Performance Consultants, Industry Leaders
I
will not pretend that I am unbiased. Our company, Performance Consultants, a niche
consultancy specialising in all aspects of coaching in business, is widely recognised
as one of the industry leaders in quality,
if not size. My book, Coaching for Performance, has been a best seller in the
field for ten years, is in its third edition and is published in some dozen or
more languages including Russian and Japanese. In the past two years , speaking
at many business conferences, I have been pioneering what I call the next frontier
of coaching which I will describe later.
The word coaching has been imported
to business from sport, however most of what is described as coaching in sport
is comprised principally of technical and physical instruction, demonstration
and criticism, with a smattering of encouragement. It has changed little over
time and is pedagogy based upon the principles of behavioural and cognitive psychology.
These principles have been challenged and in large measure superseded in the past
thirty years by the development of humanistic and transpersonal psychologies,
and their application to human performance. Sport has been slow to adapt and change,
so much so that even today a humamistic sports coach may be viewed as "a
bit of a maverick". This not so in business.
Every
field of human endeavor Since coaching was a new word to business,
the baggage of its history did not accompany it. We were able to introduce coaching
in its more progressive form from the outset. Credit for this must go first and
foremost to Tim Gallwey, a Californian educator and tennis coach who wrote an
outstanding book entitled "The Inner Game of Tennis" which sold very
widely since people recognised its application to every field of human endeavor.
I trained with Tim and founded his organisation in Britain running sports programmes
at first, but we were soon drawn into business. We dropped the Inner Game name
in favor of the more generic term "Coaching", hence the majority of
coaching in the business community, in Europe at least , is derived from the humanistic
principles of the Inner Game. Three quotes from Gallwey:
- We begin
to play the Inner Game when we realise that the opponent within our own head is
more daunting than the other side of the net.
- Our performance equals our
potential minus our internal interferences.
- The Inner Game seeks to eliminate
these internal obstacles to performance, learning and enjoyment.
To
Be Continued... For More Information To
request further information on this particular article please contact Sir John
Whitmore or David Brown on +44
(0) 2073 736 431 or by email at info@performanceconsultants.com
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