The Coach's Coach: Personal Development for Personal Developers

by Alison Hardingham with Mike Brearley, Adrian Moorhouse, Brendan Venter
published September 2004

The structure of the book

There are five parts to the book.All of us who have contributed to this book have found our own lives immeasurably enhanced by the coaching we have done. People who have experienced good coaching (and that includes us too) say the same. In the first, second and third parts of this book we aim to celebrate and capture that experience in a way which means more good coaching will happen more often.

So the book starts with the most important person in the coaching relationship, the coachee. What hopes and fears does she bring to coaching? How will her previous experiences and state of mind help or hinder the coaching effort?

The book then moves on to the coach. We explore what it is in the coach that makes good coaching possible, and what it is in him that makes good coaching impossible.

The third part of the book looks at the nature of the coaching relationship. It includes thoughts about what flows from coachee to coach, as well as what flows from coach to coachee.

The fourth part of the book is different in kind from the first three, and it is the longest part of the book. It describes the different kinds of work coach and coachee do together, and tools and techniques for approaching each kind of work successfully.

In the first four parts of the book we have, for simplicity, taken most of our examples and illustrations from the context of one-to-one coaching in a business context. The fifth and final part of the book explores a number of other business contexts in which coaching takes place, and how those contexts affect what is possible and desirable in the coaching relationship. Hopefully these chapters will enable you to supply and obtain good coaching all over the place.

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