I am reading Simon Western's book 'Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text' slowly, like you would eat a very rich meal: slowly, to savour it. And can I just say 'Wow, I love this man's mind'. And, I was just talking about his model at Coaching Practice Group this week, so I thought it would be good to share a little about it properly.
It traces coaching influences back to pre-modern times showing connections with ‘soul healers’ of the past, taking a journey through modernity to post-modernity making links that helps us better understand coaching today.
Positioning coaching as working between the 'wounded-self' (of therapeutic culture) and 'celebrated-self' (of the human potential movement), it reveals four discourses that underpin contemporary coaching practice:
- The Soul Guide Coach: coaching the 'inner-self', focusing on values, authenticity and identity.
- The Psy Coach: coaching the 'outer-self', using psychological techniques to focus on personal performance and how we relate to others.
- The Managerial Coach, coaching the 'role-self', focusing on work, task, output and productivity.
- The Network Coach, coaching the 'networked-self', focusing on the wider networks in which we live and work.
This coaching approach has emerged from a lifetime of ‘privileged conversations’ with people from very diverse backgrounds and in very different organisational settings. As a nurse, psychotherapist, family therapist, clinical manager, academic, leadership consultant, and executive coach, Dr Simon Western has worked in different roles with the aim of helping people locate and discover and then change themselves. In recent years his coaching and consultancy work has included changing organisations as well as people. He coaches CEOs and senior leaders in corporations and large public sector bodies, on their personal leadership styles, their values and work with them on organisational strategy. Previously he worked with the marginalized, the mentally ill, the sick and dying. Working in asylums, hospitals, schools, universities, banks, global retail and engineering firms, small hi-tech companies, fertility clinics and hospices, has given him unusual access and insights into organisational dynamics as well as people dynamics. It is this depth and breadth of experience, as well as theoretical insights, that informs the Analytic-Network Coaching© process.
This coaching approach has emerged from a lifetime of ‘privileged conversations’ with people from very diverse backgrounds and in very different organisational settings. As a nurse, psychotherapist, family therapist, clinical manager, academic, leadership consultant, and executive coach, Dr Simon Western has worked in different roles with the aim of helping people locate and discover and then change themselves. In recent years his coaching and consultancy work has included changing organisations as well as people.
What is common to all of these experiences is the realisation that personal change and transformation are connected to social factors. Change doesn’t take place in a vacuum, it involves:
- Deep personal work
- Having insights into the dynamics of the ‘web of life’, how structural, political, economic, technological, environmental and social networks shape our lives.
- Looking beneath the surface at personal unconscious dynamics, relational dynamics and social dynamics i.e. how discourses, power, knowledge and culture shape our lives.
Would love to see any comments from others that have been reading the book. And, if you haven't heard of it yet, check it out, it is a best seller. My overall comment is 'Academic and Awesome'.
