Positive Psychology Coaching
Coaching is an emerging profession across all walks of life. Coaches work in community, business, governments, private, and not-for-profit settings to assist people grow personally and professionally. More people are engaging their own life, business, career transition, leadership, or executive coaches to help them solve their life or work problems and reach their goals more quickly and easily. Coaches are a sounding board to clients, putting their agenda front and center and the clients back in control of their life. The coach works nonjudgmentally with clients to understand their situation and needs, help them become more self-aware and resourceful, uncover insights into themselves and what they need to do, and stand side by side with them as they take the actions they need to take.
Why Positive Psychology Coaching? Because before people can change their behavior, they often need to change their mindset. A client’s mindset may be positive and supportive of change or negative and is holding them back. Coaching from a positive-psychology perspective means that the coach and client are always focusing on what’s right in life, rather than what’s wrong. The coach works with the client to identify their limiting beliefs and reframe them into positives. Together, they identify solutions or goals and develop action plans to achieve these outcomes. Change can happen very quickly once beliefs and actions are aligned and supported by positive affirmations which boost self-esteem and self-efficacy.
Every day, we try to find meaning in life, and when we don’t, we become confused and search for answers. We can look back and despair or we can look forward into a compelling future. Many people neither want nor need to see a therapist or counselor, and they choose to see a professional coach instead to help them resolve their situation and find greater happiness in life.
Organisations continue to look for ways to increase shareholder value. After they downsize and rightsize, leaders look to maximise the return on their human capital investment. Coaching, when delivered throughout the organisation, has been found to be a particularly effective and powerful means of creating transformational, cultural change. Organisations with a growth mentality use coaching to recognise and unleash the potential of all employees.
The book is an informative source of practical strategies and mechanisms to successfully develop and embed a coaching culture into an organisation. CEOs, senior executives, organisational leaders and HR professionals will benefit from the structured approach to changing organisational thinking and behaving to bring about cultural change. Leaders can checklist where they are on their journey to embedding a coaching culture and identify any gaps they need to fill, plus the next steps they need to take to become a fully transformed organisation benefitting from increased staff engagement, productivity improvements and the retention of talented staff.
Four discrete stages that organisations go through to develop a coaching culture have been identified from my research. These stages relate to organisational leaders’ understanding of coaching, motivation for coaching, key drivers of coaching throughout the organisation and the people who deliver the coaching. Processes and strategies for organisations to transition from one stage to the next are detailed. The educational, psychological and management strategies and mechanisms by which organisational leaders learn, grow and behave differently as the organisation transitions from one stage to the next are revealed. Implications for CEO and senior executives, HR professionals and organisational leaders are outlined.