The Coaching Cafe Podcast

Coaching Philosophy!? What is it?

• Open Door Coaching

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What is your coaching philosophy? A deeper dive into the ICF Core Competency changes 

Recently, we shared the significant updates to the new ICF Core Competencies and over the coming weeks, we’ll be diving deeper into some of the key changes. Some of these updates are straightforward, others more controversial—and many invite deeper reflection from us as coaches. 

This week on the podcast, we explore a question that sits at the heart of our workplace and professional coaching: What is your coaching philosophy? 

Your coaching philosophy shapes how you show up, partner with clients, and embody the ICF Core Competencies in every conversation. It reflects your beliefs about human potential, change, and learning—and it evolves as your coaching practice grows. 

Join us for this Coaching Café Podcast as we explore: 
✔️ What a coaching philosophy is and why it matters 
✔️ How to articulate your unique coaching philosophy 
✔️ How your philosophy connects to the ICF Core Competencies and ethical practice 
✔️ Ways to reflect on and refine your philosophy as your coaching matures 

Whether you’re a new coach or an experienced practitioner, this podcast will help you reconnect with what defines you as a coach—and what guides your practice. 

NOTE: We found the defnition of Coaching Philosophy in the Glossary of the updated competencies! "The underlying theory, beliefs and principles, that guide a coach's practice and interactions with clients"

Transcripts can be found here:

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[Music] Well, it's a very good morning, a good afternoon, and for some of you a very good evening wherever you are listening to this coaching cafe either live or on your favourite streaming service. My name is Natalie Ashtar from Open Door Coaching. I am joined by the wonderful Paula Jones Hunt. Hello Paula. Hi, how you going? I'm going great. Thank you for asking, and I am excited to be back after missing coaching cafe for a couple of weeks. So thank you Paula for looking after us as we explored mental health and the link to coaching and also psychological safety in the workplace. So if you haven't picked up those cafes, I'm going to be listening to them over the weekend so you can do the same. Today we are looking at what is your coaching philosophy and a deeper dive into the ICF core competency of the changes. So before we begin, let us acknowledge the traditional onism, the custodians on the lands on which we all meet today. They continue in connection to the land, the waters, the communities of Australia, and the lands from all around the world from which they are joining us today. We have got Carroleina represented down in East Skid's land. We have KL represented. We have Wellington in New Zealand, over in Western Australia. Big representation from all around the world today. So welcome. We pay our respects to them to their elders past, present and emerging, and elders from indigenous communities from all around the world. Well today we are going to be digging into the updates to the ICF core competencies and in particular exploring the changes that were made, there were a couple or little words, well not little words, but there was a couple of words introduced into the ICF core competencies which have created a bit of a buzz around the community. So that's what we'll be looking at today, particularly the idea of coaching philosophy. If you're new to the cafe, we say welcome to you. We are all about creating a community, having shared learning experiences like this one, and having thought provoking conversations which I guarantee you, this cafe will create thought provoking conversations. So welcome back to our alumni, everyone that joins us every week. We know that you're here to have these conversations with us. And also if you're interested, we have free ICF CCEs available to you. If you are listening to this live, you'll as always stay on the end of the session and pick up your CCU. Okay, here we go. The ICF core competencies were updated recently and they were based on the 2025 Global Coaching Job Analysis. It was a 14 month process that the ICF Global went through and it was collecting data across an enormous range of evidence-based data collection, including 3,000 surveys of coaches. And the objective was to update the night 2019 core competencies to create a new set of core competencies and to bring in the involvement of the coaching industry over that period. So it identified new competencies that are now essential for coaches. They determined what was no longer relevant and it revised the existing competencies. So that's just to give a bit of a background about the update to the ICF core competencies. Now as you know, the ICF core competencies guide everything we do. They're our guiding light, they're our global practice guiding light for how we show up as coaches and our coaching practice. Of course, they're built into open to our coachings, qualifications, our certificate for an out-of-ploma, but not only that, they're built into how we all show up as coaches. So there were no main new competencies, but there were five new subcompetencies. There was updates to deliver 11 subcompetencies, one new definition and a glossary of terms. So that's just to give you an overview of what happened to the ICF core competencies, why we need to look into what the new competencies are for 2025 and beyond as well. Just a bit of an overview. All right, the big ticket items for those of you that haven't sat down and in depth or read them like I have and we all have here at OpenDoc coaching, the big ticket items were actually the introduction of working with supervisors and mentors. Being aware of coaching best practice and the use of technology, you will know if you've followed the coaching cafe, we've looked at that already with the use of AI in coaching and the influence of one's thoughts and behaviours on a client, what's emerging for the client and yourself in the moment. There was another big ticket item that talked about sharing observations, knowledge and feelings without attachment and at next week's coaching cafe, we're going to look at the concept of knowledge. It created a massive, fru-or buzz, whatever you like, hullabolo in the coaching community when the word knowledge was put into the core competencies, but we've got a different way of looking at it, so we'll do that next week. Today we're going to explore coaching philosophy and what does it actually mean? And I've got some really, hopefully, deeper insights to provide to you today that will really get you thinking and reflecting and that's our job at the coaching cafe today.[Music] All right, here we go. I am going to go full nerd alert on you, by the way, so just a bit of a warning for you. I see you chuckling there, Paula. So we're going to look at the detail and I want to go full nerd alert on you because we have very smart people on the line and it's our job to explore things in detail and to explore things not just on the surface level, but to think about things from a philosophy point of view. Here we go. So the core competency update came under, that we're talking about today, came under establishes and maintains agreement previously in the core competencies and this comparison is available from the ICF and we've stuck it on our blog as well. Establishing maintains agreement previously said explains what coaching is and not and describes the process to the client and relevant stakeholders. Great, easy. Explain what coaching is and what coaching is not and make sure you explain that to the client and the stakeholders. Now everyone that's been through our certificate for program or our diploma in leadership coaching will know that we do that at the beginning of a coaching session. We establish and maintain that agreement setting it up at the beginning, but hello, what's this? It says now in the new updates, describes one's coaching philosophy and clearly defines what coaching is and not for potential clients and stakeholders. What's this thing about one's coaching philosophy? Well, it looks kind of simple, doesn't it? Oh, just explain our coaching philosophy and then move on. There's much more to it than that and that's what I'm, as you can tell, getting very excited to share with you and getting very excited to have us think deeply about what this actually means. I actually think between you and me and the global community that we have, this has not really been very well thought about from a coaching practice point of view. And this is where I'm going to talk to you more about it. Okay, here we go. You ready? What is a coaching philosophy? Well, I'm glad you asked. And I can see you smiling, that Paula. What is a coaching philosophy? Well, I'm glad you asked. We have a massive problem, everyone, because for the research that I did, coaching philosophy is not actually defined on the ICF global website. I've looked, I've hunted. You can look and hunt more for me and send me the links that you find, but it's not defined. So here we have in the ICF core competencies, the thing saying, understanding coaching philosophy and communicate that to the client, but they haven't defined what they mean. And it just doesn't mean principles of coaching. But I did find on the website is a research article that goes back to 2009 from Peter Jackson and Elaine Cox. I'm going to put that on our blog for you. And it's the philosophical influences that are shaped coaching. And I love the article. I haven't had a lot of time to dig into all the references that the article is actually referencing, but it is a great article. And I highly recommend this group, our coaching alumni, because we're not just about coaching or about thought leadership. I highly recommend you read the article. You will find it on our blog. The article links back coaching philosophy to great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Decotar, Locke, Hume, Kant and Duy. The article, other shame, believe says that these are Western philosophers and male philosophers. So they do apologise for that. And they actually encourage looking at other great philosophers, for example, female philosophers, but also people philosophers that come from our Eastern philosophy as well. But for now, since we have only half an hour, less than that now, because I've done the warmer, we're going to stick with this article. And I'm going to help you think about philosophy in a different way, using this article. What is the coaching philosophy? Well, we first of all have to understand what is meant by philosophy. And the article from Jackson Cox lay it out really easily, fast to understand. So philosophy can be described as the investigation of knowledge or the underlying exploration of principles, underlying knowledge and the exploration of being in the world. So when we're talking about philosophy, we're not talking about coaching principles, we're talking about the investigation of knowledge. Now I can guarantee you that most people haven't actually looked into the definition of philosophy, let alone even know the definition of coaching philosophy, which I'm going to share with you. So let's do that together. Philosophy is the business of abstract thought. It's a method of interacting with and responding to questioning the world. Can you hear now where coaching might fit into the concept of coaching and philosophy? The business of abstract thought, a method of interacting and responding to and questioning the world. So the goal of philosophy is knowledge. It's about how we form our reality, not for its own sake, but by considering what and how we know what we know. And of course we're seeking to be better prepared to act effectively and to live well. So I hope you're still with me because I know we've got very smart people on the line and I know we actually have psychologists and philosophers and a great range of academics on the line. So what I'm going to try to do is break this down into practice. And as I said, I am absolutely mad, crazy, learning out on this topic. So I'm going to try to keep it simple and I'm going to try to show you how we as coaches can form our coaching philosophy. So I'm going to use the principles of Jagash, which is a person who does a lot of research in realist evaluation. It's what my actual doctorate was based on, realist evaluation. And I'm using Jagash's thoughts here. But most of you will recognise this diagram as the Hertzberg Iceberg Principle. So if we think about the iceberg principle, and you can pick this up on our website and you can pick it up on our YouTube when you actually see the video as well for those of you that are listening on your favourite streaming service. When we think about coaching philosophy, we're thinking about the iceberg. What we know is actually on the top of the iceberg. So it's what we know, it's what we can see, it's what we can hear, etc. That's on the top of the iceberg is how we show up and how we show our knowledge. But where more interested as coaches is what happens below the iceberg. And our job, philosophically, is to surface what is known and what is unknown. Does that make sense? So if we can surface as coaches what's known and unknown, then that then shows up on the actual surface of what's known. So I'm going to suggest to you that it's the interactions that we have as coaches and as coaches. We talk about the partnering and the interactions. We talk about asking our coaching, bringing our coaching principles, our coaching questions, our listening, our exploration, our reflections. And the sum of everything we are as coaches and what we know as coaches. But also it's the sum of everything the coach is known as. And I'm going to suggest to you that that's a generative process. Now what I mean by that is it's the interaction between ourselves as coaches and as coaches, the questioning, etc. And the coach is full exploration of what they know. The then surfaces stuff that is unknown and known. So let me put this into the practice. You will ask a coachy, a really amazing coaching question. And they will find out using their knowledge and some of beliefs, etc. And their exploration, they will come up with something that they never knew before. Or we're going to surface things that they knew before. But now it's coming to the surface. What do we call that? Our harm moments. What's happening is the interaction between the coach and the coachy is enabling what the researchers and the academics call a generative dance. And if I could dance that we have and we call it partnering and coaching, we call it exploration and coaching, we call it staying out of the space, allowing the coachy to find their answers. So that allowing the coachy to find their answers through our good questions that we ask. The surfaces new knowledge, it surfaces things that we never knew before. But also most excitingly when you're at the PCC level or MCC level, it surfaces new ways of being. It's the who, not just the what and the how. So with that in mind, our coaching philosophy becomes something along the lines of surfacing the who, the what and the how. In a way that is potentially known or unknown. But now because of our interactions becomes known. You're listening to the Open Door Coaching Coaching Cafe podcast. And for more information on programs run by Open Door Coaching, head to our website at opendoorcoaching.com.au. Now back to the podcast. Now I'm going to pause here because I just think this is the most, I don't know, I just think what an amazing way for me to think about what we do as coaches and for what our philosophy might be. And it goes beyond just thinking about our coaching principles. It goes beyond what we are creating through the interactions with our coach and our coachy. And it does speak to the partnering, but it speaks to it in a much more deeper level. And for some of you you might be going, oh, so that's just, we know that, don't we? We know that we know that, you know, when we ask good questions, the coachy answers the questions and they reflect and they come up with stuff that they didn't know before. We know that, right? But now we're actually putting it into a theoretical, into a philosophical position. And I think for what it's worth if we reflect on this gives us a lot more power in terms of our thinking, our roles, and it answers the question then, what is a coachy philosophy? All right. Well, you are hearing this for the first time, like many of our alumni and our great coaches on the line. I can see you nodding slowly. Can I ask you, what are your first impressions? What are your first impressions? It's a lot at 9 a.m. on a Friday morning. And I've been coming with you and I haven't seen this presentation, everybody. I am observing it and digesting it and thinking it through as we're talking. I'm wondering what was the reason that the ICF decided to add the coaching philosophy? Was there something behind it that really was driving it? Do we know? It's a good question, Paula, and I am trying to find out what made it, what made the ICF put this into the core competencies. And I'm also trying to find, extensively trying to find out, well, how do you define it? And that's actually the problem we have at the moment, I think, is I don't know the answers to those questions. So that's what we're going to be researching over the next couple of weeks so that we can bring that knowledge to the coaching cafe. But very good question. And I haven't been able to find out the answers yet. So my initial thoughts are really around, to me, this is what we talked about being nerds last week as well, is that I do love digging into something. Is that I like this idea and I think about the Cartesian coordinates and how that really asks you to dig in. And I was recently doing some coaching and the thought that came to me when I was doing the coaching with, it's amazing how one question can change a coaching conversation and have such a big impact on something that someone hadn't been thinking about. And it says, "Surface and the, it's the knowing, the what do I know, what do I not know, and even if I know what am I doing with it?" And it's that one question that really changes what someone's way of thinking and helps them to move forward, which I think is what I'm taking from what we're talking about is that linked into that coaching philosophy. Absolutely, you're on the right path there. And what I'm loving, Paul, is your reflections having heard this the first time. And we're going to offer this to everyone on our line as part of our alumni to reflect deeply and more deeply on what this means. And as Brett's jumped in here, it's important to understand what the ICF team intended when they included coaching philosophy and it may or may not be as deep as what you think. Yes, so you write, Brett, I agree with you. And it might be just, you know, talk about your coaching philosophy as in, I believe in creating people, unleashing people's potential. I believe in asking great questions and I believe that the answers come from you. So that's a beliefs and a value structure based on the core competencies and based on the core coaching principles. But if you're talking about coaching philosophy and I agree with you, it might not have been something as deep as what we are now trying to investigate, it might be something as simple as that. Well, it's not really simple, but it might be something like that. What I think our challenge is to go is actually to go a bit deeper. And if you're going to use the word coaching philosophy or philosophy, let's challenge that and let's challenge our thinking around that. So as you rightly pointed out here, let's now look at what we're talking about in terms of the actual core competencies. Let's go back to what they said it was. So they're saying under establishing maintains agreements where describing one's coaching philosophy and clearly defining what coaching is and what it's not for potential clients and stakeholders. So thinking about our surfacing, what is known and unknown, thinking about our generation of dance, our partnering with clients. That's our coaching philosophy that is our job to ask great questions, be in reflection, explore, be curious, etc, etc. And that creates a powerful interaction between us and the coachy, what they know, what they, who they are, etc, etc. It's that interaction. If that is guiding us as coaches, then that actually allows us to define what coaching is and what it's not. So what coaching is, is that powerful interaction which surfaces new ideas, beliefs, thinking, values, etc., etc. A new way of being, if you're at the PCC and MCC level, that's what coaching is. What it's not is directing and telling, counseling, psychology, telling you what you need to think, me being the subject matter expert, giving you ideas, etc., etc. So all of a sudden, hopefully you can see how, if we have a coaching philosophy, which is that exploration together, the partnering, it then we can surface our beliefs as well. We believe that the client has the answers. We believe that the client through our questioning can surface things that they hadn't surfaced before. We believe in the potential of our clients. We build a trusting relationship based on confidentiality, rapport, these kind of things. We believe in curiosity. We believe in exploration. We believe in reflection and as coaches, that's how we show up. That's actually our coaching principles and our core competencies. There are beliefs and our values which we bring and that shows what coaching is and also what it's not. So if we had a different police system that we are actually experts and our job to tell you is the coach, what we think, then we would not be coaches, would we? So what I'm offering you here is a deeper dive into what is meant by coaching philosophy. And if we would think about coaching philosophy then with those kind of ideas, then we would actually be more clearer about what coaching is and what it's not. Now I agree with you, Brett. I think it is as if you're like as simple as that. Understand what your coaching philosophy is. I think what they meant is understand what you believe and what your principles are. And based on that and understand the ICF core competencies and based on that, make sure when you are interacting with your clients, particularly upfront that you define what coaching is and what it's not. Simple, right? What I'm offering you and hopefully it's given you all a few aha moments is a deeper way to actually explore what is meant by coaching philosophy. And with that, when we come back next week, we're going to think about how does that concept of knowledge because the knowledge when the ICF put the word knowledge into the ICF core competencies, it created a massive, massive blow up in the community. A lot, a lot of people are unhappy when the ICF put the word knowledge and shares knowledge into the ICF core competencies. But if we can think about it a bit differently now based on coaching philosophy and what that word philosophy means, we can think about things completely differently. And that's our purpose of the coaching cafe. That's the purpose of why we come together to have shared, you know, when we talk about shared experiences, shared knowledge, thought, provoking experiences, that's what we're all here to do. Paula, final thoughts and comments based on that? Look, I love to be challenged and I love to have my brains scrambled a little bit and to really think differently about it. And I was thinking about that iceberg and I mean, I've seen that iceberg use for lots of different things, but in the thinking about it from that philosophical perspective, I'm just, I'm just formulating new thoughts about even talking about your coaching philosophy from that perspective of the unknown and how you would describe that part of that coaching process is that what you don't know, that you don't know yet and really trying to discover these new paths and that how do I want to be with that as well? So I love a good scramble and you've done that this morning. That was great. Thank you. And I hope everyone has had their, their thoughts scrambled because it isn't that actually what we're talking about. That's right through the interactions that we are having as a community in our thought provoking conversations, we are actually surfacing and formulating new knowledge that we never had before. And that's the really cool thing that we can do about coaching and through our conversations. We can surface new knowledge that we never had before and we could create new knowledge and that's the fundamentals of philosophy. All right off you go, all of your people, it's over to you now. I can't wait to hear what your thoughts are as we go along with this. We include all of the coaching principles and the ISEC core compasses in our cert for our diploma so you can explore that even deeper. And this month as we've been pointing out is a world mental health month. So we have one small request for you, for all you. If you love our coaching cafes, could you consider a donation to the Black Dog Institute for World Mental Health? The QR code is available there on the screen and on our website. I am walking 250 kilometres in October for, to raise awareness for World Mental Health. I am way, way under my target. So I will need some extensive coaching around this to get to, to up my targets. So, into up my performance, I am underperforming. Anyway, if you're loving our coaching cafes, we never ask for anything but perhaps this month you might consider making your donation to the Black Dog Institute here in Australia that support mental health research and their wonderful organisation. And you can do that by just simply clicking on the link there. All righty, so there you are everybody. I hope you have really enjoyed our coaching cafe to get today. I can't wait to actually share and dig deeper into these core competencies again with you next week when we explore this concept of knowledge. So there you are, hope you all enjoyed the coaching cafe. As always, we say enjoy your coaching and we look forward to catching up with you next week. It's great to be back with you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the coaching cafe podcast. You can watch the full video of this podcast on our website. I'll put a link in the show notes. We'll see you at the next coaching cafe.[Music]