What is Ethical Coaching?

In these troubling times, Ethical Coaching emerges as a vital tool for personal and professional development. It is a coaching methodology that emphasizes clarity, critical reflection, and holistic decision-making, ensuring that you make informed, sustainable decisions that align with your values and long-term goals.

• To start or end a relationship?
• To start or close a business?
• To join or leave a company?
• To tell or not tell a friend?
• To act or to wait before making a big change in your life?

Understanding Ethical Coaching

Ethical coaching is not just about navel-gazing or abstract self-reflection. It is a rigorous, results-driven practice that blends personal reflection, critical thinking, and deep learning. As an ethical coach, my role is not to provide answers but to help guide individuals through a process of self-scrutiny and to encourage them to challenge their assumptions. Together, we examine the decisions you face and the paths you are considering.

This critical coaching process relies on measurable outcomes, defined by three guiding principles:

Coherence – Does your decision make sense within the context of your life?

Completeness – Are you considering all the facets of the issue, from every perspective?

Conviction – Do you feel confident that your decision is something you can stand by and live with?

The Process: Steps of Ethical Coaching

Ethical coaching is structured around a series of introspective exercises, which challenge you to evaluate your present situation and plan your future actions. Here are some critical steps involved in this reflective journey:

1. Reality Check: What is your current state? Are you moving forward, regressing, or stagnating? This involves an honest assessment of your position and how you perceive your reality versus how others might view it.
2. Traffic Lights: Metaphorically, this involves evaluating the resonance, dissonance, or numbness in your life. Do your current values align with your actions, or do they create emotional friction?
3. Mapping: Where are you on your journey? Where have you been, and where do you want to go? Mapping life as a series of critical moments provides clarity on how past decisions have shaped the present and what future choices may look like.
4. Signposts: What options lie ahead? This part of the process helps identify possible pathways and decisions you could take, providing clarity on the next steps.
5. Stocktaking: By weighing the pros and cons of your current situation, you can create a personal balance sheet. Are there hidden costs—”off-balance sheet” factors—that need attention?
6. Lightening the Load: This is about shedding unnecessary emotional or psychological baggage. Ethical coaching helps you evaluate what to drop, what to redistribute, and what to repackage for a lighter, more manageable journey.
7. Developing an Ethical Map: By making your underlying values and assumptions explicit, you can examine them, discard the outdated ones, and make a conscious choice about which values should guide your future actions.
8. Question Framing: The ability to ask the right questions is crucial in ethical coaching. Good questions lead to deeper understanding and more ethical, aligned decisions.
9. Goal Setting: Once clarity is achieved, it’s time to set realistic and meaningful goals.
10. Moral Intentions and Consequences: Ethical coaching ensures that you not only act with good intentions but also consider the moral implications of your decisions on others.
11. Inquiry Process: Throughout the coaching relationship, we reflect on what you’re paying attention to—whether it’s books, experiences, or people—helping you learn and grow in all aspects of life.
12. Escape from Alcatraz (Prisoner’s Dilemma): Often, we feel trapped in certain aspects of our lives. Ethical coaching asks the tough question: Can you free yourself alone, or do you need to collaborate with others, even those with whom you have difficult relationships, to achieve mutual freedom?

Ethical Coaching vs. Other Coaching Approaches

Traditional coaching has often focused on psychological well-being, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. While important, these are usually considered in isolation, focusing primarily on symptoms rather than causes.

Ethical coaching dives deeper, addressing personal strategy as the root cause of many issues. Bad decisions often lead to self-awareness issues, relational breakdowns, or psychological distress. Ethical coaching, therefore, works at a deeper level by targeting the quality of decisions people make—decisions that influence whether one can lead a fulfilled life without creating internal or external conflicts.

The Impact of “Bad Personal Strategy”

At the heart of ethical coaching is the concept of “bad personal strategy”. Poorly thought-out decisions, taken in haste or under social pressure, often lead to unfavorable outcomes like stress, anxiety, or relational breakdowns. These decisions are often the result of following socialized norms—doing what is expected or what others want—without critically examining the long-term consequences. Ethical coaching helps individuals step back and reconsider their choices, ensuring they make decisions that are aligned with their true values and goals.

The Value of Ethical Coaching

The value of ethical coaching lies in its ability to help people avoid the pitfalls of bad personal strategy. By engaging in a critical, reflective coaching process, individuals can make decisions that are coherent, complete, and based on conviction. These well-thought-out decisions not only lead to psychological well-being but also promote more meaningful relationships, career success, and personal fulfillment.

The Purpose of Ethical Coaching

Ethical coaching strives to achieve three key outcomes:

1. Coherence: The decisions made must make sense and fit within the broader narrative of the individual’s life.
2. Completeness: All angles and perspectives must be considered, ensuring that no important factor is overlooked.
3. Conviction: Decisions made through ethical coaching are decisions the individual can stand behind, live with, and feel confident in.

Conclusion: Why Ethical Coaching Matters

In these uncertain and challenging times, ethical coaching offers a methodical approach to navigating life’s most significant decisions. Whether facing personal dilemmas, career challenges, or relational conflicts, this form of coaching goes beyond surface-level solutions to equip individuals with the tools they need to live with purpose, coherence, and integrity.

Ethical coaching isn’t just about feeling good or achieving psychological well-being—it’s about making ethical, aligned decisions that lead to lasting fulfilment and success in every aspect of life. In this way, it stands apart from other forms of coaching by focusing on the deeper causes of personal challenges, enabling individuals to live well, with clarity and confidence.