Mental-health issues and challenging clients in executive coaching

Abstract

Coaching is emerging as one of the major forms of personal and professional development used by executives. Organisations and individuals use coaching to develop skills, enhance performance, develop leadership and personal functioning, and to remediate unhelpful patterns of behaviour. As such, coaching and therapy share some ground and some techniques. It is often said that one of the key differences between coaching and therapy is that coaching deals with nonclinical populations, whereas therapy is designed to address the needs of people suffering from diagnosable clinical disorders such as depression and anxiety. While this is an important distinction and one that coaches need to take seriously, the task of determining the boundaries between psychopathology and the normal range of human functioning can be difficult. When is a person simply sad, and when are they depressed? When is the worry an executive feels over delivering a key presentation just the normal butterflies associated with public speaking, and when is it a symptom of a more pervasive case of social phobia? These are complex questions for coaches, particularly those untrained in psychology and the behavioural sciences. Nevertheless they are important issues, because coaches are inevitably faced with the problem of significant mental-health problems in some clients.

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