“It isn’t as clear as you think”. The post coach: another step closer

ABSTRACT

While post-structural scholarship exerts an increasing influence in the social sciences, the post-coach remains a distant concept because all coaches and coach educators are immersed in a humanist and positivist coaching logic that works as a perspective shaping, filtering, and diluting post-structural coach education. To create spaces for a broader acceptance of the post coach, in this article we, move beyond philosophical conjecture by addressing the consequences of humanist and positivist assumptions in coaching to set the tone and contexts for the post coach. That is, we reveal through a series of very short stories how positivist, humanist and post-structural assumptions show up in coaching practice, the effects they produce, the actions they make possible, and the limits they set.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-structural coach
• positivism
• humanism
• power
• body
• coaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We do notice positivist/humanist studies rarely feel the need to declare their paradigmatic assumptions, likely because, and again as we have noted, these studies are understood as “reality”, as “good science”.