Coaching Expertise
Six practical steps for every effective coach
This book will enable you to develop in-depth coaching expertise. Effective coaches all want to continuously build their skills to help their clients more. Yet widespread evidence shows that although most professionals do initially develop rapidly, more experience does not lead to better outcomes for clients. Coaching expertise uses a scientifically proven form of professional development called deliberate practice to help you greatly develop your skills. It provides a purposeful, systematic method that contrasts sharply with traditional training. It is an enhancement process that is already used widely in sport, medicine, martial arts, psychotherapy, music and many more areas. This is the first book on how to use this approach to help coaches dramatically improve their practice.
'Coaching expertise: Six practical steps for every effective coach' is an easy-to-read informative and very practical guide for coaches. It is written for those who wish to develop excellence in their coaching in a way that goes beyond learning the new bright shiny skill or technique. Written by a highly experienced, internationally recognised author and coach, this book is a very useful and engaging resource for all coaches who wish to develop their capability.
Reviews
Coaching expertise' is the antidote to mindless coaching hours accumulation. In its place Iain McCormack offers the reader six steps to enhance our coaching skills. At the core is deliberate practice: that is mindful practice, observing, reflecting, seeking feedback and most of all a commitment to continuous improvement. If you are a coach seeking to get better, in service of your clients, 'Coaching expertise’ offers you a pathway towards the uplands of high-performance coaching.
Professor Jonathan Passmore
Henley Business School & EZRA Coaching
This book is a step-by-step guide for professional coaches, whether life, career, or executive coaches, to develop and improve their skills, with the help of very practical tools and tips. In the very changing world of work, and life more generally, coaches play an important part of supporting us all. This is a must read for all coaches in their professional development.
Professor Sir Cary Cooper
CBE, University of Manchester
There are so many useful lessons for everyone in this book - whether you're just starting out as a coach, or you've been a coach for a long time. I particularly valued the use of case studies, reflective questions, along with examples of how to use the six steps of deliberate practice. The best books, for me personally, offer up helpful tools that I can incorporate easily and immediately. Iain's book provides this. For example, as someone who is a big fan of scales both in my coaching practice, and for my own personal development, this book provides some helpful scales such as the Coaching Session Rating Scale. And the pièce de résistance is the example 15-week development plan showing how to engage in deliberative practice. This book is brilliant and should be an essential for any credible coach dedicated to continuous improvement of their own practice. I cannot recommend it enough. My copy will be as well-thumbed as my copy of Iain's book on Reflective Practice!
Dr Hayley Lewis
Chartered Coaching Psychologist
Schema Coaching
Overcoming Deep-seated Challenges
Schema Coaching is an informative guide for coaches, providing readers with a powerful and evidence-based approach to dealing with persistent personal difficulties. Schema coaching has a strong foundation in schema therapy that has been used in many parts of the world for over 20 years as a highly successful approach for helping clients with anxiety and depression, as well as more severe personality disorders. The book provides clear practical guidelines, illustrative case studies and reflective practice exercises to those who wish to implement a range of schema techniques when coaching with the non-clinical population. The book is in two parts, the first is primarily designed for coaches that do not have clinical, counselling or psychotherapy training and the second includes more advanced techniques which are designed for coaches with this type of training or qualifications. It also clearly sets out the ethical steps any coach should undertake before using therapeutic techniques with a client. This will be an informative and engaging resource in a new and extremely important area of coaching, suitable for coaches, coaching psychologists, coaching educators, and anyone with a general interest in this topic.
Reviews
Iain McCormick is a master of schema coaching and he brings this to his new book. It translates the evidence-based approach originally designed for clinical clients to a non-clinical population. A fantastic contribution to the advancement of coaching.
Jonathan Passmore
Professor, Executive Master Coach, Author
What a remarkable coaching reference book. Rather than quick fix maxims, Iain grounds his coaching ideas as evolutions of the past, with innovative actions, tools, and cases. Schema coaching offers depth, processes, and technique to ensure coaching impact.
Dave Ulrich
Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Partner, the RBL Group
Dr McCormick has done a wonderful job with this book; bringing the most powerful elements of Schema Therapy practice into the coaching context. It is full of schema techniques and strategies that have been shown to create deep change for clients.
Rob Brockman
Co-Director of SchemaTherapyTrainingOnline.com, Schema Therapist, Author
This is essential reading for ethically minded coaches and coaching psychologists who want to explore and confidently use schema coaching. Its dual-part structure ensures relevance, offering insights suitable for practitioners with diverse backgrounds. It provides a rich resource for coaches and academics.
Andrea Giraldez-Hayes
Coaching Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Author
Reflective Practice for Coaches
A Guidebook for Advanced Professional Development
This practical evidence-based guide to running Reflective Practice professional development programmes provides a dynamic and engaging resource for a wide range of coaches.
Reflective Practice is a proven learning and development approach that involves consciously and deliberately thinking about experiences to develop insights and apply these within coaching practice. McCormick argues that it is vital that coaches regularly reflect on their work to develop and grow professionally, and this book provides a definitive and rich source of material on how and what to reflect on. Topics include how to reflect as an individual coach; working in pairs and small groups; applying reflective practice in a training context; and how to run advanced group sessions for coaches. The book features a wide range of practical workbook exercises to challenge the reader’s current practice and extend their capability, as well as an evidence-based guide to enhancing skills in recently developed areas such as Unified Protocol Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Internet Supplemented Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Using Schema Therapy with Mindfulness Techniques.
Written by a highly experienced executive coach, this book is full of practical and effective ways to become more capable and proficient. It is essential reading for any career, life or executive coach who wishes to enhance their coaching capability through reflective practice, as well as for coaching training organisations, senior executive coaches offering sessions for other coaches, and academic institutions offering coaching qualifications.
Reviews
Coaching has grown exponentially over the last decade, and coaches are in need of professional development as much as their clients. Dr. McCormick’s book is a step-by-step approach for professional development for coaches using ‘reflective practice’. It is a very well written, well-organised and an easy to follow guide to help coaches develop their coaching skills as they discover more about themselves from the experience of their practice. This is a ‘must buy’ book for anyone engaged in coaching.
Professor Sir Cary Cooper
CBE, University of Manchester, UK
Without adaption, we atrophy. Without learning, we never improve. Without reflection, we minimize learning from our experiences. Through this marvellous trip-tik of various approaches and models of coaching and psychotherapy, McCormick raises crucial distinctions in practice that can help clients. As professionals, coaches and therapists are paid for their time. Such performance pressure often suppresses reflective practices. This book helps to remind us what can help.
Richard Boyatzis
PhD, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University, USA, Co-author of the international best seller, Primal Leadership and the breakthrough book Helping People Change
Reflective practice is essential for coaches' development and good practice, and it is becoming a recognised domain of expertise in its own right. This book explores a good range of definitions, approaches and tools, offering the right balance between theory and practice. It also provides a wide range of tools and exercises, inviting readers to try different techniques and challenge their thinking and practice. As an academic, researcher and coaching psychology practitioner and supervisor, I highly recommend this valuable book for trainee and professional coaches and supervisors.
Dr Andrea Giraldez-Hayes
Chartered psychologist and director of the MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology at the University of East London
Reflective practice is essential for coaching practitioners. It helps us learn and develop our skills, knowledge and understanding as we join our coachees on their coaching journey. Dr Iain McCormick’s workbook is packed with techniques, case studies and reflective practice exercises. It is an excellent step by step guide to enhance reflective practice of both trainee and experienced coaches.
Stephen Palmer PhD
Professor of Practice at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and Director of the National Academy of Coaching Psychology Ltd
The Reflective Practice for Coaches: A Guidebook for Advanced Professional Development is packed full of opportunities to learn more about the application of approaches to reflective practice, accompanied by practical and insightful exercises. This offers the potential to enhance the work of coaches working across different settings and contexts, from the beginner to the more experienced practitioner. The book is timely, engaging, practical, informative and straightforward in its contribution. This offers a key resource for coaches, coach supervisors and anyone interested in enhancing their understanding and doing more around evidence-based approaches to reflective practice.
Dr Siobhain O’Riordan
Chartered Psychologist, UK
Whether you are an experienced coach, or you're new, you will get something from this book. The first part of the book takes a deep dive into what reflective practice is, and provides lots of useful activities geared around helping you to develop your reflective practice. The second part of the book explores specific approaches, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and how coaches can incorporate these into practice. The case studies that Iain provides brings to life each approach, and gives ideas for how you might use these approaches in your own practice.
This is not a book that's a 'read it and then leave it to gather dust on a shelf' kind of book. This is very much a guide that is designed for you to refer to time and time again.
Dr Hayley Lewis
Chartered psychologist, Coach, Consultant, University lecturer at Birkbeck University of London, UK
Reflective practice is one of the cornerstones of personal development... Yet for too long reflective practice has been under-acknowledged and under developed in coach education and in coaching books. Iain McCormick is determined to change this and places reflection at the centre of his new book...
The book explores coaching from multiple perspectives drawing on Iain's expertise as a coach and clinical psychologist, based in New Zealand, with interesting chapters on Schema Therapy, Compassion focused, Buddhist and Cognitive Analytic techniques, but what I enjoyed most where the chapters on integration and eclectic approaches and on coaching effectiveness.
If you are looking to broaden the range of approaches you use, are interested in reflective practice or want to think about how you draw together the different approaches into a more integrated approach, this book will make for an excellent read, and hopefully deepen and broaden your own practice as a coach, leader or supervisor.
Jonathan Passmore
Executive Coach, Senior Vice President, Award winning I/O Psychologist, Consultant, Author, Professor Henley Business School, UK