What is Relationship Coaching?

Coaching is often associated with individual, one-on-one work—but that’s not all it’s good for. While people need help exploring their values, hopes, and dreams, they often struggle to realize their highest aspirations in the context of a relationship with another person.

In this context, a relationship can consist of two people in a romantic partnership, a family, a work team, or any other group of people who must interact with each other on a regular basis.

Certainly we know that we cannot change another person—they are responsible for themselves, just as you are responsible for you. But there are ways of working together that are constructive, and ways that are destructive, even if well-intended.

The goal of relationship coaching is to come together as partners wanting the best for the relationship and hoping to elevate it to a conscious, supportive level that lets them achieve together what they cannot accomplish alone. This requires new ways of thinking about things and we employ new tools that re-shape the relationship into the vehicle that carries you both along more comfortably than before. It reveals the elements of the relationship system that are supportive and those that are undermining, and creates new ways of being together.

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Why Relationship Coaching?

Here are the axioms I believe in:

• Human relationships are inherently resourceful and wired for growth. If we reveal the system to itself, it is naturally self correcting.

• All relationship systems have certain characteristics in common, whether they are our personal inner voices, a pair, groups, teams, communities, organizations or nations. 

• Relationships have a life cycle, whether that is an intimate relationship or a team. The life cycle of relationship can be as long as a lifetime or as short as a day. The ending of a marriage, team, or organization is a natural part of the system cycle. Relationship Coaching can assist in the birth, creative expression, and constructive completion of relationship systems.

• Conflict is useful. It is the midwife to constructive change. It is the means by which relationships change. Relationship Coaching demands a paradigm shift from “Who is doing what to whom?” to “What is trying to happen?”

• Awareness is a critical but not sufficient condition for growth. Awareness must be paired with behavioral change in order to be effective.

• Theory is useful but must be paired with research and outcome studies to determine efficacy. Good theoretical models are only as effective as our ability to “operationalize” them.

• Everyone is right—but only partially! Only by listening to all the voices in the system can reality be accurately represented, and every voice is a voice of the system.

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