Coaching is defined by most of the leading authors and practitioners as follows: Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize his own performance. It facilitates self-learning of the coachee to better accomplish his life vision.
In fact Life Coaching is a philosophy and a set of practical principles suggested in the early 1990’s by Thomas Leonard, financial consultant and the founder of Coachville, the first important coaching school. Life coaching is aimed at proposing a strategic process of change towards self-actualization of the coachee.
Since the moment of its inception, life coaching has become a rapidly emerging profession spreading in the US, Europe and globally. Its growing success is derived from the fact that it meets the zeitgeist, spirit of our time, by being concrete, practical, goal-oriented and short, while at the same time attempting to satisfy the need for individuation, self-actualization and personal growth.
The origin of life coaching basic ideas could be traced to humanistic psychology, while their germination occurred in the field of existential philosophy and psychotherapy that thrived during the middle of the 20th century. Our vision involves renaissance of contemporary existential wisdom, a worldview that dominated the 20th century culture and is considered the most influential outlook in its culture including philosophy, literature, art, theater as well as psychotherapy.
Existential authors like Binswanger, Boss, R. Laing, and V. Frankel continued to develop psychotherapy approaches based upon existentialism while contemporary authors such as A. Längle, Y. Yalom, van Deurzen, Strasser, Spinelli and others continue to develop their heritage.
NECP™ aims at turning existential coaching into an evidence based discipline. As such our approach is based upon research in developmental psychology, evolutionary science, comparative psychology and systems theory. Our fundamental claim is that the human need to create meanings does not originate only in a philosophical-existential outlook. It is rooted in an evolutionary-developmental constraint based upon survival drive. From the very first moments of life the human being gets an inborn drive, which is shaped by natural selection to form primary paradigms of meaning.
Crucial life events impair the learning capacity of the self and create inadequate paradigms of meaning. The role of the existential therapist is to help the client in shaping functional, effective and adequate paradigms of meaning. The role of the existential coach is to enhance the formation of new paradigms of meaning in order to satisfy the self’s needs for transcendence and self-actualization.
Our vision is to enhance a scientific multidisciplinary existential coaching psychology approach which could be implemented in daily life. We aim at adapting our existential coaching knowledge into our career and personal life, and to enhance creative life-long learning at everyday life event.