Coaching is the relationship — a Person-Centred Approach to coaching

This blog post has been written to help you reflect on your role as a coach and the importance of the depth of the relational container with your coaching clients to create the necessary conditions for change.

When we look at the research on the factors that create psychological outcomes within coaching, we find three key ones:

• the human-to-human relationship that is established between the coach and client
• the client’s engagement and
• the capability and congruence of the coach.

To deepen your understanding of these factors, this blog post explores two core concepts from the Person-Centred Approach, a psychological modality developed by Carl Rogers and a key influence on the development of coaching in business.

Please note that this blog uses Rogers’ theory in the context of coaching, so the original therapeutic language has been changed accordingly.

Understanding and embodying these concepts will affect the way you approach and hold the coaching relationship; it will also deepen your trust in your client’s potential and development process. Most importantly, it will help you make a deeper shift in your being as a coach.

Background to a Person-Centred Approach

The Person-Centred Approach (PCA) was created by Carl Rogers, one of the pioneers of humanistic psychology in the 1950s; alongside Abraham Maslow and Rollo May, he challenged what he saw as the prevailing dehumanising views of psychology.

Humanistic theory offered a new set of more optimistic and humanising values and principles for understanding the basis of human nature. Rather than focusing on what was wrong with people, humanistic theory took a more holistic approach, seeing the individual as a whole and honouring their natural impulse for growth.

(If you would like to learn more about humanistic psychology and how it underpins our coach training courses, please watch our video “The Values and Principles underpinning Transformational Coaching“.)

One critical change for us as coaches is that Rogers placed the client at the centre and saw the coach as a facilitator (rather than the expert), with the intention of creating a relationship that promoted personal growth, congruence and autonomy.

The self-actualising tendency

One of the key concepts from Rogers’ PCA is his proposal that individuals have an inherent tendency, an innate, inborn drive towards growth, development and autonomy; he referred to this as the self-actualising tendency. Rogers took the view that the basic drive in human beings is a positive drive to achieve potential, to self-actualise and to become a fully functioning person.

He took a different position to Abraham Maslow, describing self-actualisation as a process that is lifelong and involves developing skills, gaining independence, and becoming a fully functioning person. It is not a destination; it is an ongoing development process.

Rogers described as fully functioning person as someone who:

• has openness and awareness to all experiences
• lives fully in the moment
• trusts their own behaviour and experience
• has a sense of freedom in decision making
• is creative and open to change
• recognises that difficulties will inevitably arise.

He believed that this self-actualising tendency continues throughout our lives — something we often see in coaching, when an individual learns from challenges and mistakes. It is experienced in the growing autonomy of the individual (they learn to trust themselves) and a decreased tendency to be dependent on other people for approval or direction.

Another important characteristic of the actualising tendency is that it only becomes effective as the individual becomes more self-aware and open to their experience. When you read the description of the fully functioning person above, you’ll note how Rogers identifies another important aspect of the self-actualising process as the capacity to live fully in the moment — rather than being continually preoccupied with what has happened in the past, or what might happen in the future.

Rogers believed that self-actualisation is most likely to occur when clients experience certain conditions in the coaching relationship (which I’ll outline shortly). These conditions help a coachee’s self-concept become more aligned with their experiences, creating congruence, which leads to psychological well-being.

However, if coachees have conditions of worth from their family of origin or other formative relationships, feeling accepted only if they behave in certain ways, they may ignore their true feelings to gain approval. This creates incongruence between their real self and ideal self, preventing self-actualisation and potentially leading to anxiety, low self-esteem, or other psychological difficulties.

Rogers believed that by providing a supportive and accepting environment, coachees can overcome these barriers and continue their natural journey towards personal growth and fulfilment.

Now pause for a moment and reflect upon your own experiences of being coached and of coaching others:

• How does the way you are approaching the relationship and the coaching enable your client to connect to their own self-actualising tendency?
• How might you inadvertandly prevent this as a coach? How could you facilitate it instead?

The six necessary conditions for transformational change

When Carl Rogers began to develop the PCA he made it clear that the most significant difference between other approaches and his approach is the importance of the coaching relationship.

In 1957, Rogers published his article sharing six necessary conditions for transformational change in his client-centred approach. These emerged from an intensive 12-year period of theoretical creativity and research by a team led by Rogers at the University of Chicago.

In this blog, we have adapted the original description of these principles to the context of a coaching relationship, and these are:

1. The client and coach are in psychological contact: they are present together in the space and have an effect on each other. Rogers would say that the human-to-human relationship is coaching. The coaching relationship is central to a person-centred approach and the value of the other five conditions is dependent on the depth of this relationship.
2. The client comes to coaching in a state of incongruence: they are open and vulnerable too. Most importantly they are aware why they want coaching and have fully committed to the coaching relationship.
3. The coach is congruent in the relationship (they are centred, present, resourced and available – they are more regulated than the client). As a coach they are truly authentic, genuine and real within the coaching relationship and hold the space with authority. 
4. The coach holds an unconditional positive regard for the client. The coach meets the client with respect and acceptance, valuing the dignity and their worth as an individual human being. Meeting them where they are, providing a safe and non-threatening environment in which they can explore their experiences. This non-judgemental acceptance allows them to feel heard, understood and seen. They consistently demonstrate their belief in the client’s potential that they have more resources than perhaps they see for themselves.
5. The coach is present, attuned and demonstrates an empathic understanding of the client’s subjective reality, their thoughts, feelings and the deeper meaning they are expressing. This empathic reflection creates self-reflection, self-realisation and self-learning within the coachee.
6. As a result of the client’s felt experience of the coaching relationship, the coach’s unconditional positive regard and empathic reflection, the client’s self-actualising process is activated and change takes place.

Carl Rogers made it clear that he believed that all six conditions are closely related to each other and together with a belief in the actualising tendency in all human beings, they make up the whole of the Person-Centred Approach.

After reading this blog, I encourage you to pause and reflect upon your existing coaching relationships:

• How are you creating these 6 necessary conditions?
• Where might there be a development edge for you?
• What are you doing well?
• How are you embodying these as a coach?

At Catalyst 14, we believe that coaching is fundamentally a human-to-human relationship, co-created with the client, where the coach works at relational depth, through their presence and attunement, facilitating the activation of the client and creating an energetic and embodied shift, which creates transformational change. It is for this reason we believe that Rogers’ work is still a vital influence today on our coaching stance — and the way we hold the coaching relationship and client’s autonomy and self-actualisation.

Sources:

• Carl R. Rogers. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
• Roger Casemore. Person-Centred Counselling in a Nutshell.
• Tom Merry. Learning and Being in Person Centred Counselling