the video below for an overview of Coaching 2.0 thinking.

How Coaching Works

Something to get straight

The first thing to get straight about coaching is the mechanism by which it delivers its benefits. It turns out that there are two key elements to consider:

That coaching can create the conditions for coachees to have useful insights.
That these insights become genuinely useful when they spur the coachee to take actions that will help them flourish — actions that they wouldn’t have taken if it wasn’t for the coaching.

Mechanism 1

Watch the video to learn how coaching creates the conditions for insight.

Mechanism 2

Watch the video to learn how coaching catapults coachees into insight-led action.

Skills & Training

What coaches must do

If a coach is to be able to provoke those useful insights and propel coachees along those fruitful courses of action, they need a particular set of abilities.

The second area of Coaching 2.0 thinking is a clarity about what those abilities are, and how a person can best develop them.

4 levels

Coaching 2.0 thinking defines four levels that coaching can operate at. For each level, it specifies:

What a coach can be expected to do.
The abilities the coach needs to have.

Watch the video

Watch the video to learn about coach skills and coach training.

What Living Well Means

A map

The aim of coaching, ultimately, is to help people live well — in both their personal and professional lives. So the final area of Coaching 2.0 thinking is a mapping out of what, in practice, living well involves.

This isn’t so the coach can give the coachee any kind of advice. It’s so they can keep the light of enquiry shining where it’s most needed.

Focusing on reality

Watch the video to learn about the reality-centred approach.

Good coaching is reality-centred in that it focuses on the concrete reality of the coachee’s life, not on abstract ideas about who the coachee is or what they should be doing.

Big-picture alignment

Watch the video to learn about coaching and life-alignment.

Good coaching can help people become better aligned with reality at a big picture level. It does this by helping them build purpose, strategise, and become more organised.

Where everything happens

Watch the video to learn about handling the now.

Coaching can help people become better at handling life as it happens, in the here and now, by helping them perform better and by helping them keep their performances directed at useful ends.

Attaining clarity

Watch the video to learn about the examined life.

By guiding people systematically towards living fully examined lives, coaching puts people in harmony with the human condition. This turns out to have a profound philosophical significance.