Professional Self-Fulfilment of Adults in Wartime Conditions: The Role of Coaching, Psychological Prevention and Intervention

Abstract

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has established systemic factors of psychological load that devastatingly impact the professional self-fulfilment of educators – one of the most vulnerable professional groups in the conditions of armed conflict. The objectives of the study are to investigate the measures of professional self-fulfilment, anxiety and stress among the Ukrainian educators, to determine the correlation between coaching experience and psychological support and the self-fulfilment level, and to prove a differentiated model of implementing coaching, psychological prevention, and psychological intervention. The research design utilized a mixed approach that included an empirical online survey of 30 educational professionals through the Professional Self-Fulfilment Questionnaire (2014) which was created by Kokun, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) and Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS-10) scale, as well as secondary analysis of nine international and national studies and reports. The findings revealed that 60.0 % of teachers experience moderate levels of self-fulfilment (M=33.97), 86.7 % experience moderate or high levels of stress and 50.0 % experience anxiety that is clinically significant. Negative correlations were found to be statistically significant between self-fulfilment and stress (rs=–0.44; p=0.015) and anxiety (rs=–0.38; p=0.037), with a positive relationship between support experience and self-fulfilment (rs=0.41; p=0.024). On the grounds of the results, the differentiated three-level support model is suggested – coaching, psychological prevention, and psychological intervention as the supplementary means of retaining and recovering the professional potential of educators in wartime conditions.