Articles

In September 2022, I gave an interview to the London based Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) about their systemic team coaching diploma training that I completed in 2021 as well as about my experiences as an executive and team coach. I found it a valuable time to reflect on the past 15 years of my career, and I’m happy to share it in this blog post.

In this article, I write about the interaction of coaching with psychology, summarizing the key approaches, methodologies and tools that can be found in both coaching and psychological interventions with the aim of demonstrating that coaching has strong roots in the various disciplines of psychology. I will also present an overview of where coaching can be positioned compared to other helping professions.

“Ruling a great nation is like frying small fish.
When they are over stirred, they will break into pieces.”
Lao-ce: Tao Te Ching

The biennial Global Coach Conference was held this year in Prague. The two and a half day event, organized by the International Coach Federation (ICF), was impressive and impeccably organized, hosting 1000 participants from about 70 countries. Since I am relatively new to the world of ICF, having been a member for only a year, I looked at the conference as an opportunity to see and understand who is working in this profession, what they represent and how the profession is going globally.

“In my view, a good leader can be defined in two ways. He’s capable of self-reflection – and not only capable but also actively doing it -, and people are ready to follow him. They set out to follow him, but he doesn’t need to look back to see if they are behind him. Toxic leaders, however, do not look back. They believe they are good leaders, and people are willing to follow them, but they actually do it out of fear of them.”

In the fall of 2012, I started working as a Senior Program Manager at Vodafone Hungary. At that time I had no idea about VUCA. A few weeks later, I noticed that I became exhausted very quickly psychologically; my first thing was to go to sleep after work. Having just come back from a six months long retreat in India and Nepal, my nervous system was under shock by the constant flood of information, organizational and project-level changes.

I rarely have the chance to attend lectures that cover all the topics that are professionally relevant to me, so I was particularly happy to hear a presentation by organizational psychologist, Julia Füredi dr., at the September club of the Hungarian Project Management Association in Budapest. She started her presentation with shocking statistics: 93% of organizational transformation projects fail today.

“I’m not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I’m afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” The ancient Greek conqueror, Alexander the Great was quoted by an Indian friend, Mithun, when I asked him what makes a good leader. We see both versions as management consultants, coaches and employees: how a competent, courageous leader leads a humble team to success, and how a leader who is weak, ego driven or incompetent breaks down a high-performing one.

Like all good coaches and coaching schools, I also try to give a definition of coaching. An American coaching webinar I attended recently also started by sharing how we tell our family members and clients what coaching is all about. I was just about to explain what coaching means to me, when one of the course participants, a lady working in the Silicon Valley, turned to me and asked “hey, Julia isn’t it a Hungarian word?”