This study examines the roles of trust, intimacy, and execution in enhancing coaching effectiveness, based on insights from 15 professional coaches and 30 coachees. It aims to identify best practices that contribute to successful coaching relationships and outcomes. The main objectives are to understand how trust shapes coaching relationships and outcomes, exploring intimacy's impact on client engagement, assessing effective coaching execution strategies and barriers, and formulating best practices to enhance client satisfaction. Using a mixed-methods approach, qualitative data were gathered from semi-structured interviews and analyzed thematically, highlighting trust as foundational to coaching (moderately correlated with outcomes, r = 0.68, p 0.01) and intimacy as crucial for engagement (strongly correlated with progress, r = 0.72, p 0.01). Quantitative data from questionnaires showed that structured execution significantly outperformed barriers (t(44) = 4.13, p 0.01). Findings recommend fostering trust through openness and feedback, enhancing focus and agency with structured plans, and building intimacy by creating a respectful, empathetic environment. These best practices align with principles in Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman and Martin Seligman's positive psychology framework. Future research should further validate these findings across larger, diverse samples and varied coaching contexts.
Ogunleye Adedayo (Wed,) studied this question.