Besides working with coaches from Germany and Switzerland, the QueSCo team has recently started working with Dr. Fiona Day, physician and executive coach from Leeds, England. In addition to the extended professional exchange and the international perspective on coaching, Fiona Day also shares the recordings of her coaching processes with QueSCo. In doing so, a corpus of English-language executive coaching data is currently being collected. Plans here include reviewing the question typology and question sequence typology using this new English-language data. Read more about Dr. Fiona Day and what motivated her to participate in the QueSCo project:
Dr Fiona Day qualified as a medical doctor in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1996 with a first class intercalated degree in Psychology. She worked as a junior doctor in hospital and community settings before specialising in Public Health Medicine in 2009. She trained to be an Executive Coach in 2015, established Fiona Day Consulting in 2016, and integrates her several decades of experience in public health and medical leadership roles including at Board level into her coaching practice. Fiona’s clients are mainly senior doctors, medical and public health leaders in both the UK and internationally. Fiona was awarded Independent Accreditation with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council at Master Practitioner level in 2021, and a Chartered Psychologist in Coaching Psychology in 2023 by the British Psychological Society. She has nearly 3,000 hours experience of coaching over 400 clients, and specialises in using third wave cognitive-behavioural approaches to coaching. Fiona has always initiated, collaborated with, and participated in research (publications) as a doctor and as a public health leader, ranging from publishing audits, to initiating and co-supervising a PhD in health psychology, and setting up a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to improve clinical staff health outcomes. As a Coach and Coaching Psychologist, Fiona has been committed to ensuring that her coaching practice is as professional as her former medical and public health practice, she actively engages in her own research - most recently an outcomes study in the international peer reviewed medical journal BMJ Leader, reporting a statistically significant impact of her work on senior clinician and clinical leaders’ wellbeing. She strongly believes in the professionalisation of coaching and has served in volunteer leadership roles with the EMCC-UK and British Psychological Society. Fiona also believes that Professional Coaches and Coaching Psychologists have a role to participate in research: it helps them to evaluate their practice objectively; advance their discipline; learn skills to improve their practice; as well as being able to question, evaluate and test different approaches objectively. It is well known that all patients have better health outcomes in research active hospitals, even if individual patients are not part of research, and hopes that one day the coaching profession may be able to test the wider impact of coaches engaging in research. Fiona first read about Prof Graf and Colleagues’ work in the International Coaching Psychology Review. She believes that QUESCO project provides an innovative and important contribution to the disciplines of coaching and coaching psychology, and will also enable Fiona to continue to improve her own practice, thus positively impacting on the outcomes of her clients and their systems. Her experience of taking part in the research so far has been hugely rewarding personally and professionally and she is delighted to contribute to the evidence-base on a pro-bono basis in order to further the scientific understanding of when and how coaching works.