Coaching supports client-centered occupational therapy practice by helping therapists clarify client priorities and navigate complex expectations. It also helps clients understand their choices, navigate change, and take responsibility for their recovery or rehabilitation. While client-centered care is important, coaching acknowledges its potential shadow sides such as when individual needs may conflict with broader ethical concerns. The document argues that coaching skills will become increasingly essential for occupational therapists to adapt to a changing world and enable client resilience, hope, and ability to change.

1. Learning to coach made
me a better OT…and sorry
if that annoys you
Jen Gash
OT, Coach, Artist
jen@otcoach.com
26th November 2015
OT Show

2. A rough plan
(that I will try and stick to…)
• What is coaching?
• How it supports client-centred practice (and a
little thought about the dark side of CCP)
• Why it is essential we work differently in the
future and how coaching can help
• And a smidgen of integrating coaching into OT
practice

3. Before we start…
• Why I am saying “sorry”
• It all depends on what you personally believe
about Occupational Therapy
• What I thought being an OT meant when I
applied to train
• Pub, white-water rafting, murals and pottery
etc…basically doing nice stuff with clients

4. • People talked about wheelchairs and hoists…
this came as a shock
• I needed to learn about medicine and
disability…this was also a surprise
• My placements didn’t involved pubs or rafting
• I am not devaluing OTs who specialise in
equipment or work in physical rehabilitation,
please know that…I just didn’t know that’s what
OTs got involved with
What I found out later:

5. So I really struggled when I first qualified…I burnt out
several times.
After my AMPS training, I thought…
”I finally get what an OT is…I am a proper OT now” I was
starting understand the nature of occupation and
therapy”
…But it was only when I learned to coach, that I became
the OT that I originally aspired to be: an enabler of
meaningful occupation not just an assessor of function
“We all need to become craft our own brand of OT and
choose powerful support tools if needbe”

6. Coaching is “partnering with clients in a specific
conversation-based, thought- provoking and
creative process that inspires them to move from
their current state to a more desired future state”
(ICF 2011)

7. The coaching process is
highly client-centred,
fosters self-directed
learning and is
grounded in self-
awareness, personal
values, strengths
recognition,
possibilities, choice
and self-responsibility.

8. Coaching provides the means to:
• Unpick our full and muddled mind and help us
understand what we are thinking as opposed to
what we might say or do
• Look with fresh eyes at our daily habits and
actions and see whether they are helpful or not
• Find out the reasons why we don’t do what we
say we want to
• ….and I strongly feel it should lead to increased
self-compassion

9. How does coaching support client-
centred practice?
Helps the OT to:
• Clarify who the client is…it is your employer, is it
the person you see before you? A third party?
• Whose agenda are you working with?
• Helps you understand who you are as a therapist
and how that affects your questions, actions etc.
• Navigate often complex expectations clients may
have of you and your service

10. Helps clients/patients:
• Understand how we exercise choice, how we
decide what occupations get our time and
attention, what is meaningful for us and how
we organise and perform these activities!
• Resolve the paradox between how we want to
live our lives and what we actually do can
• Negotiate the needs of others in relation to our
needs
• Navigate change
• Become creators of our own wellbeing, not
passive recipients of healthcare and medicine

11. Discovering meaning
• What do you really want?
• What makes your heart
sing?
• What is your contribution
to the world going to be?
• Where are you selling out
on yourself?
• Who are you at your
best? What are your
strengths?
• What is your favourite
way of sabotaging yourself?
• Where are you asleep at
the wheel?
• What is it for you to love
deeply?
• What is it for you to be
compassionate?
• What is it for you to live
life fully?

12. Navigating and supporting change
• Coaching provides a tool to support clients
change process, be it a conscious or
unexpected change
• Develop self awareness
• Encourage self-responsibility
• Help people find out what works for
them…not what we think they should do

13. • When I was ill, I needed an OT who could coach…
• What meaning to I give to this illness, disability or
injury. What story will I tell about it?
• Is it fate? Was I unlucky? Can I blame
something/someone?
• How much control do I have over my
recovery/rehabilitation?
• What will I gain from it? What will I gain from
becoming more independent ..What might I lose?
• What will I take responsibility for?

14. Helping people to exercise choice
• Seeing and acknowledging there are different
choices, even if it doesn’t seem like it:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing:
the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s
attitude in any given set of circumstances” V Frankl
• Shifting perspectives, generating options
• Understanding what the choices might mean
• Not making a choice, is making a choice
• Understand how our personal values affect our
choices

15. Is there a shadow side to being client-
centred?
• Do individual needs trump social,
environmental or broader ethical issues?
• When does enabling a client to take
responsibility for their care/rehab perhaps
serve to reduce a clinician’s duty of care?
• What if a clients true wishes are in clear
conflict with a service remit or the needs of
others involved e.g. a carer/family member?
• Whose needs are most important?

16. Integrating coaching into your
work/practice
• A coach approach to OT from the start?
• Coaching sandwich: coaching…formal
assessment…coaching
• Elicit – Provide – Elicit
• Regular and ongoing coaching to support
occupational change
• Snippets of “coaching” e.g. to explore key
concepts and avoid assumptions…..

17. The world is changing…
• Coaching will help us manage “future”
challenges…individually, locally and globally
• Enabling hope, resilience and dealing with
uncertainty
• Capitalizing on the brain’s ability to change
• Shifting consciousness, intuition and
emotional intelligence
• New work, changing occupations

18. jen@otcoach.com
www.otcoach.com
facebook.com/OTCoach
Twitter @otcoachuk
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