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Let me begin with a few words about my background and professional journey. I am a Professionally Certified Coach (PCC). I was trained clinically and for many years operated a full-time practice as a Christian psychotherapist, with a team of therapists and interns working for me in Clearwater, Florida. I had a particular interest in sexual brokenness and, in fact, became a certified sex therapist and came to believe that this would be my career path. But God had other designs.
About ten years ago, my wife and I felt a leading to change directions and we moved to a little Midwestern town in the middle of nowhere, to the large family farm on which my mother had lived from the age of 5 until 15. It was a radical change for us, but it was in keeping with the new vision we felt we had been given for how and where to raise our children . . . and coaching, as I will discuss, is about pursuing vision.
That's the setting for the work I do now. All of my "work now, as a distinctly Christian coach, draws upon the skills I developed as a Christian therapist. Instead of working with people in states of brokenness and trying to help them gain some measure of stability and healing, however, coaching meets people at a place of relative stability, health and function and helps them to "move on up." We consider "What else has God called you to . . . envisioned for you . . . gifted you in?" It is not about brokenness and healing; it is about growth.
In describing my work and practice, by the way, I am not assuming that there will be a wholesale exodus of therapist readers into the coaching field. Healing therapy, of course, is vitally important in realizing God's plans for the wholeness of people. My hope with this article is more that readers may develop some new tools that they can add to the work they are already doing in ministering in the lives of people.
History of Coaching
Until the late 1980s, there was virtually no literature on coaching outside of sports. Beginning around that time, people from three traditions began to sense a...