ABSTRACT
In the third phase of the research into critical moments in coaching, we received from 67 former clients of coaching their answers to the same question about a critical moment during their coaching. The most common ingredients of coachees’ critical-moment descriptions were “realisation”, “insight” or “revelation”: these words covered no less than 43 per cent of all codes we assigned. In around half of the cases, this “insight” mentioned by the coachee was related to her/himself (i.e. s/he had realised something new about her/himself); in the other half of cases, it was related to the issues s/he had brought to coaching. Moreover, this dawning insight was often accompanied by strong emotions, including “painful awareness”, “elation”, “liberation”, “relief” and “boost in confidence”. Analysis of the moment descriptions and of the metaphors used by coachees yielded a coaching model of the coachee, that is, a first model of coaching dictated by the way in which coachees themselves experience coaching. The two axes of this model span the following dimensions: (1) change of aspects (incremental change) versus essential change (transformative change) and (2) internal versus external processing aspects of experiential learning.
