Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text is a unique contribution to the field. It traces coaching influences back to pre-modern times showing connections with ‘soul healers’ of the past, taking a journey through modernity to post-modernity and making links that helps us better understand coaching today. Positioning coaching as working between the ′wounded-self′ (of therapeutic culture) and ′celebrated-self′ (of the human potential movement), it reveals four discourses that underpin contemporary coaching practice:

1. The Soul Guide Coach: coaching the ′inner-self′, focusing on values, authenticity and identity.

2. The Psy Coach: coaching the ′outer-self′, using psychological techniques to focus on personal performance and how we relate to others.

3. The Managerial Coach: coaching the ′role-self′, focusing on work, task, output and productivity.

4. The Network Coach: coaching the ′networked-self′, focusing on the wider networks in which we live and work.

This vital new book brings a fresh and critical perspective on coaching and mentoring, challenging its taken-for-granted assumptions and narratives. It is written by a practitioner-scholar, and develops an exciting vision for coaching today.

Key features:

• Accounts for the diverse influences on contemporary coaching practice
• Reveals how coaching is the new ′post-modern confessional′
• Develops a meta-theory of coaching that acts as a baseline for future developments
• Offers frames of thinking to guide coaching and mentoring practitioners and educators.