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Coaching Fundamentalism
12 Plays1 year ago
In the beginning, coaching was a pioneering and intrepid profession full of experimentation, innovation, and creativity. To gain credibility, the community has made great strides toward establishing the necessary standards and guidelines for the profession. However, as a side effect, we also gave rise to legalistic thinking and a fundamentalistic approach. How can we achieve professionalism without losing our original vision, true identity, and core values?
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:03
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Welcome to Prime Space, a Prime Coaching Academy podcast with your host, Elias Scultori.
00:00:14
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I'm going to start today with a personal story.
00:00:20
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Probably most of you know that I grew up in Brazil.
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I was born in Brazil.
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I grew up in Brazil.
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And I lived the first 25 years of my life in Brazil.
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I've been living in the U.S. now for over 32 years.
00:00:32
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You do the math.
Elias' Religious Upbringing
00:00:38
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But what you probably don't know, I don't know if I have shared this much, is that as a kid, I grew up in a very religious family.
00:00:52
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Church was at the center of everything we did in our family.
00:00:58
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In fact, there was a year of my life, I was probably like seven, eight years old, that the local church didn't have a place to worship.
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And my parents, we had a nice house in Brazil, and my parents opened our house for the local church together.
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Worship was in our living room and Sunday school was in my bedroom.
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And we were very faithful to the church and to our religion there.
Evolution of the Coaching Profession
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I tell you the story because having had this experience of growing up in this fundamentalist religion, I now smell...
00:01:45
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fundamentalism and the fundamentalistic thought from a mile away, in religion or elsewhere.
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And now I am a coach.
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And if you think of coaching, if you look at coaching historically, coaching started with this intrepid mindset, with a vision, with
00:02:12
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I remember years ago I was in this party celebrating this organization's anniversary, coaching organization's anniversary, and in the room there were several coaches who were there at the beginning of this movement.
00:02:32
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And I was just listening and paying attention.
00:02:37
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And in the middle of the conversation when they were sharing all of the stories of the first years of the profession, I was like, my gosh, these were pioneers.
00:02:49
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They didn't have a clue what they were doing, but they had a conviction.
00:02:55
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And they knew somehow that what they had in front of them was something that could be transformative to the world.
Standardization and Ethics in Coaching
00:03:04
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And they went ahead and with nothing, out of nothing, they created a worldwide multi-billion dollar industry in just a few decades.
00:03:16
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That's to me amazing.
00:03:19
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But, you know, coaching is, I say this all the time.
00:03:24
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I probably said this already in one of the episodes here in the podcast.
00:03:28
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Coaching isn't, we are like a teenager, right?
00:03:32
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We are a little insecure, trying to fit in, trying to be taken seriously, trying to establish our identity, our legitimacy.
00:03:44
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And, you know, in pursuit of that, we said we need to standardize.
00:03:50
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We can't just be this wonderful idea and vision, right?
00:03:54
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Standardization is crucial for the sustainability of the profession.
00:03:58
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It drives me crazy when someone says, okay, I have enough experience.
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I'm going to become a coach.
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without any coach-specific training.
00:04:09
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To me, it's such a breach of ethics.
00:04:12
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But anyways, that's another thought here.
00:04:14
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So standardization is imperative.
00:04:16
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I hope that all of us believe in that.
00:04:20
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Without standardization...
00:04:21
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It's a free-for-all ethical and professional standardization.
00:04:25
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This is a free-for-all standardization is crucial.
00:04:28
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And in pursuing that, the ICF several times, several years ago, made a crucial decision to pursue ISO.
00:04:37
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And if you don't know what ISO is, ISO, the International Organization of Standards.
00:04:42
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And the ICF said, let's pursue ISO because this is going to give legitimacy to coaching.
00:04:51
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And all of these changes that have happened in the ICF after that, PCC markers, new version of the core competencies, ACC bars, MCC bars, splitting the ICF into six different organizations, all of this came trying to fulfill the requirements for ISOs.
00:05:18
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And, you know, I don't know.
00:05:19
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Is ISO, this is just a question.
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I don't have the answer.
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Is ISO the right standardization for us?
00:05:27
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I'm not sure.
00:05:27
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Coaching is disruptive, right?
00:05:29
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Coaching is different.
00:05:30
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Coaching is supposed to be to challenge the status quo.
00:05:37
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And sometimes I ask, is ISO forcing us to fit in?
00:05:48
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for the sake of being legitimized, for the sake of feeling like an adult?
00:05:59
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I don't know.
00:06:01
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And I ask this question because from pioneering, from the intrepid spirit, the pendulum went all the way to data, research, and sometimes I feel like standards have become a god.
00:06:19
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Right in Coaching 101, very first coaching
The Role of Data in Coaching
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class that we have, we learned coaching is not therapy.
00:06:27
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But we continue to use psychotherapy tools to measure what we do and to find legitimacy.
00:06:38
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Are those the right tools for us?
00:06:40
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Or should we create our own tools?
00:06:43
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I'm not sure.
00:06:44
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I don't know.
00:06:46
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I go to the assessor's community and we are there discussing the PCC markers and it's like, no, in this marker,
00:06:54
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It doesn't say invites.
00:06:59
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No, it said asks in this word.
00:07:01
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And there is a common over here.
00:07:03
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And then we have the resources guide.
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And the resources guide, if you don't know anything about the resources guide, don't worry about it.
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It's an assessor's tool.
00:07:11
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But the resources guide is like a fantastic resource that the ICF has created.
00:07:16
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I use the resources guide every time I'm assessing.
00:07:19
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And not only when I'm assessing, even when Amy and I are creating programs, we use the resources guide because it's so rich and so beautiful.
00:07:28
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But all of a sudden, we talk about the resources guide as if the guide is a Bible.
00:07:34
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And then it flashes back those memories of me being a 12-year-old in Bible study, and the preacher there is explaining those Bible verses and expecting all of us to follow those Bible verses literally.
00:07:54
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It's word by word, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, word by word.
00:08:00
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this writer Yuval Noah Harari, you've probably heard of him, he wrote the book Sapiens.
00:08:07
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He wrote another book, Homo Deus, and these are New York Times bestseller books.
00:08:13
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And in that Homo Deus book, he says that one of the
00:08:18
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the futures that he sees for humanity is the aspect of the data religion, that data is going to become a religion.
00:08:27
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And he says that this is already happening.
00:08:29
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Every time we go to LinkedIn or Facebook or we enter data somewhere, our data there, we are somehow already contributing to this
Balancing Data with Human Skills
00:08:40
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idea of data as a religion.
00:08:43
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Very interesting concept.
00:08:44
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You have to read the book to understand the nuances of this.
00:08:50
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I always say this.
00:08:53
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If we are simply following data, we are already behind.
00:09:00
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If we are pursuing data for us to do one, two, and three...
00:09:06
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we are already behind, we are already obsolete.
00:09:08
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Data is a collection of what is already happening.
00:09:15
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If we want to be leaders, if we want to be innovators, if we want to be change agents,
00:09:22
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We need to be ahead of data, not behind data.
00:09:26
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The other day I was reading this book.
00:09:28
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It was about, not this book, this paper, and it was all about a coaching education.
00:09:33
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And you had all of the research lingo and pages and pages of research and whatever they found about the research that they did.
00:09:44
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And I read all of the document.
00:09:47
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And then at the end of the document, I said,
00:09:49
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This is exactly what Amy and I are talking about for years.
00:09:54
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So thank you for legitimizing
Creativity vs. Standardization in Coaching
00:09:56
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what we are doing.
00:09:56
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I appreciate that.
00:09:57
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It's wonderful.
00:09:58
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Thank you.
00:09:59
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Off I go.
00:10:05
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But then that's the question.
00:10:08
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If I don't pursue data, if data is not what I am pursuing, if data is at the service of supporting me,
00:10:19
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What do I do?
00:10:20
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What do I use?
00:10:22
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And the answer is very simple.
00:10:24
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We use the tools that humans have been using since the dawn of time.
00:10:34
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Common sense, critical thinking, listening, reflective practice, presence, humanity.
00:10:43
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Those are our tools.
00:10:47
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And this I say not only to us writing the standards, but I say this to the coach practitioner.
00:10:54
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When you're there with your client, it's imperative that you are fully versed on the standards.
00:11:01
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Standards, as I said earlier, are crucial for the legitimacy of our profession, are crucial for us.
00:11:07
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They bring the best practice.
00:11:09
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They are a collection of everything that is happening around the world.
00:11:13
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And here are things that really describes who we are as coaches.
00:11:18
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It's imperative that we are absolutely versed in the standard.
00:11:22
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That's why I'm so passionate about coaching education.
00:11:27
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But you pick up the standards...
00:11:30
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And you use your common sense, you use your critical thinking, you use your listening, your reflective practice, your presence, your humanity, the humanity of your client.
00:11:39
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And together with all of this, adding your experience as a coach, you make decisions in the moment.
00:11:50
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Following standards literally does not make a coach.
00:11:58
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Standards alone does not make a coach.
00:12:04
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Standards alone will not make our profession legitimized.
00:12:12
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We will lose what we are all about.
00:12:18
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Let's be careful with that teenager trying to fit in and losing their identity for the sake of feeling
00:12:29
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seen, right?
00:12:31
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Let's be careful with that.
00:12:34
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At the core, coaching is disruptive.
00:12:40
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At the core, coaching is a human-to-human endeavor.
00:12:43
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And that's why I say that coaching is not simply what we do.
00:12:47
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Coaching is who we are.
00:12:49
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Because these core concepts, these values of coaching is not something that one can turn on and turn off.
00:12:57
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It's not just about demonstrating skills, but it's about bringing the humanity that we have together with all of our training, together with all of the research, together with all of the standards.
00:13:12
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It's about bringing all of that to the moment of coaching.
00:13:16
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And to our industry, I feel we are in a crucial moment of coaching.
00:13:21
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What are we going to decide now?
00:13:24
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Let's not be that teenager, insecure, trying to fit in and simply following and losing our identity.
00:13:32
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Let's not become coaching fundamentalists.
00:13:36
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But instead, let's continue to be intrepid, creative, solid in our identity.
00:13:48
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Thank you everyone for listening.
00:13:50
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Lots of food for thought here today.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
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And I would love to hear from you.
00:13:56
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What do you think?
00:13:58
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What are the thoughts coming up for you as you listen to this episode?
00:14:01
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Send me a note at Elias at PrimeCoachingAcademy.com and we will continue the conversation.
00:14:09
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Okay?
00:14:11
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Otherwise, have a wonderful week and I will talk to you next time.
00:14:15
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Take care.