Understanding yourself as a coach

The motivation to become a coach often comes because of an individual’s interest in people and a desire to help them to reach their potential This chapter discusses a case for three levels of self-understanding that a professional coach benefits from developing: self-inventory, self as an instrument and a fully professional self. Capacity for self-disclosure, immediacy and presence are undoubtedly the benefits that this level of self-understanding brings to the quality of a coach’s service to their clients. The chapter argues that there are additional benefits to coaches themselves when they reach this level of self-awareness. Coaches who reach this level of self-understanding come to see coaching engagements as a self-organizing process of continuously active living systems and understand themselves as an integral part of such systems. The coach can recognise their dominant worldview, as modernism/postmodernism/pragmatism and a corresponding mini-self, as competent/dialogic/pragmatic, which may capture most appropriately their predominant style of coaching