Always an excellent and humane observer, what did Adler make of the terrors and tragedy of the war? He wrote precious little about it, but it is clear from his subsequent behavior that something had changed for him. After the war, as if on a mission, Adler dedicated himself to activities that he hoped would lead to a different future for humankind than was indicated by its war-torn past: setting up child guidance clinics in Viennese schools to help children and their parents live cooperatively; mentoring teacher educators from around the world in his techniques; extending psychotherapy to families and groups; speaking in public on the principles of his commonsense approach to mental health; writing books in what today would be called the self-help genre, such as What Life Could Mean to You (Adler & Brett, 1998); and lecturing in university classes of physicians, social workers, and teachers. He continued providing psychotherapy to patients and supervising psychotherapists, but psychotherapy for him had taken a different turn, one that had much in common with the field of coaching that would emerge some seven decades later.

Psychotherapy is an application of philosophy, health practices, and psychology to treating mental illness. Many people assume that psychotherapy and psychology are the same, or that psychotherapy came into existence as an applied subfield of psychology. But worldwide, most psychotherapists are not part of the psychology profession but rather psychiatrists or other medical doctors, social workers, clinical counselors, psychiatric nurses, occupational therapists or, simply, psychotherapists (Orlinsky & Rönnestadt, 2005). Psychotherapy, literally “tending the soul,” has its own history that is at least as old as that of scientific psychology.

The two fields do, however, have strong and ongoing connections. Both encroached on what had been the church’s exclusive dominion—psychology to study the soul and psychotherapy to treat the sick soul. Many definitions of psychotherapy include “treatment by psychological means.” Psychology’s emphasis on the individual divorced from social context was mirrored in psychotherapy’s location of mental illness within an individual. Psychotherapy also inherited Western medicine’s tendency to define health as absence of disease. As a result, it bears the stigma of being sought only when one is identified as “sick.” These two limitations provided opportunities for coaching to step in with a more systemic alternative.

Many of these concerns lie largely outside the professional interest of coaches, whose ethical guidelines prevent us from treating mental illness. What is most relevant in our discussion of psychotherapy is what has not received much attention: healthy functioning, antecedents to happiness, and conditions for success and fulfillment. It is this space that coaching has filled, aided by other fields, such as positive psychology.

The major figures associated with the early popularization of psychotherapy—Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung—set the stage for a myriad of varieties, or “schools,” of psychotherapy. Each school had its version of what it considered to be the right theory or technique. At the most general level, the battle was between psychodynamic approaches that paid attention almost exclusively to an individual’s internal motivation and behaviorist approaches that insisted on the primacy of external reinforcement techniques. During the last part of the 20th century, three trends combined to create a new context for psychotherapy that is much more supportive of a systemic worldview. We discuss these trends and the influence of psychotherapy on coaching under these headings:

The humanistic approach focuses on:

Humanistic psychology draws on the philosophical concept of humanism and was the first movement to popularize Adler’s focus on mental health rather than on mental illness. The field laid the foundations for the human potential and personal development movements, the adult education field, and much of the thinking in the counseling field.

Although the high level of generality of Maslow’s self-actualizing model makes it difficult to test in research, its intuitive “rightness” has helped it stand the test of time over several decades. A powerful idea that has still not been superseded in psychology, it is a model that most coaches would subscribe to, whether they are aware of its source or not.

Out of Maslow’s work on self-actualization came his well-known Hierarchy of Needs. The hierarchy is represented in many sources as a pyramid with multiple levels. The bottom level is physiological, representing needs for survival. The second level is safety and security needs. After these come the social needs for love and belonging, followed by ego needs of self-esteem. Finally, the apex of the pyramid is self-actualization.

In Maslow’s theory, each need must be met before the next need above can be dealt with. Exceptions have been cited, such as heroes giving up their lives to come to the aid of strangers. Scholars argue about whether the needs are independent rather than arranged in a hierarchy. Nevertheless, the idea of taking care of lower needs first makes intuitive sense. Coaches may find it useful to refer to the hierarchy in exploring health practices. As a basic example, if we are hungry and have nothing to eat, it is hard to focus on how our career may help us to feel better about ourselves. Clients may not be able to move toward increased self-esteem if their “lower” needs have not been met.

Maslow’s work has had an influence on management theory, especially in the realm of how to motivate others. Reasoning from his hierarchy, workers may have difficulty developing a cooperative work environment if they do not feel that they are safe within it. Employees who are motivated by satisfaction at work rather than by financial gain may in fact assume a certain basic level of income. In this case, their search for work satisfaction would be difficult to maintain if they were worried about feeding themselves and their families.

In parent education and education in general, self-esteem that comes from making one’s own choices is assumed to provide a basis for a “higher” self-actualization motive. Many forms of therapy also make this assumption and guide clients to understand their own and others’ needs.

Maslow also described in more detail what a psychologically healthy person might look like, an exciting development in a field that focused so much on illness. According to Maslow (1968), self-actualized people:

At the same time that the women’s movement was revealing the extent and psychological consequences of rape and domestic violence involving women, veterans returning from the Vietnam War were exhibiting extensive physical and psychological symptoms. Theorists (van der Kolk, McFarlane, & Weisaeth, 1996) began to see a pattern of trauma and resulting disabilities across present and past war experiences, violence against women, and abuse of children. Research evidence accumulated, resulting in the addition of a new diagnosis to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 2000): posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The significance of this diagnosis is that for the first time, the cause (or etiology) of a mental disorder was recognized to be a social event, albeit one outside what is considered “normal,” rather than some internal conflict or deficiency on the part of the victim. The out-of-proportion rage of the war veteran, the passivity of the rape victim, or the tendency of people who were abused as children to “go somewhere else in their minds” was shown to be an understandable reaction to traumatic stress. This was a significant step in recognizing the importance of context in mental illness. If context is recognized as being important in causing illness, surely it must be taken into account in creating wellness. This emphasis on context is an important influence in the shift to a systemic perspective.

The behaviorist approach informed many techniques (see Erwin, 1978; Rimm & Masters 1974), including behavior therapy, aversion therapy, and electroshock therapy. For decades, a substantial part of clinical psychology drew from behaviorist principles. It was not until the introduction of cognitive and humanist approaches in the 1950s and 1960s that a shift occurred (see Bechtel, Abrahamsen, & Graham, 1998, especially pp. 15-17). However, behaviorist principles still hold sway in many fields, including school psychology, psychiatry in institutions, and some domains of psychological research. Cognitive therapy has been melded with behaviorist techniques to produce cognitive-behavior therapy, and the resulting treatment has received a good deal of support from research based on manuals that prescribe how the therapist should treat the patient (see Nathan & Gorman, 1998).

Psychotherapy was considered part of medical practice to such an extent in the United States that psychiatrists (medical doctors) in the 1950s took psychologists Albert Ellis and Harold Mosak to court for practicing medicine without a license. (They were exonerated, opening the door for psychologists to practice psychotherapy.) Each of the hundreds of schools or approaches to psychotherapy claimed that it had the best or correct or only approach. After all, their patients got better, didn’t they?

A dash of very cold water was thrown on psychotherapy in 1952 when Hans Eysenck published an article claiming that psychotherapeutic treatment was no better than doing nothing at all. That is, according to Eysenck, allowing patients to recover on their own, with no psychotherapy whatsoever, yielded about the same outcome as those who had received psychotherapy. Eysenck (1953) directed his criticism particularly toward psychoanalysis. Eysenck called for better ways of measuring outcome, but it was easy to conclude that psychotherapy was an expensive and quite unnecessary procedure. This conclusion, and the fact that it was backed up by research, galvanized the formerly competing schools so that they began to cooperate in examining their work more systematically.

Interest in psychotherapy research began to build around the same time as the cognitive revolution in psychology proper, when processes inside the “black box” of the mind became legitimate subjects for scientific study. Over the next few decades, computer technology made it possible to do research on ever more complex interactions, such as those that characterize psychotherapy. The Society for Psychotherapy Research (see Internet links) brought together psychotherapists from a wide range of therapeutic approaches and professional backgrounds to share their findings. After many years and thousands of studies, many of them very carefully designed and methodologically sophisticated, some results can be stated with confidence. And those results open the door to more systemic, holistic, socially embedded, and positive approaches that have stimulated the emergence of coaching.

The first question that psychotherapy researchers answered, in response to Eysenck’s devastating critique, was “Does psychotherapy work better than no treatment at all?” The general answer, as Norcross (2002) summarizes, is yes. Nathan and Gorman (1998) describe more specifically that certain therapeutic techniques work better with some patients than with others and that some techniques work better with some mental disorders than others.

The second question was “What is it about psychotherapy that works, that accounts for the improvements shown in outcome research?” The results of this line of research may have direct relevance to coaching. Hubble, Duncan, and Miller (1999) brought together a number of studies of psychotherapy and counseling applications to find common factors among those that were successful. Their research astonished adherents of competing schools: The techniques and theories that took up most of the attention in psychotherapy training accounted for only about 15% of the variance or likelihood of successful outcome. Whatever the theoretical orientation of the therapist, the strongest predictor of success had to do with characteristics of the patient—about 40% of variance (“variance” meaning how much a factor contributes to making a difference).

One lesson that coaches may draw from this research is the importance of learning about the client from the client’s subjective perspective, rather than applying preconceived notions or assumptions to the coaching engagement.

Coaches learn to differentiate their practice from psychotherapy and counseling, as suggested by David Orlinsky’s (2007) differentiation in the introduction to this book. We do not yet have the research that clearly shows all the differences and similarities between coaching and psychotherapy. At the same time, there clearly are commonalities: Two people (in individual coaching and in therapy) relate to one another with the intention that one will benefit from the interaction. Thus, one candidate for similarity is the relationship between the patient or client on one hand and the therapist or coach on the other. The research compiled by Hubble et al. (1999) showed that the relationship was the largest factor—about 30% of variance—over which the therapist has some influence. Learning theorists (Johnson, 2006) recognize the importance of a caring teacher or mentor in creating the conditions for a student to learn, and anecdotal and experiential evidence in coaching concurs.

The remaining 15% of the outcome has to do with a factor that had been dismissed as “interference” or “irrelevant” in medical research: the placebo effect, or client expectations. We discussed this factor at length as part of the formula for dynamic stability in chapter 6. The fact that psychotherapy research shows it to be a substantial contributor to getting better supports our claim that it is an important factor in coaching.

Many research methods and strategies have been developed or borrowed from fields other than psychology—for example, qualitative approaches of sociology and anthropology—to deal with the subjective and relational reality of psychotherapy. Thus, psychotherapy research supported the overturn of the focus on “objectivity” and factors internal to the individual that derived from the logical positivist worldview. This has resulted in an impetus for coaches putting themselves in the shoes of the client, or the subjectivity that is characteristic of coaching.

These approaches yield techniques that may be useful both in coaching and in psychotherapy and counseling. Because ethical standards do not allow coaches, in their role as coaches, to practice psychotherapy, it is important to be able to discern when a client should be referred to a psychotherapist or counselor. Therefore, after discussing these approaches, we provide information written by certified mental health professionals to help coaches differentiate their practice from that of psychotherapy.

Roger’s theory of a healthy person involved:

Here are the basic tenets of person-centered techniques:

Rogers also worked with the idea of a “self-concept,” which consists of the “ideal self,” the “self-image,” and “self-esteem.” His concept of self-esteem was picked up by the human potential movement and propagated in schools and in parent education.

The person-centered approach was one of the most popular within psychology in the 20th century and contributed a great deal to the systemic paradigm shift. It brought subjectivity back into psychotherapy. It also laid the foundations for the study of happiness, cognitive (not just biological) motivation, and peak performance, fields especially important to coaching.

There is a great deal of similarity between coaching and humanistic approaches such as that of Rogers. The statement, presented as an article of faith, by pioneer coaches Whitworth, Kimsey-House, and Sandahl (1998) is that clients are “creative, resourceful, and whole” (p. 3). As with coaching, the primary intent of humanistic approaches is to comprehend the client’s internal frame of reference, focus on the client’s perception of self and the world, and draw out the client’s own wisdom and resources. A coach practices unconditional positive regard toward the client at all times.

Coaches are taught to reflect back and accept the client’s statements rather than imposing some supposedly objective “truth” or interpretation. Listening skills are based on the extensive elaboration of Rogerian techniques by Allen Ivey and colleagues (Evans et al., 2004) resulting in a textbook that is widely used in counseling and psychotherapy courses. Good listening skills provide the backbone for an approach that conveys empathy to the client.

Finally, a coach must behave in a way that is congruent with his or her values and let the client be fully aware of the coach’s authentic self, rather than hiding behind a veil of objectivity. While these skills are demanding, they constitute core competencies for coaches.

To take another perspective, despite the positive influence of believing that individuals may have their own answers, especially if they are encouraged by unconditional positive regard, there is a drawback. When a coach relies entirely on empathy, he or she may end up reinforcing the client’s inability to change. Therefore, coaches take responsibility for believing in a person’s greater potential, even when that person does not see it, and even when reminding a person of his or her potential may seem directive.

The theory behind such applications maintains that in order to interpret what we receive through our senses, we automatically organize the information. For example, when we see one dot, we perceive it as such, but when we see five dots together, we “see” them as a “row of dots.” Without this tendency to group our perceptions, that same row would be seen as “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot,” taking longer to process and reducing our interpretive ability. Gestalt theory claims that grouping is based on the four principles of similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure. More recent neuroscience findings show that our interpretations indeed cannot be separated from our sensations.

One of the key researchers in Gestalt psychology (as opposed to its application in Gestalt therapy) was Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967). He developed insight theory, often called the “aha!” phenomenon. Insight theory claims that we learn by immediate and sudden recognition and that individuals often use insight when solving a problem or determining their response to stimuli. Clearly, this idea is directly counter to the behaviorist idea that learning is based on stimulus-reward, stimulus-reward accumulating over time.

Köhler based his ideas about insight on his observations of chimpanzees. Food was placed out of the chimps’ reach while objects such as sticks were placed close by. Köhler observed that some of the chimps learned more quickly than others and that though they used trial and error to reach the food, their attempts did not build step by step, as you would expect if reinforcement were the mechanism. Nor were their attempts random. Köhler theorized that the chimps used insight to solve the problem (Blosser, 1973). Today, neuroscience has allowed us to understand the process of insight much more thoroughly so that coaches can help clients set up conditions to make insight more likely, as illustrated by Rock’s (2006) “Four Faces of Insight” model presented in chapter 9.

The many expressive therapies share the humanistic assumption that we are whole beings and that our subjective experiences can be discerned by what we do physically and what we feel emotionally. Changing behavior and thinking patterns may be useful techniques, but not to the exclusion of changing feelings, including both sensations and emotions.

One very influential technique that has proven useful to coaches is the “empty chair” (Greenberg, 2002). The technique is particularly effective when a client is stuck, either in an internal or external conflict or not knowing which of two options to choose.

As presented, the exercise is done in person, but it could be just as effective over the phone as long as the client actually moves from chair to chair. The Sanjay example is condensed; it actually went on for nearly 45 minutes, but it is representative of the kind of change that can take place as a result of utilizing an empty chair in this way.

Role playing, where the coach becomes an actor in whatever drama is engaging the client, and psychodrama, where a whole scenario is played out with other people, are related expressive techniques that may be used in individual or team coaching. To avoid having the session turn into therapy, the coach must keep the focus on practical, work-related issues rather than straying into inner emotional conflicts that must be referred to psychotherapists.

Gestalt therapy contributed to a major strand in the history of coaching. Stimulated partly by the group work of Kurt Lewin (1947), Fritz Perls led seminars based on his approach to psychotherapy at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, beginning in the early 1960s. The T-group movement had started in 1946 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when Lewin had been invited to help a group deal with ethnic tension after World War II. T-groups represented an attempt to understand the social dynamics that contributed to problems in organizations. At that point, the “T” in T-group stood for training. After Lewin’s untimely death, colleagues formed the National Training Laboratory and used the technique in organizational consulting. Perls applied T-group techniques in his seminars. Meeting in groups where members confront each other as a way of developing self-awareness soon became popular in West Coast counterculture. Werner Erhard combined group confrontation with Zen philosophy in the first Erhard Seminars Training, or EST, in 1971 in San Francisco, California. Later, EST became Landmark Education, which offers training worldwide and was cited by a large number of coaches interviewed by Vikki Brock (2008) as a major influence in the history of coaching.

Cognitive therapy is an application of scientific psychology that focuses on teaching patients how to retrain their thinking patterns. It uses awareness, logic, testing, and practice to alter distorted attitudes and perceptions that lead to problematic behavior. Automatic, habitual thoughts form the basic data around which treatment is built. A client’s thoughts are presumed to be the cause of emotions. Therefore, cognitive therapists help the client recognize distorted thinking and replace it with more realistic ideas that then yield more desirable feelings and behavior. The focus is on the present and future rather than uncovering past “causes” for difficulties.

Major features of cognitive therapy include (Schulyer, 1971):

Studies done in the 1970s showed that behavior therapy was more effective when it was extended with cognitive elements. Thus, cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) was born. CBT has been shown to be as effective as drug treatment for depression, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other problems of excessive anxiety.

Ellis’s REBT is a practical, action-oriented approach to coping with problems and enhancing personal growth. REBT focuses on the present: on currently held attitudes, painful emotions, and maladaptive behaviors that can sabotage a fuller experience of life. REBT therapists seek to help people uncover their individual beliefs (attitudes, expectations, and personal rules) that frequently lead to emotional distress.

REBT assumes that humans are prone to adopting irrational beliefs and behaviors which get in the way of their goals and purposes. Often these irrational attitudes or extreme philosophies take the form of dogmatic “musts,” “shoulds,” or “oughts”; they contrast with rational and flexible desires, wishes, preferences, and wants.

The presence of extreme philosophies can make all the difference between healthy negative emotions (such as sadness or remorse or concern) and unhealthy negative emotions (such as depression or guilt or anxiety). For example, one person’s philosophy after experiencing a loss might take the form: “It is unfortunate that this loss has occurred, although there is no actual reason why it should not have occurred. It is sad that it has happened, but it is not awful, and I can continue to function.” Another’s might take the form: “This absolutely should not have happened, and it is horrific that it did. These circumstances are now intolerable, and I cannot continue to function.” The first person’s response is accompanied by sadness, while the second person may be well on his or her way to depression.

Most important of all, REBT maintains that individuals have it within their power to change their beliefs and philosophies profoundly and thereby to radically alter their state of psychological health. To accomplish this, REBT employs a technique that can be valuable in coaching when clients maintain that they have no control over their emotional reactions or the behavior that results. The ABC framework (Ellis, 1974) clarifies the relationship between activating events (A); our beliefs about them (B); and the cognitive, emotional, or behavioral consequences of our beliefs (C).

Changing how we think about a perception (or how we filter it through our beliefs or the questions we ask unconsciously) can change how we feel about it. In effect, this ABC model, which is similar to other forms of cognitive or cognitive-behavioral therapy, illustrates that mental activities or predispositions can mediate between experiences and emotional responses.

In working with the ABC framework, REBT employs three primary insights:

The main purpose of REBT is to help clients replace absolutist philosophies, ones that are full of musts and shoulds, with more flexible ones.

According to Beck (1976), cognitive therapy seeks to:

The central insight of cognitive therapy as formulated over three decades ago is that thoughts mediate between stimuli, such as external events, and emotions. A stimulus elicits a thought—which might be an evaluative judgment of some kind—which in turn gives rise to an emotion. In other words, it is not the stimulus itself that elicits an emotional response directly but our evaluation of or thought about that stimulus. This is similar to Ellis’s ABC Model described in Figure 10.1, with the stimulus being A, the thought B, and the emotion C.

Two ancillary assumptions underpin the approach of the cognitive therapist:

Donald Meichenbaum, born in 1940 in New York City, developed a version of CBT that he calls cognitive-behavior modification (1977). He has shown the value of observing patterns of thoughts to reveal core beliefs that, when changed, can produce more lasting effects. His work is supported by neuroscience evidence that determined mental activity can actually affect brain structure and thus make changes more reliable (Schwartz & Begley, 2002).

A coach can use many of the principles of CBT in coaching by helping a client learn how to improve the quality of his or her thinking.

In summary, cognitive therapy shares common ground with coaching. They are both designed to be short-term, goal-oriented interventions, often with homework assignments. Both fields tend to work with intelligent, logical people and attempt through language to reframe people’s perceptions of themselves or refocus their thinking in a new way. They both assume that people create, or construct, their lives within the constraints of heredity and environment rather than being determined by either. Cognitive therapy tends to be more directive than most coaching approaches.

This is the logic behind neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) founded in the early 1960s by Americans John Grinder and Richard Bandler. As Robert Dilts (1983) puts it:

The power of close observation and deducing underlying mental patterns was modeled by Milton Erickson (1901-1980), an influential American psychiatrist and hypnotherapist who inspired Grinder and Bandler as well as many other psychotherapists.

Although we now know that the computer analogy does not match human brain processing in many ways (Hawkins & Blakeslee, 2004), the comparison of computers to brains spurred the development of a number of NLP techniques for practitioners to:

One of the best-known applications of this process has to do with recognizing another person’s representational system. If a coach asks a client a question and the client pauses momentarily as if searching “inside” for the answer, NLP suggests that a person’s typical inner processing will be one of three types:

The coach who is able to match the client’s processing style is more likely to communicate empathy, not just by what is said but by being in line with, in tune with, or in step with how the client processes information.

A related NLP technique is modeling. How does a person master any skill or ability? The topic of expertise has generated a good deal of interest in cognitive psychology and education. NLP teaches that a learner can observe the sensory signals of an expert—how he or she stands, moves, and speaks—and ask questions that reveal what is going on in the expert’s mind at the moment that expertise is demonstrated. Then the learner “models” or takes on these physical attributes, attitudes, and thinking patterns in approaching whatever is the target for mastery.

With its emphasis on attending to multisensory aspects of communication and its speculation about underlying neural patterns, NLP can be seen as a precursor both to coaching and to modern neuroscience.

Solution-focused therapists operate on the premise that the future is created and negotiated. The future is not a slave to past events in a person’s life. In spite of past events, even ones that were traumatic, a person can negotiate and implement many useful steps that are likely to lead to a more satisfying life. Solution-focused therapists also operate on the assumption that clients have all the resources, skills, and knowledge to make their lives better, if they decide that they want things to be better.

The deepest roots for solution-focused therapy are found in the works of Gregory Bateson (1904-1980). Bateson was a British-born anthropologist who moved to the United States and worked in diverse fields: evolutionary biology, psychiatry, genetics, ethnology, cybernetics, and communication theory. He was influenced by the works of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist from whom neuro-linguistic programming took its inspiration, and in fact introduced NLP founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder to Erickson. Bateson never put forward a theory of psychotherapy, but his work on communication theory and language had great implications for solution-focused therapy.

In a Batesonian approach, the therapist’s job is to facilitate change by gathering information about clients’ purposes and the context in which they operate and then by offering new descriptions and providing safe ways for them to achieve their goals.

Solution-focused therapy gained popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s in North America, as interest in trauma therapy was being stimulated by the women’s movement and the return of veterans from Vietnam. The demand for psychotherapy was increasing at the same time that the development of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) added to the growing reluctance of insurance companies to cover more than 20 to 25 psychotherapy sessions in a calendar year—and often many fewer. Abandoning the idea of a complete personality overhaul that had been characteristic of long-term therapy, practitioners sought ways to manage dysfunctional symptoms in the short run.

The term “Solution-Focused Brief Therapy” was first coined in 1982 through the work of the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded by Insoo Kim Berg (1994) and Steve de Shazer. The model they developed is used around the world in numerous settings with a variety of clients and problems: drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, school problems, chronic mental illness, case management, child protection investigations, corrections, criminal justice, prison populations, social services, and residential treatment programs. It has a wide appeal because of its simple, practical, and respectful approach to working with people.

Developed from an inductive process and often described as coming from a different paradigm, SFBT differs from problem-solving approaches in its philosophy and techniques. The “problem-solving” paradigm that is common to many psychotherapy treatment models can be described as a medical model that focuses on treatment of disease and removal of symptoms rather than on wellness. Contrasted with this, SFBT can be described as a solution-building approach (Berg, 1994; DeJong & Berg, 1998; de Shazer, 1985). The differences between these two models have implications for clinical practice in psychotherapy, and the emphasis on solutions rather than problems brings SFBT closer to coaching.

Coach training generally emphasizes that coaching is not focused on problems. But that does not mean clients do not bring problems to coaching or that problems are not often the motivation for clients to seek coaching. The difference is in how problems are dealt with. Solution-focused therapy identifies goals and focuses on the resources a person shows in achieving them. The concentration is on health and on coping abilities, and the emphasis is on connecting with the person, not the problem. Coaching shares this approach.

Solution-focused therapy uses language as its primary tool, based on the assumption that language shapes and molds the perception of reality and that some conversations are more useful than others. The conversation models used by Berg (1994) and de Shazer (1985) are widely used and can apply to coaching:

Solution-focused therapy is a close match to coaching. Many coaches have been trained to use this approach. Some coaching schools even refer to their method as solution-focused coaching.

Solution-focused therapy and coaching both:

Trends in psychotherapy that make particular use of the principles of constructivism are metaphor and narrative therapies.

Milton Erickson’s use of metaphor was influential in the family therapy work of Jay Haley (1971) and Virginia Satir (1983, 1988), and metaphor is a key component of Salvador Minuchin’s (1974) work with families. There are many ways in which the family therapies and family counseling approaches may be useful to coaches, and we recommend that coaches pursue those of interest, always remembering that coaching is not therapy.

Metaphors connect our ability to picture images with our verbal communication. They are also a bridge, to use a metaphor, that carries meaning from the metaphoric image to whatever it is referring to. That is, if Matilda says, “John is a real anchor to this work group,” she is not, of course, suggesting that John is literally made of a heavy metal that sinks to the bottom of the bay and hooks to rocks. (By the way, we will leave the question of metaphor versus analogy to our English major colleagues. In this context, saying “John is like an anchor” will engage the same metaphoric process.)

In the example, Matilda is expecting her listeners to take the meaning that surrounds the concept of an anchor and apply that to the person, John, as if he has those qualities. Constructivism suggests that when a therapist finds a metaphor that can shift the meaning a person or family gives to some troubling element, the reality of that element can shift. Metaphors are often used in reframing an event—for example, from “doors closing” to “other doors opening.”

However, a good deal of therapeutic metaphor is therapist-generated. That is, the therapist observes the individual’s or family’s behavior, imagines a metaphor that might be useful, and then presents it to the client or clients. Richard Kopp (1995) developed a different metaphor technique that is much more coachlike. He recommends utilizing client-generated metaphors that are more appropriate for a coaching intervention because they do not risk imposing the coach’s meaning on the client’s process. Although Kopp called his book and approach metaphor therapy, he and others have applied it in a coaching context, so it might just as well be called metaphor coaching.

Psychotherapists who read this case will likely wonder if there is therapeutic work to be done with Alice. We discuss guidelines for referral more generally in the Resource Section on mental health issues. In Alice’s case, it would be worth finding out four things about her anger:

Alice should be referred to a psychotherapist if:

In this case, Alice responded, “No, I’m quite surprised, actually. Being angry like this is not something I’m used to. And by a ‘disaster’ I mean that I might raise my voice when it’s not really justified. Then I might lose some of the respect I’ve worked so hard to gain in the office.” In subsequent sessions, she moved on to other issues. The coach mentioned that Alice might find it useful at some point to explore with a psychotherapist the reasons why Allan triggered this response but otherwise simply carried on with coaching for this and other workplace issues.

Storytelling has been particularly effective in trauma therapy, with patients being invited to incorporate their traumatic memories into a narrative as a way of gaining some control over their effects. Telling one’s story as part of a supportive healing group is particularly effective.

Narrative therapy was developed by Australian Michael White and his New Zealand colleague David Epston (1990). Its connection to coaching is obvious because of its emphasis on collaboration, on externalizing problems faced by a client (“The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.”), on the potential for a person to reshape her or his identity, on discovering unique exceptions that may serve in this reshaping, and on the social nature of the process (White, 2007).

References to creativity in coaching would not be complete without mentioning the work of Thomas Leonard (1955-2003), a very creative force and a major influence in the development of coaching (Brock, 2008). Leonard founded Coach University, a coach training school; Coachville, a network of coaching courses and resources; and a number of enterprises such as TeleClass.com, a virtual learning center delivered over telephone bridge lines. He was co-founder of the International Coach Federation in 1994. Until his untimely death in 2003, Leonard was a tireless author (e.g., Leonard, 1998) and promoter of coaching and coach training.

In reaction to psychoanalysis, which posited that unconscious forces determine human behavior, and behaviorism, which relied on stimulus-response determinism, the third wave of humanistic therapies insisted that human beings have the wherewithal to construct their own reality and that what is important in this self-determination is the subjective meaning they give to their lives.

The expressive therapies reminded practitioners that they were dealing with whole people—physical, mental, and emotional—and cognitive therapies took advantage of the cognitive revolution in psychology to focus on the maladaptive thoughts underlying mental health problems. As computer use became more widespread, neuro-linguistic programming took advantage of the computer metaphor to introduce short-term techniques for programming desired changes in people’s behavior and helped practitioners focus on underlying neural patterns. Solution-focused techniques emphasized people’s strengths and what they could accomplish in the future, and metaphor/narrative approaches relied on the social nature of the construction and reconstruction of reality.

In many ways, Adler’s suggestions that people are socially embedded, goal seeking, creative, and holistic are being confirmed today despite having been largely rejected or ignored during his lifetime. These trends are changing the face of psychotherapy and being embodied in the profession of coaching. Beginning as out-of-mainstream-science, these trends became stronger as they were taken up by positive psychology, research on emotional intelligence, and other approaches that accentuate the positive. We explore these in chapter 11.