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XPaul Kensett E-mail: paul.kensett@www.thesmartschool.co.uk Info: Posts by the author (2)

Cognitive Behavioural Coaching

From the original blog post at: transformationallifecoaching.co.uk

When I think of coaching and all that people believe coaching to be there is a strong emphasis on task-based approaches leading to a goal being achieved and quite often action plans that focus on doingrather than being.

Within CBC (Cognitive Behavioural Coaching) there are some key pillars that underpin client interactions.

• Coaching provides a safe place for personal exploration
• The dynamic of “effective coaching” allows for self actualization for the client
• It is fully person centred and integrative
• CBC allows deeper meaning for the client and their experience and goes beneath the goal as the focus of the session

Cognitive behavioural coaching focuses on the internal world of the client, which could include values, beliefs, cognitions, physiology, emotions and results.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an element of actions and goals built into the coaching interactions but the shift will happen for the client on a deeper level and this in turn can create new openings and a future focus on how they will show up in the world based on these shifts.

In today’s society people are wanting more than a quick fix and an action plan.

Many times people can achieve their goal quite swiftly but may return to the original place of frustration wondering how they got back to there and questioning themselves and they change they want.

The reason why, is that without working on the deeper structures of experience the client could  just be going around in circles and not moving ahead with any sort of permanency.

This can create further frustration and can fuel the negative mind sets that could be underpinning the clients original challenges.

Within a typical CBC based session the coaching practitioner would be looking to work with the client on emotive, important issues for them and really get to the core of the clients difficulties by using simple and powerful questioning, a sense of holding space for the client and allowing the conversation to naturally flow without the coach needing to fix, provide solutions or work to an agenda of a hard and fast goal being in place.

As in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy the skilled coaching practitioner would be looking at faulty thought biases and how this could be impacting the client in negative ways.  An example would be catastrophizing  – “everything is always bad! – how many times have you heard this or possibly thought it yourself?

Through a CBC approach we can start to unpick what these thought structures are which will also affect clients physical responses and results both practically and emotionally . We can help clients formulate a different way of doing things with more positive results.

CBC can help with:

• Limiting beliefs
• Negative cycles of behaviour
• Low confidence and self-esteem
• Compulsive behaviours
• Interpersonal issues
• Any pattern that runs enough times for it to be a problem and so much more

Coaching isn’t a one stop for change but done skilfully, with congruence and trust the effects can be truly transformational.

 

Filed Under Coaching in Action, From our satellite blogs