ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the practitioner’s view. What works and why it works: both a model for best practice and a demonstration of which psychological ‘technologies’ we use in our everyday work.
For the buyer of coaching, it will provide an overall review of what to look for when identifying competent coaches (a disarming question is to ask a coach what he or she actually plans to do with the client). For the aspiring coach who has not spent six years at university studying psychology, it will provide a robust background to both the human condition and the psychological processes fundamental to achieving lasting change. Business coaches from a non-psychological background should enjoy this selection of the more obviously useful concepts, and be guided towards further reading. Finally, clients should find it amusing to discover explicitly some of the mechanisms which make them behave in a certain way, and use this knowledge to refine their people management skills.
