In this solo episode, Charlie reflects on the origins and development of the coaching industry. He explores how coaching first started, how it has developed, and the shape of the coaching sector in 2025. The reflections he has help to understand this great practice that coaches are engaged in Main Topics Discussed in the Episode:
In this conversation, Charlie reflects on what the development of the coaching industry mean to us, offering valuable lessons that can help you grow in your own coaching journey.
[Main Point 1] – how coaching started, way back when!
[Main Point 2] – the debt of gratitude that coaching has to therapy and other 121 support approaches
[Main Point 3] – the gradual professionalising of the coaching sector
[Main Point 4] – coaching is here to stay.
Each story shared brings real-life insights that both new and experienced coaches can connect with and learn from.
Useful Links From This Episode:
Transcript:
Charlie Warshawski (00:02.478)
Greetings fellow coaches. I hope that all is going very well for you. I hope you’re having a good week and I hope that you’ve had lots of good and interesting coaching opportunities today. I’ve had a very enjoyable today. I’ve been working with coaches. I coached a colleague. I mentored someone towards the International Coach Federation qualification and I’ve had chats with fellow coaches who helped me do our coach training programs. What about you all?
What connection have you had with a fellow coach today? Have you had a chat? Have you been sharing resources? Have you been doing some coaching? Whatever you’re up to today, I hope it’s going really well. This is the first full episode on series one of our Love Your Coaching podcast. And this series is called Loving Your Coaching. I don’t want to rush into it. And you will hear in the next 10 episodes, you will hear people talking about
why they love their coaching. You’ll hear me talking about why different groups of people love coaching. And I thought quite a nice place to start off before we get into that is thinking about the appearance of coaching. So I’m calling this episode, Coaching a History, a Snapshot. Coaching just turned up, didn’t it? It just turned up at some point in time and suddenly it’s present. It’s present in people’s workplaces, present in people’s professional development.
There was a time, of course, when it wasn’t there before. What about for you? When did it first turn up? When did you first hear about it? Was there perhaps someone in your family or a friend or a colleague who was getting a bit of coaching or who’d heard something about coaching or you saw an initiative in your organization? I’ve heard all sorts of stories about when it turned up for them. And for me, when it turned up, was in 2007, I was working in a school.
I used to work mentoring students in a secondary school. So was doing lots of one-to-one work and I’d started working part-time with someone who ran a training company, supporting students again in school with study skills and that sort of thing. And this guy said one to me one day, I’m going to, I’m going to collaborate with a coaching company because they’re doing lots of interesting work in schools. Why don’t you come along and have a look? And that was my first.
foray into coaching. I’d never really heard about coaching before outside of the sports context. I didn’t really have any understanding of it. So that’s when I first heard about it. And that’s when I first got stuck into learning about coaching. And I’ll talk more about that in a later episode.
Charlie Warshawski (02:55.768)
But let’s look generally at coaching and the coaching industry and when it started. Some coaching authors really like to go back a long way and look at the origins of coaching right back into the days of maybe the Roman orators, the Greek Socratic, great experience of Socrates in the marketplace having those inquiry-based questions, and many, many other cultures going into ancient cultures of
village elders of wisdom, of very careful listening. I’m really struck by the fact that you will read lots of quotes going way back into ancient Greek, ancient Chinese, other cultures where people talk about this idea of two ears, one mouth. So a long time ago, there was an understanding that listening was probably more important than talking. So that’s an old, old, old tradition. I’m not gonna try and…
claim that coaching started by Socrates, but you can see there’s a common thread there. There is a great debt of gratitude, I think, that coaching does own, owe to psychotherapy. This idea that psychotherapy, starting in the early 20th century with Freud, Jung and Adler and Co, was the first time when really it was recognized that there could be value from
Two people sitting in a room together, one a professional and one a client or a patient or the person who had the difficulties. And that great body of work that started with Freud and Jung that built up over the generations, it’s a really important thing. know, without therapy, there could not be coaching. There could not be this idea that two people will get in a room and work on personal confidence, on personal belief, on
on personal traits. So I think that the idea that therapy was the launch point for coaching is probably not said enough. I think it’s an important thing to say, I know we spend all our time trying to say, well, coaching isn’t therapy. They are very different and all that jazz. And of course they are very different, but there is definitely a shared common history. So let’s just spend a moment, acknowledge that. I see that as a significant starting point.
Charlie Warshawski (05:23.458)
The second big moment I think that happened that allowed this idea of coaching to take hold was this, this theory of personal development, that personal development became a thing that you were likely to think about yourself, less as just a cog in the big wheel of society, but more an individual with individual growth, individual aspirations, desires. And that probably came out of the end of the second world war.
when people came back from the war and they had a slightly more ambitious approach to their lives across the class spectre. And it certainly went into the 50s and 60s. And in the 60s, we started seeing primarily in America, but also a bit in Britain, this idea of the retreat, the encounter movement, the going away weekend, the talking about yourself, the starting of the personal development.
literature, you people will go back to Dale Carnegie and his how to how to inflate friends and influence people and Napoleon Hill and his think and grow rich, that all were coming out in the 30s or 40s or so. This idea that people were starting to be personally aspirational.
this isn’t coaching. This is a starting point of having some sort of openness and awareness that you could do some work on yourself. People often talk about one man being the, almost like the grandfather of coaching, chap called Timothy Galway. I think there’s an argument to be made for him. Timothy Galway was a tennis coach who cornered this term the inner game.
He recognized that when he was coaching people on their tennis skills, that the battle was less on the tennis court and the shots that were played, but more inside the mind and the beliefs people had about themselves as tennis players. So he stopped giving specific technical advice and he started asking questions about what do you believe? What do you think you could do? The inner game was launched and that launched a great success.
Charlie Warshawski (07:37.55)
So the inner game gave the idea that people had some internal psychological work to do in order to be their best selves. And this is where it really distinguishes from therapy because of course, people who are turning up and practicing their tennis forehands, they are not generally, although we don’t know fully, but they’re not people who are dysfunctional. They’re not people in trauma. They’re not people.
dealing with major life obstacles. They’re people in their recreational context. So we suddenly have this idea that people are working on themselves from probably a positive place.
So we’re seeing coaching emerging here or the style of thinking where people have got something to work on themselves. The next place that it turned up was in the workplace. And really interestingly enough, it turned up in the workplace from another couple of sports people, a chap called John Whitmore, who was a Formula One racing driver and a fella called David Henry, who was a, I think it was an 800 metre,
or a steeplechase athlete. He was in the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Between them, but it’s often seen that John Whitmore was the driving force of this, they came up with a coaching model that we’ll all know and maybe love, maybe not so much, called the Grow Model. And I’ve got a copy of this book here, waving it around if you’re seeing this on video, called Coaching for Performance. You’ll recognize the 1990s typeface.
And he writes about the grow model.
And he, I’m going to quote, he says, performance coaching is based on the context. The context is awareness and responsibility. The skill really interestingly, he doesn’t say the number one skill is listening. He says the number one skill is effective question questioning and the sequence is G R O W goal, reality, options, and will. So there we are. We have the Grown model. This book.
First edition written in 1992. So well over 30 years ago now.
Charlie Warshawski (10:08.91)
So now we’re off from running, we? We have got a coaching model. 1992. We’ve got a coaching industry ready to start. And I looked up just before I started this, I looked up when did the major coaching bodies start. International Coaching Federation, 1995. Association of Coaching, 2000. EMCC, 2002. The end of the 90s, that’s when…
these coaching bodies launched. So there was something going on. And in the university sector, the first coaching program was run at Oxford Brookes. Still runs. I’ve just recently done studying with them in 2000. So early 2000, people can go and train to be coaches. You can go and get a master’s at Oxford Brookes, or you can do the distance learning course at Newcastle University.
Lots of coaches I know have done. You can learn and you can train to be a coach. But of course, it’s very, very new, isn’t it? It’s new, no one knows about it. So these poor early coaches in are trotting around trying to find clients and no one knows what the service is that they’re trying to sell to them. But gradually it adapts and gradually evolves. And by the time I came to coaching in 2007, it was a fledgling industry. We were seeing it
In business, were seeing it in the commercial sector, we were seeing in education, people were starting to see and recognize that coaching was something that could be used. And if we go from 2000 and 2007 or so, when I started all the way to now to 2025, the coaching industry has exploded. It’s now, as people love to say, it’s a multi-billion dollar organization. There are 60,000 plus
qualified coaches just through the International Coach Federation and many, many more worldwide. We have different strands of coaching from business to life to executive to personal. We have loads of hybrid. We have a professional qualification around coaching psychology. Lots of growth, lots of changes in the coaching sector. The other milestone that I really want to point to is the
Charlie Warshawski (12:33.095)
beginning of professionalizing coaching. So it’s often claimed that coaching is an unregulated industry. And although it’s true, we don’t have a formal and official government charters. Actually, there’s a lot of internal regulations. you have codes of ethics, you have codes of conduct, we have a large body of work around coaching supervision and the suggestion that coaching supervision is a very important part of practice that people will engage with.
So by the time we get here to 2025, suddenly we’ve got a sector that is worth counting, that is worth thinking about. And with those 60,000 plus coaches and many more, no doubt, it’s not all a bunch of life coaches running around trying to sell coaching programs to people. There are internal coaching models. There are people who want to become coaches as part of their day job, that they might become a coaching style of leader.
We have coaching cultures in organizations. We have people who have given up their jobs and opened up coaching businesses. We have training schools. We have pretty well anything that you would expect to see in a growing and a burgeoning business. It’s evolving and it will continue to evolve. And the evolution is really important and it’s quite exciting. My commitment and passion, I think, is to non-directive coaching. Very interested in
not mixing and matching coaching and mentoring or coaching and teaching coaching and training. But there are loads of hybrid models out there and there’s a rhythm in the sector that changes. We used to be very directive. I think it’s quite non-director at the moment. Probably a directive style will come along in the future. There are wonderful, great people there, coaching scholars, coaching authors, but half these books behind me are something to do with coaching.
It’s here to stay. There’s no doubt it’s here to stay. And there’s no doubt that people can have great professional experiences being coaches. You will hear me say throughout this podcast series that it’s quite challenging to become a coach and to earn a full living to pay your mortgage from coaching. I feel that that’s something that is not said enough. I’ll say plenty more about it another time. But I think it’s a point that we can’t make too many times.
Charlie Warshawski (15:02.221)
So that’s my potted history. I haven’t tried to do it chronologically. I haven’t tried to get all the facts in. There’s plenty of literature around it. I just wanted to pick up a few snapshots. What’s new? What have you learned? What’s different about what you already know about coaching? And what have I not said? What do you know? What have you understood about the origins of coaching, about why coaching has become such an important thing?
perhaps in your country, if you’re listening from outside the UK, what do you know about when coaching started in your country and how it has evolved? That will always be interesting to know. So, you’ve joined me fellow coaches to hear about the origins of coaching and a little bit of a snapshot. I’ll leave you to mull that over and the next episode is we’re going to start talking about why different groups of people love coaching. So, as you go off to the rest of the day,
Think about why you love coaching. What is it about coaching that you love? What keeps you so passionate and enthusiastic about coaching? I’d love to hear about that. And I’d love to hear about anything about you and your coaching practice. So do drop us a note. Thank you so much for giving us up your time. Have a good day. See you soon and happy coaching.
About Charlie:
I’m Charlie Warshawski, a UK based coach, coach trainer and supervisor. Coaching has been my thing since 2007 and I’ve been keen to start this podcast, to help fellow coaches navigate the difficulties of running a coaching business or practice. Most of my coaching takes place in education and I love coaching school leaders. And most of the supervision I do is with coaches who are starting their coaching practice.
Since 2019 I’ve been supporting new and experienced coaches with resources to help them grow their business – our free The Sustainable Coach programme is available to all coaches, and over 200 coaches have accessed these resources.
Away from coaching, four children, three pets, a poor table tennis and cycling schedule and a thirst for language learning all keep me busy.
Love Your Coaching Resources:
- Visit our website
- Learn more about our courses and coaching qualifications
- Contacts: charlie@loveyourcoaching.com | hello@loveyourcoaching.com| 01306 264026 | 0774 8515189
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