Coaching as a complex system

Term «coaching» came to Russian language from English language and was derived from the world “coach”. If you have a look at English etiological online dictionary, then you would see that the world “coach” appeared initially in 1550 and meant a hidden cart.  It was named “coach” after a village, where it was made. If we believe to the site, the first mentioning about such vehicle was found in Hungary and then in European countries.  

Much later, in 1830, the term “coach” was used for the first time for defining an instructor, personnel teacher- a person, who helps a student to get ready for an exam. So, the world “coaching” got its meaning – “to transport people where they want to be”. And only in 1861 the usage of this world in relation to a hired person, so that he helped sportsmen get ready for competitions, was fixed.

Later on, coaching started to develop due to knowledge in sport psychology, as it became clear that while preparation of sportsmen for big tournaments not only physical form is important, but also psychological preparation.

Couching could be considered as a system of effective methods from other scientific spheres. However, in many sources, authors immediately direct at sport psychology, not wanting to dive and examining all the foregoers of this movement. We would also lose this moment and come to the one, where the coaching stepped aside from other sciences and was formed for something distinctive and self-sufficient.

So, a forefather of a coaching is an American businessman, Timothy Gallwey, who, in his book “Internal tennis game” (1974) initially described his vision of training work in business, and later on published several more books, where he described the same method of “internal game” in different kinds of sports and businesses. It is considered that exactly in his first book there was a turnover from a sport coaching to life-coaching, which later on was developed into a separate discipline by other coaches, including his student – Thomas Leonard, who codified this sphere. Among noticeable names in coaching John Whitmore could be mentioned, as the one, who defined the core of coaching as “unlocking the potential of a person for his maximum increase of effectiveness”. Beginning with 80s of XX century coaching was developed into a separate discipline. At that period of time the following professional associations appeared: Association of coaching, International federation of coaches, European committee of coaching and mentorship, which took part in developing the standards of education. In 2001 official acknowledgement of this profession was fixed for the first time. Now the term “coaching” is widely spread in all economically developed countries. And studies of coaching itself are not limited by sport and business for a long time, but they passed to all life spheres. And that is good, as technologies of coaching, if they are applied correctly, help the person to grow as a personality, master his skills and achieve big success.