Total Confidentiality: A Critical Requirement of Life Coaching (And how corporations corrupt life coaching through breaching confidentiality)

One of the basic cannons of life coaching is that everything that transpires between you and your life coach be kept extremely confidential. The ethics of the life coaching profession mandate that your life coach not breach the confidentiality of your coaching sessions. This is vital to you as a coaching client.

The Discovery Phase of Life Coaching.

The initial phase of life coaching (we call the Discovery Phase), focuses on unraveling the mystery of you through the mirror reflection of your life coach, and in essence, continues throughout the entire life coaching process. You will discover and understand all there is about you and what makes you tick. You will reveal yourself to your life coach, who will then reflect back to you what he or she learns about you. It is a very enlightening and exhilarating process that taps into the many wonders within you that you have either suppressed over the years or did not know existed. This way you become The World’s Leading Expert on You. You will reap the wonders of life coaching BECAUSE you have unleashed the many hidden and suppressed powers within you and have eliminated the many internal conflicts within you that have drained you in the past.

The Discovery phase must be open and free of outside involvement.

The discovery process becomes an exploration into you and will touch on all sorts of possibilities that you and your coach will discuss. Then you will pinpoint what is true and what is not. You must be able to follow this exploration path freely and openly, without hesitation. If you feel any form of judgment or you have concerns that anyone other than your coach will know you have discussed these matters, you will undoubtedly restrict this exploration. Normally in the past, you were unable to dig into your inner motivations because of your fears and concerns of judgments, misunderstandings, and possible negative consequences if others knew what you were thinking. So, you probably suppressed your desires to discover yourself to comply with what you thought others wanted and expected. You most likely became a stranger to yourself.

The life coaching process discards these burdens and provides you the safe and secure place to open up without hesitation. But the process is very dependent on the absolute trust and honesty between you and your coach. Without this total trust and the complete security that you can speak in full confidentiality, the discovery process will be greatly limited, and you will miss out on unraveling the mystery of you. You will then be much less likely to gain the benefits, if any, from life coaching.

Absolute Confidentiality with your life coach is vital.

If there is even a possibility that your coaching discussions will not be kept confidential, you will most likely protect yourself by not fully opening up. You must know and feel that your coaching sessions will always be kept totally confidential, so you can be yourself, without hesitation. This is the only way you will be able to truly see and understand who you really are.

You must be assured that your life coach will not breach your confidentiality in any way, and that he or she will honor and protect your trust and confidentiality without compromise. If you have engaged a life coach, where there is consideration that confidentiality might even be partially breached, you will want to find another coach. Period. When you know and feel that you will enjoy full confidentiality between you and your life coach and you have connected with the right coach for you, the exploration trips into who you really are and what you really want will be exciting, fun, revealing, and very rewarding. Enjoy your trip!

Life Coaching does not occur without total confidentiality.

Absolute confidentiality between you and your life coach is so critical and such an ethical and important of basis of life coaching that true life coaching can ONLY occur under total confidentiality. If this confidentiality wall is breached in any way, then life coaching is NOT being provided. Confidentiality is like being pregnant. Either your life coach protects you with total confidentiality or not. There is no such thing as partial confidentiality, just like there is no such thing as being partially pregnant. Unfortunately, too many people call themselves life coaches and claim to be providing life coaching as they breach the confidentiality wall and your trust in them. They are providing other services that DO NOT REQUIRE total confidentiality, like training, consulting, or whatever you want to call it. Yet, they call themselves life coaches and what they do as life coaching.

Examples of people being confused by non-life coaches.

I responded on our Coach Connection blog to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jared Sandberg entitled Some Office Coaches Whitewash Miseries with Sunny Platitudes that reported the complaints by employees of corporations about the supposed coaching they received, when in every case the people calling themselves coaches were not providing life coaching, but were teaching, consulting or doing whatever the corporations wanted them to do. But the employees and the author of the article blamed life coaching as the cause of the problems.

How corporations alter and destroy the life coaching process.

The corporate world has jumped on the coaching bandwagon and has spent a lot of money hiring coaches or in having in-house coaches. The money involved has been very attractive to coaches and many coaches and coaching businesses have sprung up to meet the demands of corporations. Unfortunately, the corporations have learned to use the powers of their lucrative coaching expenditures to demand and get certain concessions from the people they hire who call themselves coaches. The most damaging requirement that most corporations impose is that the coaches breach the coach/client confidentiality. They require their coaches to report to management or Human Resources what transpires in the coaching sessions, many times under the guise of progress reports. Or the corporations insist that the coaches they hire follow predetermined coaching plans, philosophy, or step-by-step methods. I am not faulting corporations for using their economic muscle to impose their will on their service providers to get what they want. That is their right. I am more concerned about the many supposed coaches and coaching groups who accept and follow these corporate demands, under the guise that they are providing life coaching. I am also concerned that the many employees of corporations, who were subjected to these non-coaching efforts, were led to believe they had been coached.

Many corporations have approached The Coach Connection to coach their employees, and the initial talks have given the corporations strong motivation to consider using TCC. However, the corporations have inevitably presented their coaching demands and in all but one case, they all required TCC Member Coaches and TCC to breach the confidentiality of the coaching sessions. Most of these corporations were extremely well known and were proposing some very lucrative coaching contracts, albeit under their special coaching conditions. We rejected their demands to provide any information about what transpired between the TCC Member Coach and the employee clients. Our mission to provide true life coaching and to totally protect the confidentiality of our clients is ironclad. Needless to say, we discontinued any further talks with these corporations, because they demanded that we breach the coach/client confidentiality of our clients. As a result, we turned down a number of lucrative corporate coaching contracts.

What is fascinating is that one of corporate executive decision makers whom we had rejected as a corporate client, and who chose to hire someone else, because they would breach confidentiality, eventually returned to TCC to hire a TCC Member Coach for himself, BECAUSE TCC and our Member Coaches WOULD NOT breach confidentiality, and divulge any part of his coaching.

It appeared in many cases that the corporations were more interested in imposing their will and ways on their employees through outside coaching and on using the supposed confidentiality of the coaching process as a means of spying on their employees. They appeared to have ulterior motives in hiring coaches, and were much less, if at all interested in gaining the true results from the life coaching process for which it was designed. We would have no part in this charade.

In fact, we asked several manufacturing corporations how they would feel if we contracted to buy one of their well known products (a car, a TV, a computer), then told them how the products were to be built, the qualifications of the people who assembled the products, and that we receive timely status reports on the progress of the products we wished to buy? You would have thought we were invading their company and were demanding corporate secrets. Yet, that is exactly what they demanded from TCC, and we asked them why they felt entitled to control our process the same way. They did not think we were very funny.

TCC accepted only one corporate client.

One corporate executive did agree in advance to NOT ask for, or receive any information about the TCC Member Coach or what transpired between the coach and their employee client as a condition of engaging TCC. TCC accepted this corporate client, under the explicit requirement that confidentiality would be totally protected. The employee client reaped results after completing only one cycle of coaching with the chosen TCC Member Coach, and the client chose to continue into the next cycle.

TCC terminated its only corporate client!

Yet, the corporate decision maker (the employee’s boss) imposed a new demand on TCC. He exerted considerable pressure on TCC and his employee that TCC and the TCC Member Coach breach confidentiality by allowing him to intrude on the process, before he would authorize payments for continued coaching, even though he knew it would virtually destroy the results from coaching, and even though he had previously agreed not to break confidentiality. TCC and our TCC Member Coach both refused his demands flat out. He ceased paying for the coaching for his employee. The employee was so thrilled about the personal and career progress being made that the employee chose to pay for continued coaching with the TCC Member Coach out of the employee’s own pocket.

Coaching under corporate rules is rarely life coaching.

It is a very sad commentary that so many so-called coaching groups gladly meet these unreasonable corporate coaching demands. They appear to be more interested in reaping financial rewards than in following the ethics of the life coaching process to protect the full sanctity of the confidentiality between a coach and a client. Unfortunately, the so called coaching performed by these groups that comply with the confidentiality breaching demands of the corporate executives is rarely coaching. The article by Jared Sandberg and others like it exposes the problems these corporations cause by imposing their non-coaching demands. If you have received any form of so called “coaching” that was paid for by a corporation, I caution you that you probably did not experience true life coaching. I do not know what it was, but it was most likely not any form of life coaching.

We hope that you will consider giving real life coaching a try, where you will experience the security and relief of total confidentiality.

We welcome your opinions and comments.
Bill Dueease
Editor