Humanistic Coaching as a Collaborative Practice: Perspectives on Help Seeking From Coaches and Undergraduate Students With Foster Care Experience

Abstract

Abstract In college, reluctant help seeking is one of the challenges that students from foster care face. Avoidant help seeking is a unique risk factor that conventional support systems on college campuses often fail to adequately address. Humanistic coaching has recently been utilized by some universities as a successful alternative to typical student service strategies to address the needs of students from foster care. In this study, perspectives from four coaches and five students who were involved in a campus-based coaching program were analyzed to determine how they perceived help-seeking beliefs and behaviors. Using a hybrid thematic analysis approach, the authors found that humanistic coaching provided an opportunity to develop a transformational relationship between the coaches and the students. This relationship was perceived by both students and coaches as shifting students’ avoidant help-seeking beliefs and behaviors to adaptive help-seeking beliefs and behaviors. The transformative relationship promoted the students’ self-determination by creating a sense of relatedness, autonomy, and competency.