Coaching has become one of the most popular trends to hit the training and development world in the last 40 years, primarily due to its measurable increase in productivity and executive effectiveness.

Based on the proper disciplines and applications of those disciplines by seasoned practitioners, coaching has become a tool that generates an impressive return on investments for executives, individuals and organizations alike.

Here, I would like to give my two cents worth about the future of coaching as I understand it and I would like to examine a few major areas which have vital applications in the days to come. There are 3 more core components to 21^stcentury coaching that I would like to introduce to you here. (View the first three components here)

1. Integral philosophy coaching

I name it as such because the aim of any coaching strives to integrate a person’s living value systems into a functional whole. A lot of people name it casually life coaching, but I would like to make a distinction between personal coaching and integral philosophy coaching. Personal coaching would encourage a person to deal with expressive elements of their lives in various forms such as,  for example, the kind of goals a client would like to achieve in 2015, or what the top 10 values a client would like to express in the workplace are. Then, depending on the willingness of the client to list these items down and apply them to his life, he would be able to, at different levels, prioritize more accurately. This would therefore resolve some of his issues.

Integral Philosophy Coaching deals with how these values make sense for the person not only superficially and expressly, but also at the core of who they are. I am of the opinion that a good professional life coach should be able to handle both personal situations for coaching as well as integral philosophy. Going forward into the next decade, the tools that have been developed to help people prioritize things in their life will have become more prolific and commonplace. It is no longer enough for a client to make a list of their priorities but they also need to be able to harness the list in a far more profound way that affects them at the core of their daily life.

2. Training and development

Given that coaching has been measured to be probably the most effective training and development tool in the corporate world, it stands to reason that the more effective training programmes would have coaching structures embedded into them or if not, at least use coaching as a basis of evoking the individual.

Many trainers have successfully styled themselves as coaches. As a result, it has become even more imperative that those training providers are properly trained and accredited so that they might truly bring out the effectiveness that coaching as a discipline has been proven to provide.

It does not do any justice to this wonderful set of tools that has evolved should there be practitioners who claim that they are coaches but who, in reality, have only changed their titles but have not upgraded their skills. My encounters with the industry over the last 18 years have shown me that the coaches who caught the trend and invested into their skills and abilities have been able to make an impact and keep their customers happy in an increasingly demanding and competitive environment.

3. Business Owners

I have had a lot of experience coaching business owners to new levels of achievement with their companies. It is a combination of finding their integral philosophies, restructuring their thinking around their setups such that it might grow, investing in the right skill sets and creating appropriate strategies while building up the right teams of people with them at the helm, as the inspirational icon for the company.

I believe this is a necessary process that a business is able to see their key owner as a vital figure that is representative of the values they want to stand for and be recognized with. Coaching business owners is often a joy because they totally benefit from the organization they create, as well as setting up the playground which their employees and staff can enjoy working in.

These are some of the key directions that the coaches in Executive Coach International have been equipped to handle. They do represent a sense of where this market is going and we have developed systems to train individuals who wish to become the best coaches in the field.

Please feel free to raise questions and I will be happy to share more thoughts with you about those topics that are important to me.