SEPI draws its membership from a spectrum of therapeutic approaches. As a result, many of our members are also members of other organizations. As such, it is likely that some of the members of other organizations are also SEPI members. The SEPI Website offers the following statement regarding recent activities:
“As part of SEPI’s effort to promote dialogue, we have decided to make contact with other prominent organizations in our field.
With a first simple step of mutually li(n)king each other, our members can learn more about things other organizations are doing and their members can learn more about what SEPI is doing. What we have in mind is to address the way each specialized area of knowledge tends to grow within its own silo in the contemporary world.
We hope members of like-minded organizations enjoy becoming linked to this network of organizations that provide them additional value, as well as opportunities for enhanced dialogues, where each point of view becomes more widely familiar beyond the confines of each community alone.”
The list of organizations that are now affiliated with SEPI or are in the midst of negotiating this affiliation are remarkably diverse. Some represent traditional schools of psychotherapy or sub-specializations while others represent quite new approaches and approaches that come from non-Western sources. The potential for constructive dialogue and insight-yielding integration are great.
What is Coaching?
In moving toward an integrative model of professional coaching, a basic definition of what is and what is not coaching must be established. A primary international source of “authority” regarding professional coaching is the International Coach Foundation (ICF). The following definition is to be found on its website.
“ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.”
Together with Ken Merritt and Stephen Philipps, Bergquist offered the following distinction between professional coaching and two related human service enterprises in the first edition of our book on executive coaching (Bergquist, Merritt and Phillips, 2004). These two enterprises are counselling and consulting. The original distinction that we drew was later modified by Agnes Mura and Bergquist for their book about professional coaching (Bergquist and Mura, 2011) A summary of the distinction we offered is to be found in Appendix A.
As Bergquist and Mura not in seeking to establish a basic (if simlified) distinction, counseling is about the heart, consulting is about the head, and coaching is about the head, heart and guts in interaction. Stated with a bit more precision, we can differentiate between consulting, counseling and coaching by noting that feelings (heart) are often the focus of a counseling session, whereas consulting involves primarily the systematic reasoning through of an organizational issue based on rational analysis and review (head). Coaching issues inevitably address the interplay between feelings, reasoning and the resulting will to action. Using psychological terms, we might say that consulting is situated primarily in the domain of cognition (thinking). By contrast, counseling is situated primarily in the domain of affect (emotions). The third C, coaching, is situated at the intersection between cognition and affect, as well as in the domain of conation (behavior).