THE ORIGIN OF COACHING AND NLP

Here’s something I did not know until a couple weeks ago: NLP was present at the origin of the field of Coaching! Now we know that it was Thomas Leonard who in 1992 founded the beginning of the field of Coaching. Before that year, the term “coaching” was only briefly used in the business world and only as a synonym for lots of other things, facilitating, coaching, consulting, etc. Prior to 1992 there was no precise definition for coaching. I recently saw the term “coaching” used in the 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, and he used it in the general sense of facilitating.

Now prior to that, Timothy Gallwey is credited with being the grandfather of the field of Coaching with his 1972 book, The Inner Game of Tennis. Gallwey even took that theme to Esalen in 1972 and presented it there. I began seeing “coaching” mentioned in 1992 in Anchor Point. That was when the first articles on Coaching proper appeared in that journal. At that time, what was “big” in the field of psychotherapy was Brief Psychotherapy, Ericksonian, and Solution focused Therapy.