Ethics are on my mind. I’ve recently been sitting on the horns of a few ethical dilemmas in my coaching practice, and it’s not a comfortable place to be. As my coaching supervisor likes to remind me – “ethical dilemmas are prime opportunities for learning and for enhancing our coaching practice.”

The details of the challenges are important, and confidential, and I find myself looking for easy answers where none exist. Clear right and wrong doesn’t exist in most ethical dilemmas; however, a solid starting point, a place for grounding our coaching ethics can be found in the International Coaching Federation Code of Ethics and the European Coaching and Mentoring Council’s Global Code of Ethics.

Each of these codes are worth revisiting often enough if you are a professional coach, mentor, and/or supervisor, not for specific answers to complicated, potential ethical situations, but for guidance on how to approach them. Ethical Codes are useful in understanding the limits and boundaries of professional coaching practice.

I also recommend processing the murky waters of ethical dilemmas in coaching supervision, where the reflective space is designed to hold whatever happened in a nonjudgmental way. In supervision, the coach can explore what shift in the relationship with the client may have contributed to the drift into ethical waters and how to move back into a safe harbor.