Beautiful ideas that can make us ill: Implications for coaching
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A moral conundrum for philosophy of coaching is the noticeable parallel between the growth of the coaching industry and the unprecedented growth of mental health issues in western societies. Even if wellbeing of employees is not the only purpose of coaching interventions, they should at least not in any way be responsible for its undermining. Unfortunately, a number of 'beautiful ideas' which have become thematic in the coaching industry may be playing a detrimental role at both the personal level and for wellbeing of society as a whole. In this paper we focus on three: 'Positive Psychology', 'Mindfulness', and 'Transformational Coaching'. On the face of it these 'beautiful ideas' appear to be unquestionably beneficial. However, they have been largely accepted into the mainstream thinking of coaches without too much critical consideration. The aim of this paper is to explore the shadow side of these beautiful ideas for the wellbeing of people in organisations and the role of coaching in relation to them. Our intention is to start a challenging conversation about a paradoxical situation in which that which is meant to scaffold our wellbeing initiatives may be making significant contributions to a lack of wellbeing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.119 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".