Crafting the Self: How participating in coaching conversations can shape a recipient’s learning

Abstract

This research contributes to current understandings of how the process of learning unfurls temporally during coaching conversations. This experience has been obtained through first-hand lived experience, in particular, my active participation as a coachee in a series of one-to-one coaching conversations with two professional coaches. To assist in developing and enriching these understandings further I have crafted a research design with a two-stage process. And a hybrid methodology drawn from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Dialogical Methods. This approach is beneficial in enabling the complexity of self-other relationships that unfold within coaching conversations to be fully articulated. I have chosen to adopt autoethnography as a research method in stage one of this research, and interviews in stage two, respectively. Autoethnography enables a complex exploration of first-hand lived experience, providing a forum in which reflexive dialogues between self and other can emerge. Thus, allowing multiple perspectives to be heard. In stage two I have interviewed 6 professional coaches, facilitating an additional dialogue to unfold between self and others, enriching this research. Critically, within this research, the self is described as malleable and non-identical with itself, where on encountering others in external and inner dialogues it experiences challenges and struggles with the unknown and unfamiliar. Significantly, through this experience the self is transformed. Finally, this process can be understood as artistic, since this research describes an aesthetic metaphor informed by Bakhtin and Gell, in which coach and coachee - described as the recipient are actively engaged in emotionally crafting and shaping the other.