Developmental Coaching - What's that?
My marriage covenant vows “to love, support, challenge, and grow.” While marriage is a far different relationship than coaching, in my experience, developmental coaching includes an admixture of all those activities. In this piece, I’ll focus on the “grow” part, which is, for me, at the heart of development.
Some examples may illustrate this best:
- Tim sought coaching to ensure his progress on writing his professional sabbatical application. A brilliant and accomplished professional, he would be capable of managing this project on his own were it not for the unanswered questions of what did he want – not his family, not his institution, not the wider world but him. He was unaccustomed to folding his hopes and dreams into the mix with those of other key stakeholders. We focused on discernment, particularly from bodily and emotional knowings to distill what matters most to him. After that, the entire sabbatical process was smooth as butter.
- Faith felt stuck marketing her entrepreneurial venture. We came to see that her new identity was too tight, confining, squeezing life from her. Loosening it gave her the space to breathe and pursue her vision with vitality. We ensured that she was well grounded in what matters to her, better able to articulate her calling, more fully able to recognize and heal self-sacrificial patterns, and better equipped to prioritize and implement a plan to launch her encore career.
- Michelle, a spiritual changemaker, faced a particularly busy period in which a heavy schedule of offering program and extended travel could take a toll on her. In advance of that time, she entered into a coaching program to explore stressors, shed several of them, learn more about her ecosystem, and foster a schedule and environment suited to offering her strength and resilience.
What these three people have in common is 1) a commitment to make change and 2) access to developmental coaching, which offers companionship, guidance, skill blended with art, and knowledge of adult human development.
This growth was accomplished by committed people in coaching programs of 3-4 months featuring 6-8 bi-weekly sessions of about 60 minutes. The coachee-coach team co-created custom-tailored daily practices (15-20 minutes/ day) including weekly reflections on those daily practices. The practices take into account the coachee’s coaching topic, the way the coachee currently operates in relation to the topic and their desired way, a set of developmental objectives to move from the current way to the desired way, as well as key characteristics of the coachee to determine approach and scale of the coaching. Along the way, coachee and coach engage in a caring relationship that balances support and challenge and fosters growth.
The type of developmental coaching LifeCalls practices is Integral CoachingTM, which uses an approach that seeks to access the whole person in the particular circumstance that poses the challenge. It takes into account your dream of who or how you are called to be. From that vision, we derive objectives to move toward that dream. And from those objectives, we craft practices to engage between sessions to advance your progress.
The outcomes are rather astounding in some ways. Tim became crystal clear about his commitment to his current role while exercising it in a far different way, as if he had a new job in the shell of the old. Faith became energized in advancing her venture and has offered healing service to an abundance of clients. Michelle came to know internally the ways she inflicts stress on herself and, by eliminating it more frequently and quickly, increased her capacity to address externally-imposed stressors.
Each of them was served by developmental coaching and its components of “love, support, challenge, and grow.” And in turn, they are able to extend each of those actions to their selves, their families, those they serve, as either encore careerists or spiritual changemakers, and to wider cosmos. Ashe!
