Beyond frontiers – Workshops

Mindfulness and Resilience: an approach for coaches/mentors and their clients

Michael Chaskalson

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention in the present moment to yourself, others and the world around you. It emerges from the Buddhist tradition but is increasingly coming to be used in secular healthcare and organisational settings. There is a significant research base, including some fascinating neuroscience research, developing around its effectiveness in a wide variety of contexts. This workshop will present some of that research as well as a practical taster of mindfulness practice.

Participants will learn how mindfulness can enhance their coaching practice and their lives. They will take away practical methods that they will be able to use right away to help them to be calmer, clearer and more self-aware. They will learn methods that can help them be more fully present with their clients and in all of their relationships. And they will discover how mindfulness practice might help them to develop higher levels of personal resilience and enable them better to manage the stresses inherent in their own and their clients’ working lives.

Baby Brain or Leadership Leap? Does becoming a parent (mum or dad) make us better, or worse, at our work?

Jennifer Liston-Smith

This workshop will look at some of the psychology of becoming a parent and discuss whether being a parent brings new skills clients can apply in the workplace; it will look at some of the different theories on the parent transition, and what they tell us about clients´ states of mind when they return to work. We will also link the transition to concepts from developmental psychology to explore the upsides of such a major shift and its leadership development potential. Then we’ll explore some hands-on approaches from positive psychology and cognitive behavioural coaching to reduce feelings of guilt and bring out the best in new parents.

Cross-cultural coaching

Jenny Plaister-Ten

Coaching has emerged from a Western perspective, which may not be appropriate across cultures; given the multi-cultural nature of societies and workplaces today. Coaches could be operating with a lack of understanding, confidence and skills in a cross-cultural context and potentially operating from within a ‘blind spot’; unaware of the impact of culture.

The Cross-Cultural Kaleidoscope™ was developed by Jenny Plaister-Ten, as part of her MA in Coaching and Mentoring Practice with Oxford Brookes University in 2008. Since then, Jenny has been working to apply it to Global Executive Coaching practice.

Jenny will facilitate a workshop for those coaches interested in learning how to apply the Kaleidoscope model to their own practice or organisation. In addition to drawing on her own research she will use a combination of approaches to introduce the model. These include a World Café exploration that will reveal potential cultural issues within the coaching engagement, along with an opportunity to use the model.

Feedback so far suggests that the model has value as an awareness-building tool. It has been reported to have deepened the strength of the coaching relationship whilst raising the self-awareness of the coach to his/her own cultural influences.

Please come to the session prepared to explore and to emerge your own learning.

The art of ontological coaching – an introductory workshop

Aboodi Shabi, head of coaching and training at Newfield Europe

Two of the pioneering figures in Ontological Coaching, Julio Olalla and Rafael Echeverria describe ontological coaching as “a process aimed at producing a change in a person’s soul, which only happens when we are willing to observe, question and be curious enough to change the self that we are.”

The way we see ourselves and the world, determines how we are, and our capacity for action. By shifting and expanding how we see, we expand our possible range of actions. How we see, or the “Observer” we are, is made up of:

• Language, or the words you speak and in which you frame your thoughts.
• Intelligence of your moods and emotions.
• Physical movements.

Clients will experience new, increased possibilities for action and decision-making when we can help them to interrupt unproductive patterns of language, movement, and moods and emotions.

During this session we will explore these concepts and how to apply them in our coaching.

Metropolitan Police

The case for change: an inside job
Jackie Keddy

Having introduced and spearheaded London’s Metropolitan Police Service’s (Met) award-winning in-house successful coaching programme, Jackie Keddy has now worked with the Met to pioneer an initiative that would bring coaching into practical, everyday conversations and management style.

Recognising the severe time pressures that the group’s critical incident-led team of middle managers faced, the initiative started with consultation with the intended participants, going into the basics of what would be practically useful for them and their teams. It is also significant to note that this was ‘mandatory training’.

Focusing on issues such as handling challenging conversations, developing personal resilience and dealing with staff under-performance, the programme combined coaching principles with application, also being realistic about what managers could confidently take away from only a brief exposure to coaching training.

In this session, Jackie will explain how 135 managers became engaged with the notion that coaching could be embraced as a management style in their brief, everyday conversations with staff, against a backdrop of the uncertainty and contraction that bedevils the public sector. Jackie will also demonstrate some of the approaches that she used and the memorable “micro-techniques” that were offered to the programme’s participants to give them the enthusiasm, confidence and know-how to coach on-the-fly.