Self-directed coaching: repositioning the client as the internalizing agent of developmental self-regulation a conceptual framework and research agenda for coaching theory and practice

Coaching has become one of the most widely deployed developmental interventions in organizational, educational, and health-professions settings, and the literature offers substantial evidence for its short-term benefits. Evidence on whether those benefits persist after formal coaching support is withdrawn is thinner and less systematic, and the question points to an unresolved tension at the field’s core. Coaching is justified by its capacity to build independent, self-regulating professionals, but it is typically structured in a way that locates diagnosis, goal setting, strategic planning, and accountability in the coach rather than the client. The result can be improvement that does not outlive the engagement. This paper introduces Self-Directed Coaching (SDC) as a theory-based framework that repositions the client as the principal agent of their own developmental regulation. Grounded in self-determination theory, intentional change theory, regulatory focus theory, self-directed and self-regulated learning, cybernetic control theory, and attachment theory, SDC reframes coaching as a scaffolded process whose intended end-state is reduced dependence on formal coaching support. The framework’s central mechanism is self-regulatory internalization, the progressive transfer of coaching functions from an external agent to the client’s own regulatory repertoire. SDC is organized around six cyclical components anchored by autonomy awareness, and the paper introduces Self-Directed Coaching Competency (SDCC) as a measurable higher-order construct distinguishable from self-leadership, self-regulated learning, trait self-control, and coachability. Consistent with intentional change theory, the cycle is entered and recurrently refreshed through the Ideal Self and personal vision rather than through deficit detection, and the paper specifies the conditions under which self-administered discrepancy monitoring would be expected to inhibit rather than sustain change. Fourteen propositions are advanced, together with explicit fading protocols, a specification of the coach competencies that competence-gated fading requires, and boundary conditions that include client readiness for self-direction. SDC therefore shifts the criterion of successful coaching from goal attainment during an engagement to the durable developmental capacity that remains after the engagement has ended.