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To deliver an “introduction to life coaching” workshop to local government lawyers and the benefits they could get from life coaching.

The nature of the interactive workshop is outlined and the responses of the delegates examined.

The findings of the paper focus on the benefits to the delegates at both personal and professional levels. The holistic approach of life coaching impacting on how difficulties are viewed and the consequent reduction in stress.

A case study on the experiences of delegates exposed to life coaching. This paper will be of value to HR in local government and high stress business environments.

Examines how the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, West Yorkshire, UK, has employed freelance life coaches to help local government staff in their careers and general well being.

Provides a description of the nature and benefits of life coaching from the senior occupational health adviser for the council, Susan Gee. Includes comments from two of the life coaches used by the council, Alison Tempest and Lisa Lawton. Quotes employees who have been able to make positive changes to their jobs and lives thanks to receiving life coaching.

Discovers that life coaching can lead to a reduction in sickness absenteeism and a lowering of stress levels among employees.

Highlights a creative and innovative way to help employees to stay well and happy at work.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the ways in which life coaching helped the owner of a UK agency specialising in helping production companies to provide campaigns for their clients to perform more efficiently and gain greater enjoyment from his work.

Presents the viewpoints of both the agency owner and of the life coach.

Reveals that the coaching, delivered by Life Goal, helped the owner of TA2 to see his overall business proposition more clearly. It benefited both his business and his well being.

Explains how life coaching can help people to understand the way they think, and to turn negative thinking into positive.

Highlights the benefits of coaching, particularly for sole traders who often get so involved in running the business that they find it difficult to see the bigger picture.

There is limited empirical literature on the effectiveness of leadership coaching in healthcare settings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the efficacy of leadership coaching for individuals implementing strategic change in the Australian public health system.

Using a within-subjects (pre-post) design, participants (n=31) undertook six one-hour coaching sessions. Coaching was conducted by professional leadership coaches. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected.

Participation was associated with significant improvements in goal attainment, solution-focused thinking, leadership self-efficacy, perspective-taking capacity, self-insight and resilience, and ambiguity tolerance. There were significant reductions in stress and anxiety. The benefits of coaching transferred from the workplace to the home. Many participants reported being able to use insights gained in coaching in their personal lives, and reported better work/life balance, less stress and better quality relationships at home.

Few studies have provided evaluation of leadership coaching in healthcare setting. Leadership coaching in the public health system may be an important methodology for facilitating goal attainment and fostering resilience in this vital social sector, benefiting workers in the health services, their families and ultimately their patients and the broader community.

Coaching in higher education has become increasingly common across the United States. Our qualitative study explores the perceptions of coaches and advisors, as they consider academic coaching as a role distinct from academic advising.

Our study adopts a qualitative research approach. Two focus groups were conducted with 14 coaching and academic advising professionals.

Our findings identify at least three major themes when considering academic coaching as a role distinct from academic advising: (1) Potential role overlap, (2) Caseload disparities and (3) Philosophical differences. The indiscriminate use of the title of “coach” contributed to confusion, ambiguity and tension.

Without a clear understanding of the coach role as a distinct type of support in higher education, confusion and ambiguity are likely to continue.

No studies have explored the perceptions of coaches and advisors, as they consider academic coaching as a role distinct in the United States.

To identify the distinguishing characteristics and future challenges for the business coaching industry in Australia.

A telephone survey of business coaching firms was used to identify the main structural characteristics of the industry. Structured interviews with selected business coaches were used to identify the key business and professional issues they faced.

Firms in the business coaching industry in Australia have three main characteristics: most firms are young and small; most are not exclusively dedicated to coaching; and most have a poor appreciation of the competitive environment in which they operate.

The research identified three main challenges for the business coaching industry that will need to be addressed if business coaching is to develop further: the challenge of defining standards of service and performance that do not inhibit the flexible and personal orientation of the coaching process; the challenge of developing a more coherent and well understood perception of the nature and benefits of business coaching amongst industry more generally; and the challenge of establishing robust and durable coaching businesses that can take leadership in growing and developing the industry.

Business coaching is an emerging industry that is increasingly being used to provide learning‐based interventions in organizations. To date there has been little formal research into the nature of this industry or the services it provides. This paper addresses this by examining the “state of play” of business coaching in Australia.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s path-breaking book After Virtue launched him into a place of prominence in social and moral philosophy. Two central, and still relevant, themes are identifiable in the corpus of MacIntyre’s work. First, advanced modernity is in a perilous state because of the philosophical creation of the emotivist self. Second, virtue must be reclaimed if the crisis in moral philosophy is to be addressed and an institutional world worthy of what we are as human beings is to be built. MacIntyre’s heroic effort in this regard is a new presentation of a Thomistic Aristotelianism but he was not naïve about the chances of his project’s success. Emotivism has made it extremely difficult for a virtue perspective to even gain a hearing. MacIntyre proposed a way forward different from abstract theorising. He felt that at this point we could, and had to, learn how to act from accounts of exemplary lives. This chapter presents the wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden as a contribution to aid in the recovery of virtue. The central claim being made is that it is long overdue that John Wooden should take his rightful place in the virtue tradition in ethics. This work gives John Wooden’s conception of leadership that flows from his understanding of virtue the attention it deserves. The examination of John Wooden’s life undertaken bridges virtue theory and leadership. Several other key elements of MacIntyre’s thought set the structure of the inquiry. The chapter begins with a biographical sketch of Wooden’s life because of the stress that MacIntyre places on tradition and narrative unity. The basis of Wooden’s reflection on virtue, the tradition informing his practical reasoning, is a selected canon of Western civilisation, its great literature and the Bible. The Midwestern values of hard work, honesty, faith, and caring for one’s family are also significant. MacIntyre places great emphasis on the need to understand the story of a life and, in particular, the need to understand how development was aided or hindered in childhood and what kind of apprenticeship into a practice was available. The singular influence John Wooden’s father had on his life is documented. The role that John Wooden’s teachers, coaches and mentors played in initiating him into the practice of coaching is reviewed. The experiential base for Wooden’s derivation of his emotionally healthy definition of success and his well thought out conception of the virtues is thus put in place. MacIntyre summarises the teleological structure of human life and the role of virtue in human flourishing by contrasting man-as-he-happens-to-be with man-as-he-should-be-if-he-realised-his-essential-nature. John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success identifies the combination of personal qualities and values, virtues, that fulfil MacIntyre’s second term, that are intrinsic to reaching one’s potential as a person. The 15 qualities Wooden gives – industriousness, enthusiasm, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, self-control, alertness, initiative, intentness, condition, skill, team spirit, poise, confidence, competitive greatness – are defined and illustrated. The rationale for the qualities and for their placement into a coherent whole is discussed. Basic elements of John Wooden’s leadership genius are then brought out. Leaders need to get the culture right, build cohesive teams, and be guided by a moral topline.

In this article the author, Managing Director of the leading coaching and coach training company, Peter Bluckert Coaching, and founder member of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, sets out a personal view on the current state of the coaching market. That market, and, indeed, the profession of coaching, is fairly young, but it is one that he expects will undergo significant changes in the next few years, spurred by the demands of an increasingly discerning client base. Clients will look to employ coaches who are truly adding value and coaches will need to differentiate themselves in the market place through the quality of their initial training, the extent to which they are committed to ongoing personal development and supervision and their ability to operate at a deeper level with individuals. The author welcomes the greater professionalisation of coaching and looks to a lead body to take forward that process of change.

This chapter explores the international field of leadership coaching from a sociological perspective. The fundamental features of the leadership coaching industry are outlined using primary data collected from in-depth interviews with leadership coaches, ethnographic observation of coach-training workshops, and secondary data analysis of global coaching surveys. Leadership coaching is defined and contextualized within the field of leadership studies as well as within the broader international coaching industry. The issue of certification is examined along with an overview of the global demographics of who is involved in leadership coaching as practitioners and clients. The goal is to explicate how and why leadership coaching has emerged as a professional field and to offer insight into how leaders around the world are being trained and developed for various leadership roles in their communities.

The lack of services for adults on the autism spectrum is of growing concern. Given the huge variation in how autism impacts people, individualized approaches might be particularly effective. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of a community-based life-skills coaching program for adults with autism “LifeMAP.”

LifeMAP is structured around individualized meetings between a client and their coach where they identify, prioritize and make progress toward self-selected goals. LifeMAP was established in 2008 and has since served around 2,600 clients. This paper provides an outline of the LifeMAP program, how sessions with clients are structured, goals that adults with autism prioritize and preliminary data on progress toward goal attainment.

Findings indicated that the LifeMAP program model was effective in supporting progress toward goals, increasing confidence toward goals and reducing anxiety.

Given the scope of the LifeMAP program, this overview is unique in providing pertinent information to others looking for effective and authentic strategies to support autistic adults and those transitioning from high school. This study provides a realistic perspective on how programs are applied in community-based settings, outside a structured, formal lab setting. It is concluded that individualized intervention approaches might be key to successful outcomes for adults with autism.