Whilst it has been stimulating and rewarding working and developing a ‘coaching culture’ in an Arabic setting ,some of the challenges we are facing are often not encountered whilst working in a western culture.

Whilst adapting models on Coaching for change using the work of Marshall Goldsmith (2000) , one of the behaviours which is proving difficult to embed is trying to overcome ‘the success delusion’. ‘Any human, in fact , any animal will tend to repeat behaviour that is followed by positive reinforcement. The more successful we become, the more positive reinforcement we get – and the more likely we are to experience the success delusion’.

Overcoming this ‘success delusion’ is a challenge when culturally there is a respect and fear to not offend through comments that may infer things are not as good as we really think they are. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said ‘he who praises everyone , praises nobody’.

Until we can be more accepting of a true picture of where we are and the learning dip which needs to take place , only then will the coaching conversations begin to develop the behavioural changes of individuals which will lead to collaborative organizational improvement.