The Professional Identity Formation of Grief Coaches: Applying Braun & Clarke’s Thematic Analysis

This qualitative study explored how grief coaches develop their professional identity. Three coaches were selected as participants: all held certification from the Korea Coach Association (KPC), had completed grief-related training courses, and had conducted at least five grief coaching sessions. Open-ended, in-depth individual interviews were conducted between December 2025 and March 2026, each lasting 90 to 180 minutes. The collected data were analyzed through thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke (2006). The analysis identified four major themes and thirteen sub-themes. The first theme, ‘Motivation for Career Choice: What Life Taught First’, showed how participants discovered meaning in their personal experiences of loss, integrated coaching with thanatology, and gradually came to see grief coaching as a vocational calling. The second theme, ‘Experiencing Professional Crisis’, revealed that participants faced ongoing challenges to their professional identity, including blurred boundaries between coaching and counseling, lack of social recognition, and the re-surfacing of unresolved grief. The third theme, ‘Resources for Overcoming Crisis and Sustaining Practice’, showed that developing a practice model and philosophical foundation, engaging in professional learning communities, and establishing self-care routines served as key factors sustaining their practice. The fourth theme, ‘Identity Becoming a Grief Coach’, demonstrated that professional identity is not a fixed state but an ongoing process of becoming continually reshaped through exploration and provisional self-experimentation. By examining how grief coaches in South Korea form their professional identity, this study broadens understanding of the intersection between coaching research and thanatology. It also provides practical groundwork for the development of training curricula and supervision frameworks for grief coaches.