impact of life coaching on goal attainment, metacognition and mental health, The

Social Behavior and Personality, 2003 by Grant, Anthony M

Despite its high media profile and growing popularity there have been no empirical investigations of the impact of life coaching on goal attainment, metacognition or mental health. This exploratory study used life coaching as a means of exploring key metacognitive factors involved as individuals move towards goal attainment. In a within-subjects design, twenty adults completed a life coaching program. Participation in the program was associated with enhanced mental health, quality of life and goal attainment. In terms of metacognition, levels of self-reflection decreased and levels of insight increased. Life coaching has promise as an effective approach to personal development and goal attainment, and may prove to be a useful platform for a positive psychology and the investigation of the psychological mechanisms involved in purposeful change in normal, nonclinical populations.

In working with individuals to improve the quality of their lives, psychology has traditionally focused on alleviating dysfunctionality or treating psychopathology in clinical or counseling populations rather than enhancing the life experience of normal adult populations.

However, it is clear that the general public has a thirst for techniques and processes that enhance life experience and facilitate personal development. The market for personal development material has grown rapidly worldwide since the 1950s (Fried, 1994). Although psychologists feature infrequently as producers of this material, psychology has a genuine and important contribution to make in terms of adapting and validating existing therapeutic models for use with normal populations, and evaluating commercialized approaches to personal development to ensure consumer protection and inform consumer choice (Grant, 2001; Starker, 1990).

A recent development in the personal development genre is the emergence of life coaching. Life coaching can be broadly defined as a collaborative solution-focused, result-orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of life experience and goal attainment in the personal and/or professional life of normal, nonclinical clients.

ISSUES IN THE GROWTH OF LIFE COACHING PRACTICE

The coaching industry, and particularly life coaching, has grown substantially since at least 1998. There have been claims that the number of executive and life coaches number in the tens of thousands in the USA, and coaching has received widespread attention in the popular Western press (Hall, Otazo, & Hollenbeck, 1999).

Despite often over optimistic claims as to its effectiveness there has been little empirical research into the effectiveness of life coaching (Grant, 2000), with anecdotal and marketing claims from the coaching industry itself forming the bulk of the evidence. An overview of the peer-reviewed academic psychology literature on coaching, in normal adult populations, as represented in the database PsycINFO shows that there are only 98 citations, with only 17 of these being empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of coaching interventions. All of these are concerned with evaluating work-related or executive coaching within work or organizational settings.

This is an exploratory study; the first to investigate the effectiveness of life coaching (i.e., coaching in a nonwork or organizational setting), and to investigate the impact of solution-focused, cognitive-behavioral life coaching on key sociocognitive and metacognitive factors.

A SOLUTION-FOCUSED, COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL MODEL OF COACHING

The life coaching program used in this study is adapted from a self-help book, Coach Yourself (Grant & Greene, 2001). This program is based on principles drawn from cognitive-behavioral clinical and counseling psychology (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979), brief solution-focused therapy (O'Hanlon, 1998), and models of self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 1989).

Cognitive-behavioral approaches to counseling and coaching psychology recognize the quadratic reciprocity between the four domains of human experience: behavior, thoughts, feelings and the environment. From a cognitive-behavioral perspective, goal attainment is best facilitated by understanding the relationship between these four domains of human experience and structuring them so as to best support goal attainment. However, possibly because its roots are in the treatment of psychopathology within a medical model, the cognitive-behavioral approach tends to emphasize psychopathology, an approach which is often alienating for nonclinical populations.

Thus, the Coach Yourself program incorporates aspects of brief solution-focused therapy. Solution-focused therapy is a constructivist, humanistic approach that concentrates on the strengths that clients bring to therapy, and emphasizes the importance of solution construction rather than problem analysis.

SELF-REGULATION, SOCIOCOGNITION, METACOGNITION AND COACHING

Goal-directed self-regulation consists of a series of processes in which an individual sets a goal, develops a plan of action, begins action, monitors his or her performance (through self-reflection), evaluates his or her performance by comparison to a standard (gaining insight), and based on this evaluation changes his or her actions to further enhance performance and better reach his or her goals. The coach's role is to facilitate the coachee's movement through the self-regulatory cycle towards goal attainment. Hence, coaching is a useful means of furthering our understanding of the sociocognitive and metacognitive factors involved in purposeful behavior change as people move through the self-regulatory cycle. Figure 1 presents a generic model of self-regulation.