Broadening Your Coaching Perspective

In a recent webinar, Peter Hawkins presented a new coaching paradigm. Using the title “From Ego to Eco Coaching: Creative Value Beyond the Client,” Hawkins challenges coaches to take a broader perspective on their work and their relationship to the client. Here are his five challenges:

1. 1. You are never just coaching an individual but coaching with and through an individual. When an individual changes, he or she can change a system.
2.     The person being coached is not simply your coaching partner, and it is the joint purpose that creates the partnership not the partners.  Bob Dale called this relationship “thought partners.” This conveys the same idea.  We join together around an idea that the person being coached identifies and the coach embraces.
3.     The team dynamic, organizational culture, the wider community, and the ecology are not out there to be talked about but are present in the room (literally or virtually) with you.  No one being coached lives in a vacuum.  They are part of a larger ecology.
4.     Transformational coaching begins when we move beyond what the coachee wants to what their world needs from them. Each of us have the potential to make a significant impact in our world.
5.     Essential learning and transformation happen at the learning edge, where neither coach nor person being coached have the answer, but both recognize the world is requiring an answer.

No matter the setting in which your client or “thought partner” functions, she or he will change the system equilibrium when that person works toward and achieves their goals.

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