The Coaching Differentiator

J DiGirolamo, J Tkach Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Conference 2026

Coaching is distinguished from adjacent development modalities — consulting, mentoring, and training — by its unique capacity to access both overt and subsurface client elements, including desires, values, abilities, and well-being. Building on prior specialty coaching research (DiGirolamo & Berman, 2025), which identified leading with coaching skills, drawing on domain knowledge, and balancing the two as hallmarks of effective practice, this study extends that work through an exploratory survey of ICF-affiliated coaches (N = 214) examining how coaches uncover client motivations, facilitate action, and support well-being outcomes. Survey findings reveal that coaches primarily employ powerful questioning, active listening, and formal assessments to surface both conscious and unconscious client motivations. When conscious and unconscious motivations diverge, coaches emphasize psychological safety, permission-based inquiry, and non-judgmental exploration. To translate motivation into action, coaches most frequently leverage SMART goal-setting, incremental action steps, and accountability structures. As clients progress, coaches report observing meaningful well-being gains—including increased confidence, clarity, agency, and resilience, alongside reduced stress and self-doubt. Leadership skills, career growth, and personal development emerged as the most frequently presented coaching topics. These findings are framed within a parsimonious Motivations → Actions → Well-Being model that positions coaching's subsurface orientation as its core differentiator from modalities that primarily address overt, observable elements. Future research directions include quantitative validation of motivation-to-well-being linkages and formal documentation of the coaching differentiator.