Coaches - what is your learning theory?

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential” (https://experiencecoaching.com last accessed 07/17/2024). The goal of coaching, according to this definition, is “maximizing personal and professional potential”. Undoubtedly that means that clients “learn something” through coaching, be it in the personal or professional realm or anywhere in between. The learning happens through partnership with a coach (not a teacher etc.).

The ICF core competencies (as well as EMCC core standards and AC competencies) clearly position the coach in the role of a facilitator of learning rather than a teacher or imparter of a predefined curriculum. A coach accompanies a client on their path of learning: in each session, the client talks about their own learning goals and usually ends with designing experiments, actions or other learning activities for after the session. This clearly puts coaching into the arena of adult “experiential learning” with cycles of setting a learning goal, planning learning activities, carrying them out, reflecting on them and setting a new learning goal (cf. Kolb, 1984).

As, according to ICF, the goal of coaching is “maximizing personal and professional potential”, any other form of learning philosophy would be difficult to conceptualize or bordering on the unethical. Who could design a curriculum, a body of knowledge, that would be applicable to every human being on the planet? Not everyone has the same potential, not everyone has the same definition of what “maximizing their potential” looks like. We simply could not come up with “competences for maximized potential”!

As there is no fixed curriculum, it is also very difficult to determine progress quantitatively. When I hear “ROI of coaching” I always wonder how this could be measured, if you cannot even measure progress except by asking clients and their stakeholders whether they experienced growth. And even then, since coach and client co-create that growth and you do not have another universe in which the client was not coached to compare, it is very tricky to determine what were the effects of the coaching and what were other effects that led to growth of the client. Maybe they would have developed on their own without the coach, anyway.

The foundation of coaching in experiential learning conceptualizes growth as fluid and circular rather than linear along a pre-determined path. Now why is this idea useful for coaches? I think that reflecting on how we think human learning and growth happens shapes our stance as coaches. If we think that we know in any small way what the client should be developing next (think, for example, coaches’ ideas on the client using their body, the client moving from one color of a human growth path to the next, the client overcoming a syndrome etc.), we are entering a different paradigm and, in my view, stop being coaches who partner with the client.

What do you think? If you would like to discuss, experiment, learn about our classes or just hang out with a bunch of reflective and fun people, why not come to one of our free meetups and exchanges?

Reference:

Kolb, D. (1984): Experiential learning. Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

‍