Christian van Nieuwerburgh has trained thousands of coaches. He’s written the book that a lot of them learned from, now in its fourth edition, with the fifth already underway. So it’s a little startling when he says, about halfway through this conversation, that coaching isn’t the thing he cares about.
“I’m not passionate about coaching. I’ve picked coaching because it’s the most powerful tool we have to achieve the kinds of things that are important for me. If I found a better intervention, I wouldn’t be talking about coaching.”
What he’s actually interested in is much bigger, and much more useful if you work in wellbeing. It’s the question of whether there’s a way to show up to an interaction that increases the chance of it going well. He calls this positive presence, and the claim is that it travels. It works in a coaching session, and it also works picking your kid up from school, or walking into the office on a morning when you’d rather not talk to anyone.
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There’s a challenge in here for those of us who like our evidence tidy. Christian argues that the research methods we currently have aren’t sophisticated enough for what’s really going on in a coaching conversation, and that “does coaching change behaviour” is a question that misses most of the value. He also has an answer for the organisations that ask him to teach a way of being in half a day.
What we get into
Why Christian’s definition of coaching is now “creating ideal environments for learning”, and what he threw out to get there
Positive presence, and two questions you can use to test your own
The art and the science, and why the science should become invisible to the client
What coaching research is measuring, and what it’s missing
Why coaching individuals inside a dysfunctional organisation doesn’t work
His practical test for choosing a coach, which involves being suspicious of good websites
Christian van Nieuwerburgh is professor of coaching and positive psychology at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. He’s the author of An Introduction to Coaching Skills, and co-author with Robert Biswas-Diener of Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection. You can find along with his work on Instagram.
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