Twenty years ago Karen Kimsey-House was looking for a way to help people that “felt whole”. Today she is recognised as a pioneer of professional coaching and the developer of the Co-Active Coaching model. Liz Hall follows her journey.
More than two decades ago, in a ‘life planning’ class, Karen Kimsey-House got chatting to a fellow participant. The teacher/facilitator was the late Thomas Leonard, and the fellow participant was the late Laura Whitworth. The seeds were being sown for the development of the Co-Active Coaching model, now well-known across the world.
Kimsey-House is considered one of the pioneers of professional coaching. Back then, however, she was just looking for a way to work with people that “felt whole”. Soon after meeting Whitworth, they were developing a new framework for one-to-one work.
Elsewhere too, others such as Tim Gallwey and Sir John Whitmore were exploring similar territory. The time was right for coaching.
Kimsey-House came across Whitmore’s “wonderful” book, Coaching for Performance. But although some coaching was being delivered for the higher echelons in organisations, in general, “nobody knew what coaching was”.
“We started coaching in 1988. I don’t know where the word coaching came from, but if it was used, it was in relation to performance coaching. What coaching there was, was at the higher levels. For the general population, there was nothing,”
she says.
“Leonard (who set up the International Coach Federation, Coachville and the International Association of Coaching) went the organisation direction, we went in another. But the spirit of coaching has remained the same: the heart is about working with people, helping them use the best of themselves.”
Kimsey-House is president of the Coaches Training Institute (CTI), which she co-founded with her husband, Henry, and Whitworth.
CTI is thought to be the oldest and largest in-person coach training school in the world. It has trained more than 35,000 coaches globally and the book, Co-Active Coaching, is now in its third edition and an industry standard text.
Why its popularity? “I think (because) it touches people at both the industrial and societal levels. It connects people in a place of heart that is sub-cultural. Coaching is great, but sometimes its focus can be so specific that it limits itself to one population. I think the CTI model is humanistic enough to allow connection at a human level.
“It’s very universal – we’ve been offering coaching globally in diverse cultural settings. Japan and the US, for example, are very different, yet the coaching model is popular in both. It’s a model of relating that people are hungry for. It’s not religious, yet it has a large spiritual component. People are longing for connecting in this way.
“The Western world is so focused on profit, making things happen, that it has lost the relationship with purpose and meaning. People want to find a way back to that, to let the trappings drop away so they can connect human to human.”
She says that often on the first day of the CTI programme, people can be “hesitant” about the approach. “But by the third day, they become very intimate. It’s rare for such integrity that allows these relationships to happen.”
When prompted to talk about what she’s proud of, she says: “I’m really proud of our book – I think it’s really good and accessible and useful. I’m proud that we’ve been able to grow (CTI) globally and translate it in seven languages.
“I’m also really proud that the model and the intellectual capacity of Co-Active is not just held in the US, but that we’re been able to train a faculty of 120 people around the world who are better at delivering our work than us. So much work dies with the originators. And I’m proud of the integrity with which we’ve expanded into the profession. We do fail at being as collective as we’d like, however.”
Working together
The theme of being collective, of working together and connecting deeply, is a recurrent and important one for Kimsey-House – for her business, for coaching, for the world at large.
She is working on a book on the relationship between brain research and the collective model, with Ann Betz. And she is co-presenting this autumn with Carol Kauffman on the collective model, at the Institute of Coaching in the US.
“We’ve gone really broad at CTI. Now I want to go really deep so that there’s scientific validation. We’re doing lots of work with organisations, which is exciting, but I need to be better able to articulate our theories.”
She thinks the first cornerstone of the CTI approach – that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole – makes for its wide appeal. “Nobody is interested at school in us being creative and querying. When we hold people as naturally not broken, when there is nothing to fix, people relax and all sorts of things can change.
“It is an approach that’s particularly helpful in these times,” she believes. “Especially now. I think that’s the thing that can get us through. Any illusion anyone had that we’re operating in isolation, has been shattered. Whatever we do, we’re going to do together.
“I think, as human beings, as a species, we have been on an evolutionary journey and we’re at a crisis point. We’re being asked to make a transformative leap. It’s difficult to talk about because all our major constructs are getting a bit shaky – the environment, industry, the economy, are all at pressure point. We need to shift how we live so I think communication is not the only answer, but it will allow us to use all our resources to make that leap. If we collaborate with all our points of view, we could create something so much larger than the sum of our parts.”
Working together is something the coaching profession needs to do more of, too, she says.
“As (coaching) has become a profession, the philosophical framework has become a little bit splintered, but now we’re back to seeing greater integration. We can have our differences, but still stand shoulder to shoulder, otherwise we won’t be able to do all we can as a profession. Coaching can either be a movement, sometimes scattered, or we can grow to a solid profession, which I am committed to. We need to work together.”
She believes the professional bodies are key and that they need to collaborate to support accreditation, for example.
Kimsey-House was a founding member of the Professional and Personal Coaches Association and she holds a Master Certified Coach designation through the ICF. In her work as a professional coach, she specialises in entrepreneurs and start-up companies, helping them with innovative business practices and no-nonsense strategies to move things forward quickly.
Background and influences
Before getting into coaching, Kimsey-House had already been showing her colours as an entrepreneur. She founded the successful Learning Annex adult education programme in San Francisco in 1986. Even while she was working as an actress earlier on, she started a cleaning business. Her theatrical background has very much informed what she does, she says. “Training as an actress has been fundamental to the work
I do. Acting is really all about understanding human behaviour. So in my acting training, I learned to really get ‘over there’, inside the skin of whatever character I was playing. I learned to be curious and interested in what made a person tick, and I moved beyond my need to have the world be like me.
“Acting is also about using all of yourself and so I developed a much fuller range of self expression than I had prior to this. These two things have formed the nexus of the philosophy of Co-Active Coaching and our approach to leadership,” she says.
Before acting, Kimsey-House had travelled a lot with her military family, which she says also helped her see the world through different lenses. “My dad was in the airforce so I travelled lots and I had the chance to navigate lots of cultures, which was informative as well. I learnt that the world was very different and very much the same. We speak different languages, we live differently and we have different cultural norms, and we navigate the world differently (but we are fundamentally the same).
“When I was 13, I went to Spain and had my first love affair with a guy who spoke no English. We were having a ball not being able to speak a word and I learnt communication is not just in the language.”
Other important influences on her included Ken Wilber; cosmologist Brian Swimme and the human potential movement of the late 1970s.
“I was a child of the 60s, so I grew up in at time of political upheaval. I was protesting at the Vietnam War. I was wild-eyed, but passionate and idealistic, which has informed me.”
Kimsey-House now lives by the ocean in North California. She still travels a lot, but “I get to be in a really beautiful place and have time for introspection and reflection”.
From this place of reflection, is there a message Kimsey-House would like to share?
“The only thing I want to share is this: I really want people to know that they matter, that their vision and their efforts and contributions really matter right now. People are so frightened, so scared because the ground is shifting and I don’t think our generation has been trained to navigate this complexity. It will take lots of continued support to help us get the ball rolling. It’s like, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ Let’s step up our collective awareness.”
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, issue 5