Historic Roots and Summary of Approaches

Abstract

Personal development through coaching may have grown out of management training and sports coaching but it has much in common, in our view, with the older field of psychotherapy (see also Peltier, 2001). As a consequence, we look primarily to psychotherapy to find historic roots for various coaching approaches. In the history of psychotherapy different authors have made different choices and different recommendations, often related to their own approach or personality, or to the type of clients for whom their approach was developed. Strangely, research has shown that there is much more agreement between psychotherapists in practice than there is in theory (Corsini and Wedding, 1989). Therapists using completely different theoretical approaches therefore do largely the same things in the consulting room.

I think any theoretically based psychotherapy is mistaken because each person is different.

A teaching seminar with Milton Erickson, J.K. Zeig (1972)