Continued Development: Self-Authorship and Self-Mastery

Abstract

At every stage in our lives as coaches, the question before us is how to engage in our continuing development as a coach. The most obvious approach, especially when new to the profession, is to focus on increasing our skill-fulness. Pursuing increased skillfulness often takes the form of a search for more powerful questions, new and more effective ways to establish and maintain rapport, and learning how to craft stronger agreements, and so on. This focus on increasing skillfulness is really a commonsense approach intent on examining our proficiency at any or all of the International Coach Federation (ICF) competencies and then striving to move our performance of each of them to higher levels of skillfulness. Coach training programs reinforce this approach by asking graduating students their plans for their own development going forward. Most often the student plans include “… build this skill, become better at that, take this course or program…” Although this approach is a normal and necessary part of our continuing development as coaches, the real work, the more important work, is truly in who we “be” as a coach much more than what we “do” as a coach. In mathematical terms, we’d say that skill building is necessary, but it is not sufficient to become a great coach.