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To be clear: Effective academic coaching relies upon strong boundaries. Even when coaching roles are combined with other roles such as advising, mentoring, or career coaching, the boundary between this work and counseling or therapeutic work must be strong. Coaches must refer out to counseling and therapy services when students ask for support with issues that are best treated by professionals in those settings.
However, we do coach the whole person. What does that mean, if we can't provide all the services that the whole person needs? It means we don't consider academic performance as isolated from the rest of who the student is or what the student faces. It means we nonjudgmentally invite the coachee to share what they feel is affecting their performance, so that we may bring that context into the conversation about academic learning and self-management. It means we shine a light on the "underwater part of the iceberg" layers that appear in the conversation. Students may not perceive such layers — for example, self-efficacy, mindset, or trauma-driven cognitive load hijacking — as factors in their performance.
I encourage you to see "coaching the whole person" as entirely doable, although different from "satisfying the needs of the whole person." Some time ago, for example, I met with a student who had attended weekly coaching for a semester a year prior. They said they had focused on study strategies at that time, and had thought that was what they needed. But now they felt there was a layer, having to do with how they felt about themselves, that hadn't been addressed. Our session went from there into an exploration of their self-concept based on high school vs. college performance, and how underestimation of time and difficulty of assignments led them to give up entirely when estimates proved wrong.
There was more work to do after this conversation, of course. That's another important point about coaching the whole person — it takes time. The visible part of the iceberg is often dwarfed by what lies underneath. Give yourself and your coachees time and grace as you explore the underside of the "whole person" iceberg.
Expand your ability to coach the whole person with the tools LifeBound offers.
Explore which course is right for you at www.lifebound.com.
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