COUPLES & FAMILY COACHING: Assisting people in succeeding with the most important projects of their lives

Nowadays in most cultures people have all the freedom to seek, pre-test, improvise and ask for fulfillment in their relationships. Continuous social transformations enabled us to choose between staying in unhappy relationships and staying single, still we are missing a system of skills how to manage our relationships projects successfully. However, too people get exhausted in their search for happiness as they are struggling blindfolded, making mistakes, fixing broken parts, abandoning relationships that doesn't work well. It is far too long for many people before they finally create a fulfilling bond.
Happy family life keeps being a TOP priority through decades. If you observe your environment, your friends, and yourself, you will see that men and women all over the world are proactively searching for productive behavior models to build strong families. They don’t want to find themselves in counseling, sorting out relationships problems, and they are open for solutions and recommendations of all kinds: friendly, mystical and spiritual, astrological, psychological, in training rooms, surfing the web and reading books.
For all those reasons Family and Couples Coaching is gaining power all over the world, as it enables people to learn how to negotiate with each, how to listen to your partner, how to be as a coach with their partner, and how to actually have a sustainable system that allows to grow in each other’s presence.
Dr. Marilyn Atkinson, founding president of Erickson College and originator of the Solution-Focused and Outcome-Oriented Coaching model, has profound, 30 years expertise in this area, and delivers a highly sought after Couples Coaching training.
You are invited to read her interview below, as Dr. Atkinson is eager to share her discoveries and break-throughs, and even more of your questions will get answered as you join the Couples Coaching training program.

LM: Marilyn, what would you recommend to people who are considering signing up for the course or stepping into the area of Couples Coaching?

Dr. Marilyn Atkinson: Oh, I would suggest you make a step forward and risk it. Simply jump in! It doesn't matter if you think you fit of not, Family Coaching is good for everyone who has completed The Art and Science of Coaching.
Frankly, I would suggest that every coach would do a Family Coaching program, just for themselves. It adds so much rich information to understanding coaching processes. It adds a baseline for all sorts of individual coaching where people are actually dealing with “couple issues”. Personally I would like to see all coaches working with at least 3 days of Family Coaching, getting this baseline integrated.
Knowing how to coach relationships also helps a lot with team and business coaching, because we are looking at how to accelerate the path of team development. A family is a team. And if we understand all the areas where a team needs to build trust, and how is that done, then it becomes much easier.

LM: What kind of background, skills coaches should acquire before going into Family Coaching?

Dr. Marilyn Atkinson: It is absolutely necessary to have basic coaching, The Art and Science of Coaching individuals. We also prefer people who have some kind of background in working with relationships before. And experience in mediation, facilitation, counseling assists you too. This is because Family Coaching is probably the most complex area of coaching.
We want people who know the difference between the need to negotiate with somebody and the need to coach them, or training issue, what's a coaching issue, what's a negotiation issue, and what's a mediation issue.
If you want to make it your specialty area, then it is very useful to have at least a certain level of experience with your own family life, and your own parental experience to move the program ahead.
We need somebody often who is a little more mature, who may have raised a family themselves, may have being in a relationships for some time, and knows a lot more about relationships dynamics than a greenhorn.

LM: Working with Couples and with Relationships creates new level of complexity for coaches. How this reshapes or adjusts the set of coaching skills, which coach should have to be successful in this area?

Dr. Marilyn Atkinson: It shapes them a lot.
What differs is that we are actually talking to three participants, when we are working with a couple: we are coaching Him, coaching Her, if it is a traditional couple, and then third, we are also coaching the Relationship. Each partner in the couple is invested into third body which is called the Relationship, and that's somewhat different than coaching one person around their goals.
We use a variation on Coaching Arrow in family coaching. The Art and Science of Coaching tools map very powerfully into Family Coaching.
And also there are different levels and kinds of coaching skills as it is very different working with a new couple, than with a couple which has hit problem areas. There are particular methods that have to do with people working gradually to adjust their perception of their partner to keep it positive to support their partner and to support a long term vision with family.
Working with confidentiality gets new dimension: sometimes we are coaching only one partner, sometimes we are coaching both together. Sometimes we need to refer a partner to another coach because they don't feel safe working with the same coach as their partner. And we need to be very acutely aware of these issues, so that the couple moves ahead.

LM: What differentiates Relationship & Couples Coaching from the Family Therapy and Counseling? Many people used to perceive these areas as already established and traditional and coaching is new to this area..

Dr. Marilyn Atkinson: The main difference is the attitude of the clients. If somebody has called saying: “I have got serious, severe problem”, - they are likely looking for a very qualified relationship specialist. And a lot of people don’t come to coaches when they believe they have a severe problem. However the methodologies are frequently much the same and follow the same principles. I have spent a whole lot time coaching and training around relational questions, and I have a clear background on what it takes to become effective in any of these areas.

LM: Relationships & Couple Coaching is such a huge area, can we call it a “niche”?

Dr. Marilyn Atkinson: It's a very wide niche... it includes family coaching for young couples, who are just getting started, second area is working with couples, who have got some “bones of contention”, and that is where we start the course on Couples Coaching. Then we move into an area where we work with troubled families.
In all these are people who desperately want assistance: they want to learn how to negotiate with each other, how to actually have a sustainable system that allows them to grow in each other’s presence. They are really checking: can this marriage be saved? Do we want to be with each other? What’s the real long-term prognosis? Is it worth staying together?
And so making some simple discoveries about the value of coaching, and developing methods for self-coaching and partnership coaching early in relationships, can provide powerful assistance. In this course, you, as coaches, will discover valuable ways to assist couples to build a framework for their development as a team.