Christian Van Nieuwerburgh and Raja’a Allaho
Routledge
ISBN: 978 17822 0199 1
5 out of 5 stars
The coaching profession has long called for culturally appropriate approaches, with few solutions available. This book is an attempt to build a model consistent with specific cultural values, beliefs, traditions or religions.
Ershad means guidance. According to the principles of Ershad this refers to self-guidance to learn and find the right pathway for the learner (the client) who is supported by a Murshid, a guide or facilitator (the coach).
According to the practice of Ershad, the stages of the coaching conversation consist of: discovery, intentions, pathways and effort. While these have parallels with the GROW process, the Hadith (reports of what the Holy Prophet Muhammad said or did on certain occasions) states that ‘all action is judged by intention (Niyyah)’ rather than a focus on outcome. This represents a key difference in approach and is endorsed by both the Holy Qur’an (sacred scriptures of Islam) and Sunnah (traditions of the Prophet Muhammad).
Also key to this approach is the Alignment wheel of the Ershad method, which provides a framework for Muslim beliefs about God, self, others and the world. The alignment wheel may be used at any stage of the coaching conversation. It incorporates a spiritual component – cited as the ‘essence of Islamic education’ (p90) as represented by words and deeds in order to worship the Divine.
The ideal outcome of alignment is the “assured self” – the acceptance of positive aspects of self along with acknowledgement of the negative aspects. This demands a commitment to work on those negative aspects at the same time as a requirement to adapt to the environment and the people in it, such that a feeling of balance and enhanced wellbeing ensues. Useful questions guide the facilitator (pp99-102) on how to use the wheel.
The authors propose three key elements to effective coaching: a conversational process; a set of communication skills and a particular ‘coaching way of being’.
This means that a facilitator needs to have the key attributes of faith, modelling, initiative, discretion and positive thinking.
The Ershad coaching framework is set among relationship conditions for partnership, which is founded on deep trust and respect – the authors suggest that the partnership conditions are discussed at each stage of the coaching relationship.
Throughout the book, key coaching skills are, where possible, mapped against teachings from the Noble Qur’an (a version of the Qur’an translated into the English language) and the Sunnah.
This provides an insightful comparison between coaching skills as typically practised in the West and the reasons why these skills are important to Islamic culture. For example, the Noble Qur’an considers questions to be one of the most important tools for learning and to prove the truth of faith.
Overall, this is a very useful addition to the growing pool of literature that emphasises the importance of culturally sensitive coaching. Nevertheless, there is an inherent assumption within this text that coaches from the West do not coach at the level of values and beliefs. This would have benefited from testing by means of a wider literature review and an exploration of other cross-cultural coaching models.
This book will hopefully help coaches who are not familiar with Islamic culture to avoid making mistakes that not only overlook core beliefs, but could cause offence.
Jenny Plaister-Ten is the founder of 10 Consulting, and the author of The Cross Cultural Coaching Kaleidoscope: A Systems Approach to Coaching (Karnac,2016) www.10consulting.co.uk