Coaching

I have recently been certified as an Integral Professional Coach.

I’m excited by this.

Over the years, as an author, I have often found myself engaged in deeply personal conversations with readers. Because I offer up intimate and painful experiences in my books, readers feel, rightly, an invitation to explore their own ideas and vulnerabilities with me.

If you put your voice out into the world, then you place yourself at service to that world. (Or, at least, that feels right to me.)

For years, I have been deepening my understanding of psychology, but I decided to add another dimension of skill to my encounters, so that I could continue to listen with empathy and curiosity, but also add rigour.

So, in the fall of 2013, I began training as an Integral Coach, a sophisticated, rigorous and profound approach to engaging with others in personal change. It isn’t precisely therapy, perhaps closer to counselling for mentally well people who have hit a wall in some way. Their strategies no longer work. They feel stymied. They want to grow.

We work together to bring insight and build capacity, without any implicit power imbalance between coach and client. It’s collaborative.

Integral Coaches invite their clients to engage in subtle, incremental shifts, so that change can take genuine hold. If the wall that’s been hit seems too immense, we take a few steps back from it and practise clambering about on boulders. Together, the coach and client develop bi-monthly practises that carefully develop strengths and thus open new awareness of what’s possible.

What I deeply respect about Integral Coaching is its emphasis on meeting people where they live, seeing AS them, rather than looking AT them.

“ICC’s coaching method is the very first coaching methodology we’ve ever seen that explicitly honors and includes the full spectrum of human development—which is to say that it is the very first coaching program that fully honors and includes all of you: all of your strengths, all of your weaknesses, all of your shadows, all of your experiences, and all of your untapped potentials.” Ken Wilbur

Contact me at pearsonspost1@gmail.com, if you want to explore this.