ABSTRACT
This chapter considers anxiety, another emotion that can have a negative effect on a coachee's life and their participation in coaching. Anxiety, when it is psychologically based, occurs in the inferential context of threat to an individual's personal domain. The intention of avoidance as a strategy is to keep the person safe, but this is done at a longer-term cost in that the effect is to maintain the person's anxiety problem. Avoidance may keep the person safe in the short term, but it affords the person no opportunity to process the threat properly, either to determine that it is not threatening or, if it is, that the person can deal effectively with the threat. When a person brings their anxious tendencies to coaching, this manifests itself largely in a reluctance to take risks that might expose the person to threat. The coach wants to achieve their coaching objectives/goals, but wants to do so without exposure to threat.
