The role of integration in coaching

As clients gain awareness and learn through coaching, a process of integration occurs in which clients embody the insight and learning that they discover and apply during coaching.

 

The process of integration involves coaches helping to make meaning through listening, questioning and reflection, and by coaches holding clients accountable to aligning their learning and insight with their current circumstances and goals/desires.

 

In taking action, clients apply and integrate their learning in their lives. As they fully integrate their learning, this manifests outwardly as them taking responsibility. By taking responsibility, clients own their learning and their newly acquired understanding of themselves. They make choices based on their emergent awareness and learning, and, feeling more confidence, this can be liberating, as they set themselves free from previously limited circumstances.

 

At this point, clients also show a tendency to integrate the coaching process itself, as they begin to self-coach.

 

Thus, the process of integration in coaching simultaneously stems from and serves to sustain the processes of discovery and application of learning.

 

Reference:

Griffiths, K. (2008). Discovering, applying and integrating self-knowledge: A grounded theory study of learning in life coaching (Ph.D). Centre for Learning Innovation, Queensland University of Technology