There’s an ongoing need for coaches to take part in reflective practice, says Iain McCormick
Many experienced coaches face a professional development challenge because most available training either focuses on basic coaching skills or introductory therapeutic skills for coaches such as gestalt.
If you’ve been coaching for 10 or 20 years you may feel that the available basic or specific skills training is elementary, too narrow and that you need a more engaging, intense experience to challenge yourself, beyond what’s provided in supervision.
Reflective practice is well recognised by all the major coaching professional bodies as a critical skill for competence. Yet as many coaches have asked me, how do you actually undertake reflective practice on an ongoing basis and create an engaging, challenging and provocative form of professional development? This is the challenge I set myself when writing my book on this topic (McCormick, 2023).
Reflective practice has been used in the education field since the 1930s (Dewey, 1933), and can be defined as an active ongoing process of carefully reviewing one’s thoughts, feelings, behaviour, knowledge and capability so that we can continuously learn and develop professionally.
Reflective practice is a type of rational problem-solving that involves active conscious and deliberate contemplation to produce ideas and actions that expand our capability. It can be understood by contrasting it with thoughtful action. The latter is largely spontaneous, doesn’t happen on a regular basis and doesn’t involve an intentional opportunity to learn. By contrast, reflective practice is a conscious planned cycle that usually involves a written record as an integral part of continuous improvement and professional development.
A classic form of reflective practice developed by Gibbs (1988) involves contemplating: what just happened, what was I feeling and thinking, what was helpful and unhelpful about the experience, what can I learn from the situation and what actions will I undertake moving forward?
Practices
In the book I set out seven types of reflective practice that are particularly relevant to coaches. These are:
- Individual informal reflection, such as spending a few minutes at the end of each day considering how your coaching sessions have gone and what you need to do to improve in the future.
- Individual workbook based reflection where you spend time, not just reading a book, but actively evaluating its utility for your practice and setting up an action plan to implement improvements.
- Workbook based reflection in pairs where you collaborate with a colleague to extract the maximum value from a book, video or programme and systematically implement the changes.
- Supervision and reflective practice where you not only talk over current cases but also reflect on your own mindset and pre-judgements and consider how these can be useful to enhance your performance.
- Peer group reflective practice where you work with a small group of colleagues to rigorously review your own performance and seek input from your peers on how to improve.
- Classroom based reflective practice where coaches can use therapeutic tools such as those from cognitive analytic therapy and apply them to their own personal challenges.
Classroom feedback on this experience can be confined to a discussion on the reflective process involved and not the personal content so enabling deep contemplation without the need to expose highly personal material to fellow students. - Finally there is intensive group based reflective practice for coaches where, in a safe and confidential environment, a senior practitioner coaches each member of the group in turn on a personal issue that bothers them. Participants can then reflect on what it’s like to be in the ‘client’s shoes’, reflect on the live coaching sessions they’ve participated in or observed and reflect on the other participants’ comments.
This group reflective practice approach provides a powerful, engaging, ongoing professional development process for coaches. Overall, there are a vast array of practical ways that coaches can use reflective skills to systematically develop their professional capability.
Models and approaches
The book then sets out a range of conceptual coaching models such as the coaching alliance model and challenges readers to consider the quality of the relationship that they have with each of their clients, to evaluate their own ability to form a coaching alliance and to write an action plan to improve in this area. The general format of the book involves articulating coaching concepts and then helping the reader to apply these to themselves and to develop ways to grow professionally.
One chapter that has received considerable positive comment explores the difference between eclectic and integrated approaches to coaching. Being eclectic involves using an approach that’s composed of elements drawn from various sources and the eclectic coach makes the choice based on their belief that the combination is effective. At the extreme, new coaches can fall into syncretism, a random combination of techniques without cohesion, that can be unhelpful to the client.
By contrast, integrative means to form or blend into a unified whole.
The underlying idea of the integrative approach is that client issues have multiple causes and so using only one therapeutic method is unlikely to be successful. In practice, integrative coaching means in any one session the coach will primarily adhere to one coaching model but supplement this with the use of a small number of other therapeutic techniques as needed.
At any time the coach should be able to clearly articulate what they are doing, why and how it’s integrated. Research supports this approach indicating that a diverse range of therapeutic methods can be beneficial to clients, even when their underlying models or theories aren’t directly compatible, provided the coach can explain the approach to the client if this is needed (Cooper, 2008).
The remaining chapters in the book take a range of therapeutic techniques and show how these can be adapted to the coaching context. In writing the book, I used the reflective practice model to challenge myself not to write about approaches which have been extensively examined such as CBT or Gestalt. Where I did examine a common modality such as ACT I looked at the most recent research and application which focuses on how internet-based training and apps can be used to supplement work done in the coaching session – a powerful fresh approach that can be very helpful to coaches.
Other chapters examine what I consider to be highly innovative but underused therapeutic approaches that have direct applicability to coaching. These include:
- Stress inoculation which is a practical approach used to help clients better anticipate and prepare for challenging situations
- The unified protocol approach which provides an evidence-based fresh approach to applying CBT in coaching and,
- Cognitive analytic therapy which is highly effective with clients who have repetitive destructive behavioural patterns.
Conclusion
I believe that coaches who’ve been through their basic training and have some years’ experience need not only supervision when it comes to professional development. Reflective practice is an engaging, practical and effective additional approach to professional development.
References
- M Cooper, Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy, SAGE, 2008
- J Dewey, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process, D C Heath, 1933
- G Gibbs, Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods, Oxford Further Education Unit, 1988
- I McCormick, Reflective Practice for Coaches: A Guidebook for Advanced Professional Development, Routledge, 2023