Coaching Philosophy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction1

Thesis Statement2

Discussion2

Elements of Athletics2

Coaching2

Motivation and Coaching4

Coaching Philosophy5

Motivation and Coaching Philosophy5

Conclusion7

REFERENCES8

Coaching Philosophy

Introduction

Professional coaching has emerged as a new phenomenon in the fields of executive development and personal growth and may include many types of coaching interventions: personal coaching, business coaching, life coaching, executive coaching, feedback coaching, integral coaching, leadership coaching, and spiritual coaching, among others. Most professional coaching interventions draw heavily on psychological techniques. Recently, however, in their efforts to describe professional coaching, coaching practitioners and clients have begun to use language that-explicitly or implicitly-relates to religious discourse.

A complete issue of Consulting Psychology Journal: Research and Practice (Kilburg, 2004a) was devoted to the topic of executive coaching. It traced the antecedents of coaching psychology back to the humanistic traditions of psychology and up to the recent emergence of the Positive Psychology movement (Seligman, 2002). What unites the humanistic traditions and positive psychology is their common focus on the individual as healthy as opposed to pathological.

Three executive coaching books (Fitzgerald & Berger, 2002; Kilburg, 2000; O'Neill, 2000) provided comprehensive discussions of executive coaching as practiced in corporations and also offered advice to those who are interested in developing a coaching practice. Kilburg examined coaching from a psychodynamic and psychological perspective and provided a conceptual framework using psychodynamic principles to understand coaching, the executive, and the organization. Fitzgerald offered a framework for understanding the psychological shift that occurs at midlife and applied insights from adult development theory to leadership and coaching.

Thesis Statement

In order to understand how coach can influence players, we need to understand the philosophy of coaching and how coaching can motivate players.

Discussion

Elements of Athletics

At the most basic level, there are three essentials to the interscholastic athletic process: sport, athletes, and the coach. This is especially true at the interscholastic level when compared to youth and elite coaches. If a goal of coaching science is to provide information that will facilitate coach development (Gilbert, 2007), which in turn provide coaches the ability to navigate the complex act of coaching, it is the tension between these three essential elements that must be traversed. The specific lessons a sport illuminates obviously depends on the competitive intensity placed on the game. The developmental focus of youth sport is very different from the winner-take-all approach for elite athletics. Interscholastic sport seems to fall somewhere in the middle.

Coaching

Coaching is a complex, multifaceted, and socially intricate endeavor. For a researcher or coach to think in terms of complete understanding about a process as complex as coaching, not only is that naive but also dangerous (Gilbert, 2007). Some have gone so far as to claim coaching science will never get a firm grip on either the coaching process or its practitioners. Thus, it would be arrogant and extremely naive for me to even suggest that I have the ability to comprehend fully the process of coaching. This project is a qualitative first step toward understanding. For many coaches, there is devotion for the games we grew up playing. Sport drew us in to its power, ...