Beyond frontiers – Keynote sessions

Being human: coaching the whole person for holistic high performance

Alex Linley, founding director, Capp

Life, and indeed work, seems to be defined by dichotomies: day/night, work/life, positive/negative, performing/failing, talent/effort, strengths/weaknesses. It’s easy to develop a position where we define what we do as the opposite of what others do, our counterpoint to their point. For decades, this has been much the story of human development. It is this story to which coaching and mentoring have typically, perhaps unwittingly, bought in and continued to practice.

Yet as we look beyond frontiers, it’s clear that there are other ways. We can start to define ourselves in relation to what we contribute, rather than what we accumulate. Winning can be about abundance rather than a zero-sum gain. Success can be defined as much by who we are and what we do as by what we have. Development can be about how much of our potential we have realized, rather than just which rough edges we have smoothed.

In the quiet moments of reflection in the coaching relationship, these are the whispers that emerge from clients who are looking for another way but feel locked into the status quo. The paradox is that when we start to coach the whole person, rather than just their narrow performance in role, everybody wins.

In this presentation, illuminated by the latest insights from positive psychology and strengths research, Alex Linley will share how by being human as coaches ourselves, and enabling our clients to be everything that they are and that they bring, we can see beyond frontiers to a more fulfilling way of working that serves us all in making our greatest contributions and realising the deep potential we all have.

Brain power: the latest developments in neuroscience and the implications for taking coaching and mentoring forward

Geoff Bird, neuroscientist at Birkbeck College and Anne Scoular, psychologist, author of The FT Guide to Business Coaching and co-founder of coach training school Meyler Campbell

This keynote looks at some of the latest research in neuroscience, which has used brain-scanning technology to investigate how the brain works when humans interact with each other, examining what this means for coaching and mentoring practice.