Ishi, the last “wild Indian” and last member of his tribe, faced enormous challenges when he left his northeastern California wilderness homeland and moved to San Francisco in 1911. He had to think and relate to others very differently, and neuroscience tells us that these adjustments were surely reflected in the very structures of his brain. The challenges to our minds, relationships, and brains are no less for us today than those Ishi faced. For the first time ever, we have seen our home planet from space or the moon. Not only are we facing possible extinction from natural disasters, as happened to the dinosaurs, but we are aware of these threats. Added to that are threats we humans have created or exacerbated, such as annihilation by nuclear weapons, climate change, or pandemics. Overcoming these threats will take all the creativity our young species can muster. Yet dangers such as these activate our limbic system, including the ever-on-guard amygdala, thus reducing brain functions that support creative thinking, problem solving, and big-picture planning.

In this book, we have presented evidence for the deep historical and theoretical roots of coaching. We are also demonstrating how to deepen those roots through an understanding of neuroscience. We have defined the ever-increasing complexity resulting from a system’s dynamic stability as “potentiating.”

Coaching has emerged as a response to age-old questions that were not adequately answered given the assumptions of the dominant Western European and North American paradigm for the last three to four centuries: Newtonian mechanics. Coaching inherits the discoveries made by science during this era, conceived of as a theoretical bedrock, but has risen above that bedrock on pillars that have accompanied a shift to a new, systemic paradigm. The challenge for the future, not just for coaching but for the human species, lies in utilizing the science that embodies this new paradigm, brain science, as a platform for discovering how to think, relate, and therefore structure our brains so as to become the best species possible, or to potentiate.

The very possibility of asking “Who am I?” as a person and “Who are we?” as a group depends on being able to think of “me” or “us” as separate from the “I” or “we” who ask. Out of philosophical inquiry into this question, called “ontology,” emerged an approach that is anchored in Newtonian assumptions. As with individual elements interacting according to these assumptions, inquiry began and ended with the individual person, who was assumed to be “supreme.” However, social sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as anthropology and sociology, and New Age philosophies began to shake this assumption. Thus, out of the bedrock of individualism, coaching has inherited a trend toward recognizing relatedness.

Historically, medical practices included body-mind health promotion as well as prevention and treatment of disease. As Western medicine developed within the mechanistic paradigm, it focused on the physical body and left mental health and health promotion mainly to ancillary professionals and to public and governmental agencies. Nonetheless, the discoveries of physiology and research on stress have many applications to health in general and thus serve as bedrock for coaching. “Alternative” health practices, bolstered by globalization and New Age philosophy, became more mainstream during the 20th century. Along with research showing the connections between physical and mental health, they brought into question dualism, or separation of mind and body. The ancient concept of holism has been reintroduced to medical practice.

During the 20th century in North America, people who wanted to understand human behavior typically looked to psychology, which became what one historian described as “the ‘master’ science of human affairs” (Prilleltensky, 1994, p. 28). However, psychologists were seeking to fit into a definition of scientists as objective seekers of value-free truth. Behaviorist research fit this paradigm, as did aspects of developmental and evolutionary psychology and psychometrics, but the relegation of the mind to a “black box” of no interest to science came under pressure by midcentury. Nonetheless, careful behaviorist and psychometric research has provided a bedrock for many coaching techniques, even as the trend has been from limiting research to objective observations to including the subjective experience of people.

Psychotherapy is an application of medical and psychological theory with its own history that predates scientific psychology. For that reason, we deal with psychotherapy separately from psychology. Because it is a practice that uses psychosocial means to elicit change, psychotherapy has much to offer as bedrock for coaching. However, its roots in mechanistic assumptions resulted in an ongoing argument over what determines mental illness: heredity or environment? A systemic view says both are important, but human creativity and meaning making also play a role. Coaches may use many psychotherapy techniques as long as they avoid attempting to treat mental illness. Psychotherapy approaches described in chapter 10 reveal a trend from assuming that people’s personalities and behaviors are determined by objective forces to seeing them as constructed by the active, unique, meaning-making capacity of human beings.

Management attempted to make itself more scientific by embracing Taylorism at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the fact that Taylorism dealt with organizations and teams and work groups militated against a totally individualistic approach. From the beginning, some management theorists stressed the human “soft” side of management concerns, despite the business school emphasis on numbers, thus providing useful bedrock for coaching. Organizations recognized this by relying on industrial/organizational psychology and social psychology for much of the theoretical principles on which their practices were based. The numbers orientation of meta-analysis has helped introduce a higher-level systemic view. Even 50 years ago, there were indications of a shift from hierarchy to a more systemic-related participation.