A Masterclass in Trauma-Informed Coaching
The coach is puzzled. She has been working with this client for six months. His staff describe him as ‘cool’ and his bosses say that while they rate the high level of his technical skills, his inability to delegate is creating decision-bottlenecks for his team. They have hinted that he needs what they call ‘a …
Continue reading “Could you be working with an ‘avoidant’ client?”
When we ran two catch-up seminars via Zoom for coaches interested in our trauma work, many of them people who had already attended one of our masterclasses, we asked for ideas about how to manage our own anxieties. Here is a selection of the many useful ideas that people put forward: Mindfulness and meditation: not …
I often recommend that coaches who are interested in understanding trauma and bringing that awareness into their coaching engage with their own internal therapeutic inquiry. I have always ‘done my own work’, firstly in psychotherapy, over the last 8 years through the therapeutic process developed by Franz Ruppert and additionally over the last 2 years …
Continue reading “Engaging with our own therapeutic inquiry”
Working recently with trainee and beginner coaches, I was struck yet again by their understandable preoccupations and concerns. Chief among these was a combination of self-doubt and doubt about the coaching process. ‘How can I be sure that these apparently simple questions will help my client?’ ‘What happens if I can’t think of the next …
Continue reading “What distinguishes beginners from more experienced coaches?”
Cora was a marketing executive in a utilities company. She felt stuck in her career and a kindly boss who had worked with me himself suggested me as someone who specializes in career issues. Cora was the breadwinner in her family and was finding her long commute to work exhausting. Her partner and teenage children …
A new event from Coaching and Trauma When you already have some familiarity with the topic of trauma and coaching you will have tried out some of the ideas and approaches. This may have raised innumerable questions for you, for instance The client got upset and I wasn’t sure whether to go on with the …
Continue reading “Deepening your understanding of coaching and trauma”
Becoming Your True Self by Vivian Broughton Green Balloon Publishing, £7.95 ‘Where can I read more?’ The coaching client has described an early life trauma: parents so preoccupied by their own fights and struggles that he says he felt ‘chronically unsafe’ despite an apparently comfortable middle class upbringing. We have made the link to his …
Even in my earliest days as a coach, I had the sense to ask clients about their experience of growing up. But often I found myself not knowing what on earth to make of what they told me. I had the impression that they spoke to me readily enough and frequently it shocked and surprised …
Continue reading “How it helps to apply trauma theory to coaching”
Here are some common coaching scenarios from my own practice as a supervisor in the last year, all client details disguised: Client A Is considering leaving his job abruptly with no alternative on the horizon. At their first session Client A describes a pattern of repeated sudden exits, sometimes triggered by him, sometimes by the …
Continue reading “Could trauma be the explanation for lack of coaching progress?”
Can there be a coach anywhere in the world who does not know and use the Wheel of Life? Thank you Ms or Mr Anon-Coach-Therapist who invented it. Yes, it’s an oldie, but that does not mean it has lost its usefulness. As part of the first session, the Intake Session as coaches in the …