2007 Special Group in Coaching Psychology 3rd Annual Conference
Conference Venue: City University Special Group in Coaching Psychology
From: 17 Dec 2007 To: 18 Dec 2007
Peer-Reviewed
Personal Consultancy: An integrative approach to one-to-one talking practices
Personal Well-Being Centre
I. BONIWELL
University of East London
Despite a proliferation of ‘one-to-one’ talking practices that include counselling, psychotherapy and coaching, the existing approaches do not seem to be fully adequate, starting from their very names to, more importantly, the help that they can offer to clients. Broadly speaking, counselling and psychotherapy are mostly remedial, and usually lack more ‘positive’ or pro-active elements. Coaching, on the other hand, can be charged with not addressing deeper, underlying issues, and consequently being superficial. Personal consultancy is based on the model that integrates the depth perspective offered by counselling and psychotherapy, with an opportunity to make constructive, practical changes, associated with coaching. So, it can be seen as a coherent way to combine the existing approaches and techniques, rather than being a radically new approach. This synthesis is possible because all of these practices, in fact, use similar core skills, and their domains already overlap to some extent. In building its framework three essential elements of ‘one-to-one’ practices are considered first: the client, the consultant and the interaction (relationship) between them. On this basis four stages of the personal consultancy process are suggested: authentic listening, re-balancing, generating and supporting. The paper will expand on them, discussing the appropriate attitudes, methods, and techniques that can be used at each stage in order to assist the process.
