How does my prior career experience affect my relationships with coaching clients?

There is currently limited understanding of “the role that a coach’s background plays on the outcome and quality of the coaching intervention” (Athanasopoulu & Dopson, 2015, p.30). This report provides details of two exercises that explored how one coach’s own non-coaching experience affected his coaching and relationships with clients. First, recordings and transcripts of individual coaching sessions with three clients were subjected to detailed self-reflection; and second, a methodology informed by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was employed to analyse semi-structured interviews with the same clients. <br /><br />The self-reflection exercise suggested that the coach’s non-coaching experience had a notable influence on his coaching interventions. His understanding of the work situation, corporate mores and culture, and management and leadership issues were identified as being especially influential. In addition, the exercise evinced that the coach’s own confidence and how he exercised care for clients were affected by his non-coaching experience as well as, potentially, his clients’ trust in him and estimations of his credibility. The analysis of client interviews produced four themes and suggested that his non-coaching experience was important to the clients’ appraisal of their coach and his coaching and enhanced their estimations of his credibility, their trust in him, and their assessment of the value of the coaching. <br />The generalisability of the results of these exercises is limited by their scale and methodologies, but it is suggested that they may be useful in providing insights to other practitioners with similar backgrounds working with similar clients in similar contexts. <br /><br />