What Is Cognitive Behavioural Coaching?
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching (CBC) brings together the practice of coaching with the concepts and methods that underpin Cognitive Behavioural Psychology.
CBC offers a number of distinctive models and techniques that help coaches to understand the barriers that coachees may be placing in their own way. Often it is only these internal barriers that prevent coachees from moving forward with their desired outcomes.
The main premise of the cognitive behavioural approach is that the way that you think impacts on the way that you feel, and the way you think and feel also impacts on your physiology and the actions that you take, or don’t take.
This relationship between the four different elements of our response to a situation are illustrated in the Hot Cross Bun/SPACE model.
Often referred to as the Hot Cross Bun model, because of the pictorial representation of it, or the SPACE model, because of the five different elements that it depicts, this useful model is used in Cognitive Behavioural Coaching to illustrate to coachees how each element effects and is affected by the others and to work through their situation with them.
How Might CBC be Helpful In The Coaching Room?
Engaging with CBC facilitates increasing awareness and insights in to unhelpful thinking, limiting beliefs, and behavioural patterns.
CBC tools help the coachee find new perspectives from which to view their situation, and to notice and interrupt their previous patterns when they occur, developing new ways of thinking and behaving that are more aligned with their values and objectives. The ABCDE model is one such tool that helps to facilitate this type of coaching conversation.
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching is just one approach to coaching that is covered on out Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma.
To find out about more about the history, key elements, and practical uses of cognitive behavioural coaching, listen to the episode we recorded for our podcast here.
