Most coach training is focused on learning a coaching methodology and developing yourself as a human being, and therefore as a coach. Great coach training helps you have great coaching conversations with your clients. What makes these conversations great is that your clients will leave with an empowering sense of themselves, a fresh perspective on world they live in, and a new horizon of possibilities for action. Through this, you help them develop and navigate their challenges with greater ease and effectiveness.
This view of coaching is microscopic. To study coaching from this microscopic view is to study the finer aspects of coaching and refine your craft. Every coach must undertake this essential project. This is what we do in our Advanced Coaching Program. However, coaching conversations are not isolated from what’s happening in the world. To really understanding coaching, your also need a much wider, more expansive, and panoptic view.
In April 2021, integral luminary Roger Walsh (professor of psychiatry, philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies at the University of California at Irvine) published a call to action on the Integral Life website: Calling All Integral Practitioners!: Responding Effectively to the Crises and Craziness of Our Times. I highly recommend reading his article. Opening this article, he writes:
We are in a race between consciousness and catastrophe, and the potential catastrophes keep multiplying. Social and political turmoil, cold wars and hot wars, culture wars and cyberwars — the list of social challenges is long and growing.
But looming far larger are unprecedented threats to the survival of our civilization and even our species. Pandemics have grabbed attention, but are merely a warning shot. Barreling towards us is a constellation of crises such as overpopulation, resource depletion, ecological collapse, weapons of mass destruction, and more. Worse, the urgency of these crises keeps increasing and the time for effective action shortening.
In this race between consciousness and catastrophe, coaching has a role. Coaching offers much needed support for awakening consciousness in the face of the unfolding catastrophes - the metacrisis. Therefore, as a coach, you have a role to play in addressing the metacrisis we all face. Regardless of your coaching niche, the lives of your clients are impacted by this metacrisis. The last two years living with COVID have demonstrated this with superb clarity.
With this blog, I want to help you understand this wider, more expansive, and panoptic view of coaching. I want to help you understand how coaching individuals is simultaneously also coaching the collective. Consciously held, this broader context can shape the unfolding evolution of your coaching in a way that it becomes a more effective response to the metacrisis that we all face.
The kinds of challenges and breakdowns that your coaching clients will bring to you over the next decade and beyond will, more and more I believe, reflect the deep interconnectedness of the many crises we are facing. Most approaches to coaching are too narrowly focused on individual development. Yet what’s unfolding in the collective contextualizes individual development. And this relationship is reciprocal. What’s unfolding in the lives of individuals contextualizes collective development. As a community of professional coaches, we must stretch ourselves in this direction.
My intent with this blog is to help you, my dear readers, to sustain an empowered mood in the face of this daunting metacrisis. In this blog, I promise to offer perspectives and practices that you can put to use in your life and your coaching.