Exploring Positive Psychology Coaching
Positive Psychology Coaching involves the scientific study and application of behaviour, cognition and emotion to deepen our understanding of both an individuals’ and groups’ performance, achievement and wellbeing, as well as enhancing practice within coaching.
This can be a powerful approach in that the framework is tailored around an individual’s values, strengths, challenges, resilience, resourcefulness, goals, and experiences. A core focus is upon exploring and identifying the many facets of positivity to enable individual success and to co-create meaningful lives. Key areas that maybe explored include personal strengths, cultural context, resilience, subjective well-being, flow, emotional creativity, adaptive functioning, self-determination, goal pathways and sustainability, positive institutions and positive organisations.
Importantly, this method is underpinned by extensive professional research, whereby coaching models based on Positive Psychology frameworks enable structured and reliable approaches to support individual goal attainment. Also there are multiple assessments, resources tools, and feedback models to assist in developing a structured coaching journey based upon measurable evidence.
Overall, Positive Psychology Coaching seeks to establish a balance between negativity and positivity through understanding of negative thoughts and behaviors versus positive thoughts and behaviors, and through understanding what is needed to achieve goals. The internal experience is viewed as something to be accepted, embraced, and adaptive to enhance an individual’s progress towards desired change and goals.
The foundation is the belief that people desire change, are motivated to learn and grow, and are open to feedback and new experiences that this coaching approach can bring. It is optimal when there is sufficient emotional resilience to handle being challenged and also openness to change. Clients with underlying emotional or mental health conditions might benefit more positively from therapy, and the models acknowledge this.
Ultimately, this coaching approach aims to empower individuals to develop self-determinism, by facilitating the individual to be self-reflective and to develop deeper self-awareness that enables more informed, positive choice-making and ultimately pathways to a life of meaning.