OCR
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