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DO ACCELERATION AND BOUNDLESS WORK LEAD TO
ACCELERATED AND BOUNDLESS COACHING?
——o—
FRANK AUSTERMANN
ABSTRACT
Those who want to support others with coaching in our times of acceleration and
boundless work must be able to take care of themselves well. Here it is useful
and important to refer to Foucault's practice of freedom. It firstly encompasses
self-care, secondly the courage of truth, and, thirdly, critique. Practice of
freedom is the only way to avoid that acceleration and boundless work lead to
an accelerated and boundless coaching.
INTRODUCTION
(1) What is most important to those who work as coaches in our times of
acceleration? If you like: what is most important to you, what to me? (2) What
must those who work in the coaching environment be most good at? (3) What
do coaches need most urgently?
Admittedly, these are clearly distinct questions, for one thing about priorities,
for another about competencies, and finally about needs and requirements.
I am convinced that the answers to these questions are intertwined most
closely. My thesis is: Those who want to support others with coaching in our
times of acceleration and boundless work, those who want to interact well
with others, e.g. in forms of professional communication such as coaching and
training, consultancy and education, must be able to take care of themselves
well. Self-care is a prerequisite for good inter-action, care for oneself is a
condition for successful work in coaching. If care for oneself is not be taken
into consideration in coaching, acceleration and boundless work will lead to
an accelerated and boundless coaching.
I wish to develop my thesis in several steps. First of all, let me make some
comments on the quality of coaching, afterwards I will describe the phenomenon
of acceleration as a sweeping social trend against the background of which lam