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Coaching is a specific approach to communication designed to facilitate positive change. Learning to use selected coaching skills in practice offers occupational therapists powerful tools for enabling client pursuit of meaning, adaptation and change. While coaching is a profession with its own specific training and certification programs, occupational therapists don't need to complete coaching certification to introduce aspects of the coaching approach into their practice. Occupational therapists can learn and integrate specific coaching skills into their work, just as they select and apply approaches from professional fields like teaching/education, counseling, architectural design, psychology and community development.
Coaching has been formally adopted as an enablement skill by the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT) (Townsend & Polatajko, 2007) and has been identified by the Australian Association of Occupational Therapists (AAOT) as an emerging area of practice for the profession. The coaching approach to communication is being taught to students in occupational therapy programs around the world, including University of Queensland, Hong Kong and here in Canada at Queen's University.
While the term "coaching" does appear in the occupational therapy literature and professional conversations, very little has been written about it and how to apply coaching in occupational therapy. This article aims to begin to address this gap by explaining what coaching actually is, coaching's theoretical underpinnings, what coaching can offer occupational therapy, how occupational therapists can begin to apply coaching and integrate it in to their practice, and how you can learn more about coaching and add it to your professional skill toolbox.
What is coaching?
Coaching can be defined as a specific conversation-based partnership for facilitating client change from their current state to a more desired future state. The process is highly clientcentred, fosters self-directed learning and is grounded in selfawareness, personal values, strengths recognition, possibilities, choice and self-responsibility. A key focus is assisting clients to discover what is important to them, contribute more of their unique self to the world and thus create a greater sense of meaning in their lives. The client is regarded as an expert in their own life and the coach partners with them to bring it out.
What are the origins and theoretical underpinnings of coaching?
Coaching is an emerging profession with a history of citations in the...