Behind big ideas and new ventures there are often experiences of pressure, loneliness, doubt, and everyday coping challenges. This study offers an important perspective on the contribution of evidence based coaching for entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey and shows how a focused coaching process can contribute to clarity, hope, wellbeing, and meaningful progress toward goals.
Research content:
The purpose of the study was to examine how evidence based coaching influences cognition, psychological wellbeing, and performance among entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey. The study included 19 entrepreneurs from an accelerator program who participated in five one hour coaching sessions over ten weeks. The intervention was delivered at the University of Sydney by master’s students in coaching psychology using an approach that combined goal focused work, cognitive behavioural tools, and solution focused thinking. Before and after the intervention, the researchers measured solution focused thinking, hope, self efficacy, positive and negative emotions, psychological wellbeing, and goal attainment. The findings showed improvement in solution focused thinking, an increase in hope, especially in the component reflecting the sense of being able to act and have influence, improvement in psychological wellbeing, especially in self acceptance, autonomy, personal growth, and sense of purpose, a decrease in negative emotions, and improvement in goal attainment. In some measures, including general self efficacy, positive emotions, and one component of hope, no significant change was found. The study concludes that coaching is a structured and theory based intervention with an important contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, a field in which research is still developing. For the coaching community, the study highlights the potential impact of high quality coaching on entrepreneurs, and the opportunity it opens for coaches to become part of the worlds of business development, startups, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Hinkelmann, H., S. O’Connor, and J. Passmore. “Coaching Entrepreneurs towards Growth: An Experimental Design Study of Coaching Effectiveness for Business