This book has several purposes. It is designed to provide a resource for
all those working in the field of one-to-one helping. It gives processes
and tools (we use the term ‘techniques’) to do their job well. We also give
vivid examples from within our own or our collaborators’ experience to
give context and point to the techniques described.
The book contributes to integrating the sub-fields of mentoring and
coaching, as most of these techniques are appropriate to both, and we are
not precious about definitions and pecking orders.
It also attempts to liberate the field from the comforting but ultimately
oppressive thrall of various schools. If someone says to you, ‘Are you a
psychodynamic coach or a cognitive behavioural coach; an NLP mentor,
or a TAmentor, or a psychosynthesis mentor?’ this book encourages you
to stand free of such commitments. It fortifies those who want to say,
‘I choose how to go on in my one-to-one helping from a whole range of
traditions and frameworks’. This book is for those who have learned one
way or picked up a range of ways of doing the job, and want to extend
that range.
In becoming the coaches and mentors we are today, the authors have
worked in and learned from a multiplicity of schools of helping. This
book seeks to distil our experience and to offer approaches that can be
used by people like us with a range of experience who want to bring that
full experience to bear onto the issues of the people we are helping. The
risk of operating solely within one of the rich traditions that we have
drawn upon is that you require the learner to define their issue in the
terms of the discipline. We stand resolutely against such an approach –
and in favour of defining the issue in the learner’s own terms and
finding the resources that will help them deal with this.
David Megginson
David Clutterbuck
Sheffield Hallam University
May 2004