Archive for February, 2010
Believe it or not
Posted by David Winter in Career choice, Understanding clients on 18 February 2010

Some beliefs are junk
The recent post on Transactional Analysis looked at certain belief patterns (or scripts) that can determine the way people live out their lives and their careers. Beliefs are also at the heart of the highly influential Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) developed in 1994 by Robert Lent, Steven Brown and Gail Hackett. This was based on the broader Social Cognitive Theory proposed by Albert Bandura.
The two key types of belief in SCCT are:
- Self-efficacy — Your beliefs about what you are capable of — your confidence in your ability to perform certain tasks effectively.
- Outcome expectations — Your beliefs about what is likely to result from behaving in certain ways or taking particular actions.
This is great. I find it really useful to work with clients’ belief systems and a handy way of analysing them is good. However, it’s a bit broad. I would quite like a slightly longer list of common types of beliefs to be on the look out for.
John D. Krumboltz (who had a hand in Planned Happenstance) also developed a theory based on Bandura, which he called the Social Learning Theory of Career Decision Making (SLTCDM – snappy!). Linked to this he developed the Career Beliefs Inventory. This has 25 different scales intended to diagnose potentially problematic belief areas.
This is great too, but it’s a bit too big (and expensive). I want something simpler that I can carry around in my head.
(Not-so) model behaviour
Posted by David Winter in Models on 15 February 2010
In an early post I suggested that the popularity of coaching might be attributable to the fact that coaching models all seem to have positive, sexy-sounding acronyms.
I have just come across another model with a cringingly appropriate name. Based on the popular GROW model, Saul Brown and Anthony Grant from Australia have come up with a coaching model for working with teams called…GROUP.
GROUP stands for:
- Goals
- Reality
- Options
- Understanding others
- Perform
I can’t really tell you much more about it because my Athens account doesn’t give me access to Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, so I can’t read the whole paper. Although, I did notice in the abstract they refer to ‘Scharma’s U process’, by which I assume they mean Theory U developed by Otto Scharmer. I mentioned this in my article on levels of listening. They also allude to ‘double-loop learning’. This is one aspect of transformational learning which was an inspiration for the Zones model.
I think Seasonal Affective Disorder has set in because I had a bit of a grumpy week last week. As a result, I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of positive, chirpy model acronyms and want to invent a few that reflect the sometimes disappointing reality of coaching and guidance.
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