The best from the ICF 2007 conference

I recently returned from a two day whirlwind at the International Coach Federation Annual Conference held in Long Beach, CA. It’s the industry’s largest conference with thousands of coaches and speakers from all over the world. This year’s opening keynote speaker was Julio Olalla. He’s one of my favorite speakers and a pioneer in the field of ontological coaching (coaching around “being” vs. performance coaching).

Here is a smidgen I thought worth sharing with you from his talk:

What concerns does coaching address that old technologies of teaching, training, and consulting do not?
Knowing (knowldege)has changed through time. It started as divine revelation. Exterior knowledge (technology) is the understanding of knowing that we have embraced and we have abandoned the interior aspect of knowing (such as love). We need a balance between the exterior and the interior. We have divided this in ways we don’t know how to put back together. Coaching was born to address the unity of knowledge. Coaching is about uniting the human experience.

Try that one on when the next person asks you “What is coaching?”