The Co-Active Coaching model established by The Coaches Training Institute defines Co-Active Coaching as follows:

"Co-Active Coaching is a unique, proactive alliance with coach and client, working together as equals in meeting the needs of the client. Fervent curiosity is more important than specialized knowledge.

The Coaches Training Institute holds that all people are naturally creative, resourceful, whole, and completely capable of finding their own answers to whatever challenges they face. In Co-Active Coaching, the client has the answers and the job of the Co-Active Coach is to listen and empower rather than inform and advise. The Coach has the questions, rather than the other way around. We also believe that all parts of people's lives—their careers, relationships, recreation, personal growth, and finances, for example—are interrelated and should be addressed as such. We coach the whole person.

The main criterion for becoming a Co-Active Coach is simple: One must be fascinated by human potential, inspired by individual creativity, and unwaveringly committed to holding others as grand and capable."

The Advocate describes Co-active Coaching as:

". . . a thought clarification process. It's different because of two of its underlying assumptions.

The first is that no other person can ever know enough about you to decide for you more effectively than you can decide for yourself. The primary need of most people is not for the advice or direction of others. Rather, the primary need of most people is for clarification of their own thinking. That's what co-active coaching does.

Co-active Coaching's second underlying assumption is that you are intrinsically creative, resourceful and whole. Coaching is a way to for you to discover, with the aid of a trained coach, what you value, what you need and what you want out of your life. This form of coaching is called "co-active" because it is a customized "designed alliance" between coach and client to maximize the benefit of coaching to each client. Properly trained co-active coaches utilize a toolkit of skills to enable you to clarify your thinking. Your coach need know virtually nothing of the specifics of issues with which you are grappling. Rather, he or she is the guide who enables you to clearly assess your situation and then deal with it in the manner best suited to you. Coaching is clarifying, is balancing and is fulfilling."