Jonathan Passmore: Chartered Psychologist and Accredited Coach and Supervisor

A conversation with Jonathan Passmore discusses the importance of coaching in the workplace. He emphasizes the role of coaches in helping individuals reach their full potential and improve their performance. 

Passmore also highlights the benefits of coaching, such as increased self-awareness, enhanced leadership skills, and improved decision-making. He shares practical tips for leaders to incorporate coaching into their management style and encourages organizations to invest in coaching programs to foster a culture of growth and development.

Transcript

Jonathan: If we’re all fighting about how much progress we’re making in the harbor of coaching, in the little area as we sail from one side to the other, it’s a very constrained fight. It’s a very constrained competition. But if we allow ourselves, through opening and sharing, to set sail into the ocean of availability of many different organizations and many different leaders and managers who could benefit from coaching, then the water breadth and depth grows infinitely.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the most cited living coaching researcher. He has published over 100 scientific papers and book chapters, over 30 books, and has delivered over 200 conference papers to audiences across the globe. He has been ranked as a top thought leader in the coaching field by Thinkers50 and Global Gurus and has worked at a few of the largest digital coaching providers. Please welcome Jonathan Passmore.

(Interview)

Alex: Hey, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Hi, Alex. How you doing? 

Alex: I’m doing great. So good to have you here. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, what are we drinking today? 

Jonathan: Well, I’m drinking an English breakfast tea. So in the UK, we would just say that’s tea, but I know for those who might be tuning in from other parts of the world might need more detail, so it’s English breakfast tea and it’s a little bit of milk and I call it a combination of builders and nuns tea, so really strong but I also like a good dash of milk in there. Some people like to drink it black but I would put a little bit of milk to add to the black tea. 

Alex: So, since I’m in the morning here, well, not that early but a little early here in LA, I wanted to go with the tea family to match you but I’m doing Japanese matcha with homemade almond milk and I did it iced because we’re coming into that part of the year where it’s not as cold as it used to be. So we’re both drinking tea and I’ve actually had tea with you in person and I liked the whole tea culture in the UK. It’s pretty interesting. 

Jonathan: You talk about cold, we’re in spring at the moment here in the UK so we’re about four degrees. How does that compare to you? 

Alex: Well, here, it’s 59 degrees Fahrenheit and it’s going to be 75 later. I wish I could quickly change this to — from Fahrenheit, but I can’t, so probably a lot warmer than you.

Jonathan: A lot warmer than here in the UK at the moment. We’re envious of that lovely temperature. 

Alex: Yes, I mean, the weather in LA, we could do a whole episode on the weather in LA but we’ll skip so that those in maybe less favorable climate conditions don’t tune off our episode because they’re unhappy with us enjoying some better weather here. But it’s always good to see you, Jonathan, and you’re doing so much interesting work, you’ve been doing it for a long time, you’re very well known in the space so I want to take this opportunity for me to get to know you a little bit more. We’ve seen each other many times during the years but kind of want to learn about your background, how you got interested in this profession very early on, and the lifecycle of this profession, have our audience to kind of get a better sense of who you are, what your trajectory is, and I’m sure we’ll talk about some really exciting things around cutting-edge coaching research and I think more importantly at the moment technology and how it will reshape coaching and enable a new era, both for coaching but it seems like for humanity as well.

Jonathan: Let’s hope so. Where would you like to start, Alex?

Alex: Let’s start with you. Take me through the journey of your career. How did you get started? I’m sure your dreams of maybe being a policeman or a fireman or something like that turned into coaching research and practice.

Jonathan: Well, over the years, I’ve done quite a few different. You’re right, as a boy, I wanted to be a football player, an astronaut, a policeman, and as a grown-up, I’ve turned out to be a psychologist. And early in my career, or earlier in my career, I worked in the not-for-profit sector, worked as a chief executive for a mental health charity, and during that time really was when I started to engage in that leadership role as an interest in coaching and we’re talking about the late 1990s, coaching was beginning to be a thing in the UK and I got curious about maybe this was something that could be useful for a leader and may be useful for an organization, particularly an organization that was very egalitarian, that tried to leverage the talents of all its people. So that was the culture of the charity. And so I started in the late 1990s doing a course in coaching. In those days, there really in the UK wasn’t very much in the way of professional training. There wasn’t much in the way of accreditation, at least that I was aware of. And so I started with an online course and they sent you the course through the mail and you read the little booklets, you completed the exercises, and then I started to test those out at work, coaching my leadership team, and then having completed the course, the rest of the leadership team went on that program and we started to bring coaching in across the organization with an ambition of making it part of the organization’s culture. And as I was doing that, I also was then interested much more in developing my psychological career, and at that time, encountered somebody who was at PwC and they said, “Why don’t you come and join us?” and so I moved across from that chief exec role to a role at PwC, did some time there, moved across to a role in IBM and then a couple of other consultancies. And as that period of time developed through the early 2000s into around about 2005, 2006, coaching was becoming more established, people were interested in coaching, we were starting to use coaching as consultants, with clients here in the UK, and because I had had some training because I was relatively early into that area of practice, I started to take the lead in some of those organizations in providing coaching and then starting to develop other team members in helping them to build their coaching skills and then leading the coaching practice. It then led me to an area of curiosity, it’s like, “Well, it’s the research from a psychologist, what’s the evidence around this?” and as I looked around, there was the APA’s Consulting Psychology journal that had published a few case studies, a few surveys, tips and insights from practitioners, but really it wasn’t evidence as we might consider it from other areas of psychological practice. So I thought, “Well, actually, I need to contribute to this,” and that started me on the road of doing a PhD as a mature student and I joined the university program in doctoral programs, started to focus on coaching research, and about halfway through that program, the head of the business school said, “Why don’t you set up a program for us? We want to have a coaching program,” so I transitioned across from the consultancy company that I was working at to then get engaged in the program development and then build a program out of that university, completed my PhD, and at that stage, moved across to set up my own consultancy business. Did that for a while and then sold that business to retire and thinking, “Well, it’s great, I’ve transitioned out of this,” and we’re working predominantly in safety critical environments and taking coachee in to construction, oil and gas pipeline, and other areas where there was a high level of consideration about safety and about risk and the importance of decision making. And coaching can play a very important part there. And I thought, “Well, what am I gonna do next? I might do a little bit of coaching practice,” and a colleague said, “Why don’t you come along and join me at Henley?” that was somebody I trained maybe 15 years before and I took up a part-time role that became full-time at Henley and we’ve built out the coaching programs. When I joined, I think we had about 150 students, we’re now probably one of the leading institutions in the world in providing executive coach training, 600-plus students coming through a year who are typically senior leaders in organizations who themselves are looking to transition. Also providing supervision, team coach training, and training for managers, so a wide range of coach provision, coach training provision, and, of course, the center of what a university does is research so I’ve been working with some really fabulous colleagues like Rebecca Jones and others in helping us take forward the whole research agenda, the evidence base for coaching. Does coaching work? How does it work? What can it tell us about when best to use it? How best to deploy it? And over that time, been very lucky to collaborate with a whole host of people in organizations, like yourself, but also other institutional researchers as we start to collaborate, which is always the best way of doing research, number of people coming together, bringing different ideas, adding together the insights that we have, and also working with professional bodies. And then I took a step out because I’ve spent most of my career some of the time in academic institutions, some of it in organizations, and some of it in consulting, to then step into an organization who was providing coaching, so I had a fabulous time at CoachHub. And then most recently, I’ve moved across to EZRA, so I’ve had an unusual opportunity of working at two of the three leading digital coaching providers and helping them think through some of the challenges of democratizing coaching. So it’s been an amazing and fascinating journey, really, over those years, coming from working as a leader and manager in organizations through consulting through building psychological programs, building the research, and then back into turning that evidence and research into deployment for organizations so that they can utilize coaching. And I’m still doing the research so I’ve got a number of projects on the go that maybe we’ll talk about today. 

Alex: I’m looking forward to talking about that. Thank you for sharing your journey. There’s so many exciting things to discuss today. You highlighted many of them already, but before we get there, I just wanted to ask you, why is it do you think that coaching has so quickly emerged as a full-fledged profession and tool for human and organizational development? I mean, as humanity evolves, things tend to develop faster. It takes a very long time for something to happen and then things start happening very quickly. When I look at the emergence of coaching as a serious endeavor and how quickly it has morphed into something very fundamental for organizational life and definitely something that uplifts individuals as well at a scale that is very impressive. It’s grown very, very quickly. What is it about coaching, you think, that has been driving this kind of furious pace of innovation and deployment of coaching overall? What is it about coaching that is so relevant? 

Jonathan: Well, that’s a great question and I’m going to talk about the zeitgeist, but let me start by talking about the fact that I don’t think coaching is new. If you read many of the coaching books or you listen to professional organizations, they say, “Hey, coaching started in…,” and they identified their contribution as when coaching started. So the ICF or the MCC or maybe some of the older grandfathers and grandmothers in the whole coaching industry will say, “Well, it’s 1973 and I started working with a client and I invented coaching,” or you read some of those consultancy books as though the idea just fell into their head. And the evidence would challenge that. The evidence tells us that we can go back to the early 1900s. So there are articles in peer-reviewed journals, 1911, 1913, 1920s, 1930s, where talk about the role of coaching, where you encourage people to reflect to develop their own insights, and they collaborate, they work with somebody who’s working alongside them. So we’ve got evidence that goes back more than 100 years and I think that actually goes back further than that. We might not have written records but probably coaching goes back to prehistory. When we look at indigenous societies, there are many examples where if you look at that indigenous group, they are using a variety of conversational tools to pass on knowledge. They weren’t relying on a handbook that some academic has produced or some guru has written to share their pearls of wisdom. Knowledge was conversational and we can use a directive style, you can tell people what to do, but you can also encourage them to think for themselves. And why coaching has taken off, I think it’s the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist has two particular factors. One of those is we’re living in dynamic times. It’s a period of time where there is significant change, significant variety. That was also true for indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples, early prehistory civilizations were not settled. They moved from valley to valley, they moved from environment to environment, the seasons changed, the valley changes, you didn’t just go to the apple tree that you had planted 50 years before to pick the apples when it was October, it was a different valley, it was a different apple tree. Maybe there weren’t apple trees in that valley. Maybe you need to be hunting rabbits or deer or something else. So, those groups of traveling people will have looked for criteria. What are the criteria they need to be thinking about to identify food sources at this time of year in this type of environment? And coaching is really powerful for moving from one environment to another, which is why it’s popular today, it’s great in dynamic environments, and probably, no written record, but probably those dynamic environments of indigenous peoples or prehistory peoples who are moving also were using a conversational style of coaching alongside directive approaches. The second zeitgeist that I would highlight is that we’ve become as a society over the last 30 to 40 years very focused on us as the individual. We’ve moved away from the society, the collective group. We’re now very interested in my best life, “How can I be the best? How can I be happy? What is satisfaction for me? How do I achieve my goals?” Less about “we and us” and more about “I and me.” And coaching plays very much into that agenda of I and me achieving my best life, achieving my goals. So I think that that has fitted in with that growth of the humanistic movement, the focus on the individual, and also fitting into that dynamic environment. Now, we’re also starting to see a little bit of hint maybe that’s beginning to change. I’m hopeful that it is and that change is the importance of us as a collective, not just me as an individual, that our success, our ability to survive on this planet, relies not on me having a great time, not on me achieving my goals, but on we and us, how do we transition our global economy to one that is sustainable? How do we manage collectively climate change? Because if I do that by myself, that isn’t going to make a difference. We need to agree ways collectively to do this and we need to think about ways that we interact. We know this is true in organizations, that success of organizations really is to do with the idea of the Great Leader, that 1950s, 60s, 70s, maybe even 80s idea of one great man has disappeared, is disappearing, and instead, what we know is we want multiple talents, diverse ideas, and teams coming together to share those ideas in different ways that appeal to different customers, different environments, different cultures, and then bringing them together in a shared consensus as a group, as a team, to then deliver them. And we need to move from the organization to doing that at a societal level, not just as a national level, but a global level. And maybe team coaching can play a part in that transformation agenda as we move from “I and me” that dominated maybe the early parts of the 2000s and dominated the 90s and maybe the 80s, but as we move into the 2030s, we and us should, could become more important.

Alex: Absolutely. Thank you for taking us through that historical origin. I agree that there’s something fundamental about coaching and human nature and I think we’ve finally found a way to make it more commercially available, understanding scientifically what works, what doesn’t work, and it’s an exciting time. And the emergence of coaching as a full-fledged profession coincides with these developments in technology that are accelerating innovation at a pace that, frankly, is almost too much. I think the pace of innovation and this acceleration in the modern world is both exciting but also I think it’s challenging from a business perspective, from a societal perspective, from a political-governmental perspective. But it’s also quite interesting for people that are — kind of humanness, people-oriented people that are drawn to this coaching profession and suddenly you’re starting to see how does this evolution and innovation and we talk about AI a lot, how is AI going to reshape the way we think about coaching? From a research perspective, I can see so many incredible pathways to collect data, especially with the emergence of the digital coaching platforms, so much easier to collect data at scale. It’s just there’s a plethora of research opportunities to really bring the field forward in terms of our evidence-based approaches, which is super exciting, but at the same time, there’s proliferation of technology that could supplant the human connection and I’m sure there’s going to be many different approaches. Some companies will take a human-centered approach and leverage technology to optimize results. Some companies will try to get a combination of AI coaching and content drip and things like that to be able to make coaching more inexpensive. But there’s concerns around is that even coaching? And what is coaching? What is not coaching? I remember having many, many fun conversations with David Peterson over a nice bottle of wine around what is coaching and what is not coaching. So, we’re not drinking wine right now but I’d love for us to discuss that a little bit. What’s coming up for you, as I’m talking about some of the challenges and opportunities that technology in its very accelerated form is bringing into the field of coaching?

Jonathan: Well, we can see that pattern of change, again, happening over history, that isn’t anything new, we might say the pace of change is quicker and there is certainly a technological revolution. And I think that you’re right, Alex. Where we’re going to end up is in a place of diversity and diversity of provision and diversity that gives choice to consumers. And I’ve been talking about the idea for the last two or three years that we’re going to move to a, what I might describe as a coach in your pocket. You’ll be able to have on your phone a coach that is driven by AI. Maybe this particular phone, you might then connect to your Apple Pro or your Meta glasses and with a codecs be able to see a 3D version of the coach that you’ve selected. And that coach doesn’t have to be physically present. It could be a video recording codecs, recording of that individual, which means —

Alex: Could be could be MarshallBot. You know about MarshallBot, could be MarshallBot. 

Jonathan: It could be MarshallBot, so you have Marshall Goldsmith, but it’s not the bot, you feel as though through your glasses, you’re physically in the presence of Marshall, or Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or Nelson Mandela, or Mother Teresa. Clearly, there’s an ethical question there about consent of those images being represented 3D image of that individual, but sitting behind them, you can capture that individual’s voice and break that down into the individual phonics and, driven by an AI bot, that AI bot, maybe following different coaching methodologies, so not only you pick the individual but you’re going to pick maybe the methodology that they’re working to. So Donald Trump, solution-focused coaching and it sounds like Donald, it looks like Donald following a solution-based approach to helping you through the issue or challenge that you want to raise in the moment in 3D. So we might see that type of offer emerging. We might have a very simple text-based AI model. Maybe you wake up at 2 a.m. in the morning, you’ve got a problem, you just want a few moments to think it through and develop a plan. You pick up your phone, a quick text, five-minute conversation, maybe it’s spoken, and then the machine types the text and produces the text back to you, maybe you just type it in, could be a solution. We’re likely to carry on digital coaching platforms that are already starting to integrate AI, so we have the human coach delivering this supplemented by AI, we’ve got the emergence of supervision platforms using AI to help you to analyze your coaching conversation. What’s the percentage of the voice? What’s the percentage of open questions? What methodology are you following? And giving you some feedback to help you to reflect so I can see it enhancing the human coach and, of course, we’re also going to be likely to provide Zoom-based conversations where an individual coach working as a sole entrepreneur connects with an individual client, we’re likely to have face to face, but at the other end of the spectrum, what we’re also seen is a movement away from technology. If you have spent, as I have today, eight hours in digital meetings, then you might think, “Oh, what do I wanna do? I know, I’m gonna spend another hour talking to Alex as he drinks his lovely tea and I drink my tea, or maybe what I wanna do is go for a walk.” And I could have outdoor coaching with the coach walking side by side exploring the natural world, getting some exposure to, in the UK, a bit of rain, or, if you’re in Los Angeles, a little bit of sunshine. So we’re seeing the emergence of these outdoor coaching environments, the eco coaching, and I’m probably seeing also an enhancement of face to face use of creativity so a wide variety of using art, collage, music, poetry, dance coming in to the application of coaching. So what we’re seeing as coaching begins to move into a phase of maturity is a thousand flowers blooming of different varieties, different flavors, different ways of coaching, different clients, different challenges, different times of day, maybe personal versus work, maybe short versus long, preference for online and immediate access, a preference for different environments such as an outdoor space, all of that choice, that blossoming of that choice, I think is good for coaching and good for individual clients. And the challenge, of course, is what are the things that are just fads and fashion and what is the evidence that particular types of interventions really do add value? Because what we will see is we have choice, we get some high quality choices and we’ll also see some choices where really there’s no evidence to support this and that’s the area of curiosity that I have. I love diversity but we also need to say where is that intervention going to work best and which interventions work and which ones don’t. And as coaching is unregulated, there is no scientist, there is no professional regulator saying, “Actually, hold on a minute, this treatment for that illness that you have got, no, we’re not gonna give that drug a license, we’re not gonna evaluate it.” Anybody can offer anything, and as a result of that, you get some great stuff and you get some twaddle and nonsense and we really as researchers need to be stepping into that space to evaluate all of those to identify the good from the poor. 

Alex: Jonathan, that’s all very interesting and you’re describing, I think, what’s going to be kind of like the cutting edge of coaching in the next many years, and I think we can see some really exciting potential opportunities in the horizon. We see the horizon moving closer as well and some challenges as well but, today, we can focus on what’s exciting. And I do see an overlap between research and practice being able to kind of be overcome. Traditionally, just it’s been hard to do coaching research and to give coaching data at scale but now that you have technology as the medium in which coaching happens, that really opens up a lot of doors. So what are some of the most exciting themes for you as I think you’re certainly one of the most prolific coaching researchers and you actually, I think, might be the coaching researcher with the most articles and mentions out there. Is that accurate? 

Jonathan: How do you measure those things? So I’ve done about 100 peer-reviewed papers that are coaching related and about 40 books, of which probably about 35, maybe just less than that, are coaching related. So I have four new books coming out this year. And just I’m curious, I love the area of practice, and, in many ways, I start focusing on a topic because I don’t understand it, I don’t know about it. And so the research has become my way of learning and understanding a topic. My area at the moment has been focusing on producing more randomized controlled trials. So my criticism going back really to the early 2000s has been we didn’t have the science and we needed to do more randomized controlled trials, we needed to have more meta-analysis studies and we needed to have higher quality studies. And you allude here to one of the challenges that we as researchers face is that coaching practitioners are typically practitioners. They don’t always want to engage in the research, they often don’t want to help the research, because it’s tricky. It takes time. What’s in it for them? And on the other side, how do you persuade a client organization or an individual that they want to complete data that has nothing in it for them either? So, generally, the studies that have been done have often been individual studies. They’re usually small groups, they’re often qualitative so we have endless amounts of studies where you ask six participants what they felt about their felt experience or make sense of their coaching and how it’s contributed to them. So there’s lots of that work and that was very helpful in the early 2000s. It gave us the sense, it helped us to build some theory, but, really, we’ve done very little as a profession in building out the quantitative data, and I’m a qualitative researcher so I want to start with qualitative, but the gap that we have in our industry is around quantitative. And you’re right, the growth of digital coaching companies or larger coaching providers does offer the opportunity to collect that data, does offer the opportunity to share, but the anxiety that I think many organizations have is, well, this is insights that we could keep secret to us that gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace. So, instead, an encouragement really for all of the providers to share, to take knowledge forward collectively, because as we do that, we deepen the ocean. If we’re all fighting about how much progress we’re making in the harbor of coaching, in the little area as we sail from one side to the other, it’s a very constrained fight, it’s a very constrained competition. But if we allow ourselves through opening and sharing to set sail into the ocean, the ocean of availability of many different organizations and many different leaders and managers who could benefit from coaching, then the water breadth and depth grows infinitely and opportunities for greater differentiated, greater growth of the marketplace and that comes by us sharing that knowledge, collaborating between bodies, providers, universities, professional bodies, sharing knowledge to build confidence in individuals, in confidence in organizations about when and how to deploy coaching and the benefits that it offers individuals, managers, leaders, or organizations. And we have a long, long way to go. Those markets even in the US and in Germany, in the UK that are relatively mature, we have just scratched the surface. We are really talking about 10 and 15 percent, whereas if you look at Japan, Korea, Africa, South America, we’re probably at 5 percent of the opportunity there that coaching can make a contribution. And so it’s that collaboration, it’s building confidence, building understanding, and coming together to share research and insight that will grow that market and that turns organizations that might be 10 or 100 million or 300 million turnover into organizations that are turning over a billion in revenue, and equally grows the overall number of coaches who can contribute to this market and contribute to organization and individual growth and development. So I see this huge potential and evidence and research is a key building block in growing our profession, its maturity and the understanding of clients, and quantitative evidence of impact is where we need to be focusing next. 

Alex: Yeah, that’s always been the holy grail or the next horizon of coaching but now the mode of delivery facilitates that and, of course, there’s challenges, as you mentioned. There’s some critical data that organizations are pulling from the coaching practices and you want to be careful around who owns that data, issues around data portability, if you go to another company, it’s like who owns the data? Is that the coachee? Is it the organization? Is it the coaching vendor? I mean, there’s a very intricate web of relationships and very powerful data. I mean, the coaching data is uniquely important. A lot of data that is captured through the performance management process is tainted, in a way, by the process itself. I’ve always been very interested in the fact that coaching data typically these days comes from like this growth-oriented approach. It’s just unique in kind of the way that data is sourced, the type of data you can source so there’s going to be some very, very interesting things happening in the field. But like everything in the modern, I don’t know if you want to call it postmodern, post postmodern, whatever we are right now, there’s these webs of relationships. You were talking about kind of how Western societies are very individualistic. Interestingly enough, that is clashing against a background of increasing systemic integration and when I look at the world today, a lot of what is, I think, frustrating in many ways, it’s the lack of true cohesive integration in these systems. We have so many systems that are playing together but what’s hard is to integrate those. To me, coaching actually, that’s kind of part of the role that that plays in society is the integration and the alignment of not only individuals with their own goals, aspirations, challenges, but also when you’re doing that at scale in organizations, that has tremendous power and then organizations influence systems, but it starts getting super complex. So, going back to where I started with this, that data ownership piece of it, I find fascinating and it’s something we haven’t seen in coaching before but now coaching is so technology dependent, it is certainly interesting. Is this something that you pay attention to? What are some of your thoughts around data ownership, privacy, confidentiality? Those have been at the core of coaching thought for many, many years, but in this age of technology, kind of it raises the bar exponentially to how we think about it. 

Jonathan: What comes to mind as you’re speaking is the question marks that were raised about psychologist practice during the Afghan and Iraq conflicts and should psychologists have collaborated, joined in, advised, participated, your choice of words, in some of the practices that were going on during those periods of conflict. And I think we’ve got some real ethical dilemmas as researchers and psychologists, in particular, about the way the data is collected, the way data is held and analyzed, and that partly reflect of the different cultural environments that different organizations are growing up in and their view about data. So, as examples, in the European Union, the focus on data is much more on the individual citizen and the individual citizen holds data and so when we come to AI regulation, the European Union places the citizen at the center of the regulatory process. And we can contrast that with the United States, where, and it varies, I appreciate, across different states, but there is much more focus on the needs of the organization and placing the organization at the heart of the data process and at the heart of AI regulation. So how do we regulate in a way, I be the US perspective, in a way that supports the development of technology and the growth and success of those businesses? And then we have a third area of regulation or a third philosophical approach to this and this is based within China. China’s view about the importance of the state and of the party and the responsibility the state has to itself and the growth of us all as represented by the party and so the state and the party are the people who are held at the center of that and when regulation is considered and when data is collected, it’s that lens that the legislators are looking through in comparison to the US and the European Union. So those different models, we can debate which is right and wrong, but they are as they are, has leads to different outcomes, and also creates different environments for TikTok or different providers for the way they then set up their data collection and the way that they are holding and managing that data. Now, I come from a European Union perspective and that means that I have question marks about some of the other practices and those practices might benefit the state, they might benefit organizations, but that will lead to different outcomes in those different environments and it creates challenges for those people who are outside of that regulatory, legislative regime. So if you’re an American provider providing it to China, that creates some interesting complexities that would be not present if you were in Texas providing it to Kansas.

Alex: Certainly. So many interesting areas that are emerging. So, as we’re coming up to kind of the latter part of our episode, getting ready to close out the episode, as sad as it makes me, what are you the most excited about in the field of coaching? There’s so much going on, what is the thing that drives you every morning when you’re doing this cutting edge work? What is it? 

Jonathan: Wow. So we’ve got another hour, is that right, Alex, for me to talk about this?

Alex: Of course. 

Jonathan: So let me mention three things. So the first of those is technology, AI, digital, and other technological tools so VR and augmented reality and how that will shape and influence the development of coaching and the plurality that we will see emerge. Of course, the predictions that I’ve talked about in an episode like this, no doubt, when someone listens to this episode in 2028, they will just laugh because whenever you try and predict the future, there’s only one thing that you can guarantee about predicting the future is you’re going to be wrong. So it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. We can speculate and speculate a little bit as I’ve chatted to you but I’m super excited about technology and the fabulous growth of digital platforms, how they’re experimenting with AI, and the emergence of Meta and other providers into the virtual reality space. And the second thing that I’m excited, curious about is how coaching is proliferating in this variety of different ways of delivering. So, I really enjoy outdoor coaching. I’m fascinated by colleagues who are working in different modalities, so poetry and dance and collage and there’s some really great work that’s being done there. And the third aspect that I’m seeing happening that excites me is how coaching is being taken into other areas of practice. So, one of the books that I have coming out in this year is around health and wellbeing and how coaching can contribute to improving health outcomes, how it can contribute to wellbeing and what’s the evidence and research in this area. But it’s also being taken into prisons, being taken into educational institutions, it’s being taken into a whole variety of different arenas. We might have started in the workplace and it’s been quite frequently used maybe different ways in sport, but we’re seeing that spread coaching to help people in a multiplicity of environments and that is exciting too. And there are great research opportunities in each of those three areas for researchers, for practitioners to collaborate with professional bodies, providers, and researchers to help us understand where coaching can really make a difference, to help people, to help teams, and to help organizations flourish, and to help us as humanity to sustain and grow as a species and making sure as part of the solution but making sure that over the next 50 or 150 years that we’re still here.

Alex: Love it. We’re definitely going through a critical point of humanity’s development so we hope that we’re still here in 150 years and we hope that coaching has some sort of role in making that happen. I love that. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today. Enjoy the rest of your evening over there in rainy London and looking forward to staying connected.

Jonathan: Great connecting with you, Alex. Have a great day.