The aims of Existential Coaching

The overarching aim of Existential Coaching is to facilitate the means by which clients become much more explicitly aware of their unique and underlying worldview in order that they may be more able to "own" and challenge the ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes that both structure and maintain it. Through this focused investigation, the lived and felt concerns which unnecessarily influence and impact upon a client's stated goals and aspirations can be highlighted and, in turn, their influence minimised or defused.

These various clarificatory approaches underpin Existential Coaching's way of doing and thinking about life issues that is derived from existential psychotherapy.

Existential Coaching aims to be an extremely straightforward, practically-minded and attractive approach whose ideas require very little in the way of "meta-analyses" nor rest upon numerous questionable and unnecessary assumptions regarding unseen and unknown mental agencies that influence, if not control, our thoughts and behaviours.

Instead, Existential Coaching focuses upon the various stances we adopt in order to find meaningful and secure relations with ourselves, others, and the world in general. In doing so, it examines and exposes how these very same relational strategies may be provoking the current uncertainties and dilemmas that have arisen in our lives.

Existential Coaching helps clients to clarify and reconsider the meanings and values given to the various inter-relations that make up their personal and professional lives. Through this exploration, clients can be empowered to assess more honestly and accurately how the relational stances that they adopt are impacting upon the quality and enjoyment of their lives.

Specifically, Existential Coaching considers three main forms of inter-relations: I-focused relations - which deal with and expose the vast array of assumptions, judgements, values, beliefs and fears we hold about ourselves (the "I"). You-focused relations - which deal with and expose the vast array of assumptions, judgements, values, beliefs and fears which we hold about how others view and relate to us or who they "want us to be" (the "you"). And, We-focused relations - which deal with the immediate and currently-experienced way of being that exists in the present encounter between persons and which may contradict, as much as they might conform to, our pre-set stances toward "I" and "you" (the "we").

Existential Coaching's challenging exploration of these three focus points in any interaction has been shown to be the critical variable in promoting ameliorative benefits for our clients. Just as pertinently, the gains derived from this structured examination of our clients' lives are typically experienced as "life-lasting" and as stimuli to a rich and responsible reassessment of their various relations, goals and overall life-direction.