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CLIMATE COACHING ACTION DAY 2022

by | Apr 29, 2022 | Articles, Climate change, Climate Coaching, Climate Coaching Action Day, News | 0 comments

The third Climate Coaching Action Day took place on 3 March 2022, an initiative Coaching at Work launched in 2020 to promote, support and celebrate climate coaching. This year we dedicated the initiative to the late Alison Whybrow, who did so much to promote climate coaching through the Climate Coaching Alliance and beyond. Liz Hall reports

 

Who did what on and around the day


Coaching at Work released various climate-emergency related articles and podcasts, including:

 

Articles

 

Podcasts

  • Zoe Cohen speaks to Coaching at Work’s Molly Hall in this inspiring call to action to be more climate conscious: https://bit.ly/3JhoGO2
  • Katherine Long speaks to Coaching at Work editor Liz Hall about regenerative leadership and healing systems: https://bit.ly/3Kim4kg
  • The UK International Coaching Federation held an Open Space Q&A session with Zoe Cohen and
    Julia Griffin exploring anything at all in relation to the climate, ecological and associated social justice emergencies, and their intersection with coaches and coaching.
  • The Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) held a webinar on Climate anxiety and environmental psychology: coaching in the climate crisis.

 

We need a radical rethink of coaching

To address the climate emergency, we need to shake up our models of what coaching should be: this was one of the themes that emerged at an AoEC webinar with a panel of Peter Hawkins, Linda Aspey, Tabitha Jayne, and hosted by George Warren.

“We need to radically rethink coaching beyond what is still an offshoot of individualistic White Anglo-American human-centric concepts”, said Hawkins.

Defining climate anxiety as a “feeling of impending doom about what’s happening in our world”, Aspey said one problem was that “coaching started off on an unhealthy footing as something to help successful people become more successful.”

It failed to “look at how other cultures around the world help people to grow and…be in relationship with. We were probably asking the wrong questions at the time because we were caught up in the industrial growth society which told us that more was better and we didn’t have enough,” she said.

The lens of climate is too narrow, said Aspey: “These are symptoms of a world in great malaise. How do we widen our own lenses? People are motivated by their values, and if we look at the values of this growth-dominant world, these values aren’t consistent with a life-sustaining society… it’s about a fundamental shift before it’s too late, and it’s already too late for a lot of people.”

Jayne called for greater democratisation of coaching, meeting clients where they are. She shared how she comes “from a very working-class background, very marginalized, so I’ve stepped up, and in coaching, I’ve had my eyes opened to this (seeming to be) very middle class and privileged…How do we shift focus (away from senior leaders) and do (things) from the ground up…giving the people at the bottom a voice?

“That space we provide in coaching where people can be truly heard and witnessed is one of the most beautiful spaces. It allows us to help evolve the next generation who are feeling a huge amount of responsibility, with the eco-anxiety coming in.

“You’ve got the people who aren’t interested, who are disengaged. Then you’ve got the people who are engaged but who are in complete anxiety. So it’s about meeting people where they are (even if they’re denying climate change is real – in that case, she takes a practical approach to complying with legislation, for example, creating a safe space), and absolutely redefining where we put our energy as coaches,” she said.

“For me, it’s not necessarily saying, I’m a climate coach and I can coach you on climate. It’s maybe making the decision in our coaching practice to work with people in different ways and in different contexts we might not have seen. If we all view coaching as a traditional pathway, coaching as a profession isn’t going to evolve, neither are we and neither is the wider collective waiting to be included in the conversation,” said Jayne.

However, Hawkins said, “Even the notion of, we have to start where the individual is, is a very human-centric and individualistic white northern concept. In many cultures, the notion that an individual is separate from their community would not make sense.”

While he agreed with Jayne that democratisation in terms of who coaching is for needs to happen, he said “we need to move further than that and have to recognise that in some ways coaching has been part of an Anglo-American colonialisation. And part of that is to (position) the individual as the arbiter of what’s needed. I no longer ask people what they want in coaching. I think we have to come alongside them, facing what their world is asking of them.

“Coaching has become very anthropo-centric and very individualistic, very focused on individual needs and wants…How do we have in the coaching room not just the voice of the individual but the voice of their customers, teams and community, and of the more than human world. How do we let that voice be present as it appears through and within us, as well as outside us?” he said.

“We’ve got to start privileging what the world is needing, not what the individual coachee is needing. We don’t have the time to try and help people change one person at a time.

“We have to stop seeing individuals as customers and us as suppliers,” said Hawkins, recommending instead we see ourselves as “coaching partners, with both in service of all the worlds the coachee is part of.”

 

Climate Coaching Alliance

The Climate Coaching Alliance held a six-day Global Festival with more than 70 events

Themes including narrative coaching, exploring coaching through a permaculture lens, working with Neil’s Wheel (https://neilswheel.org/), partnering with nature, using trees as inspiration for coaching (Tabitha Jayne), exploring the power of the Divine Feminine (Anne-Marie Morello, who drew on EFT tapping), and Eco Consciousness, decoloniality as narrative resistance to coloniality (Charmaine Roche and Fenella Trevillion).

Other sessions explored the benefits of expanding our temporal perspective to deep time to lift us out of the microplots of the business-as-usual paradigm. One way to do this is to engaging in a ‘Deep Time Walk’, a journey through 4.6bn years of Earth’s history via a 4.6km guided walk. (https://www.deeptimewalk.org/).Deep Time Walk’s Robert Woodford said, “Short-termism is the state of our Western mind, and this view pervades all our organisations, cultures and institutions. It’s difficult but we need to find a way to step back from our temporal myopia. How do we do it? We walk it.”

In their session, Honouring Uncertainty, Radical Support Collective’s Jess Serrante and Seth Bush, drew on Joanna Macy’s Spiral, the Work that Reconnects (Coming from Gratitude, Honouring our Pain, Seeing with new/ancient eyes, Going forth) to explore how to support resilience and effectiveness by honouring our pain for the world rather than turning away from it.

Presence at Work’s Roelien Bokxem and Jorn Wolfs, explored what happens when people lead from the heart, sharing their conscious evolution leadership model and their Leadership Being Strength Indicator tool.

Linda Aspey shared her systemic With the Earth in Mind model, which she developed in 2018 as a way to bring the climate and the environment into coaching conversations, and Jens Malmström from Sweden explored whether you can be an activist and a coach at the same time.

 

A hunger for facts can trip you up

Being too attached to needing to know all the facts can trip climate conscious coaches up, agreed the AoEC’s Sophie Welch, Climate Biodiversity Coaching’s Lydia Stevens and Climate Change Coaches’ Emily Buchanan and Charly Cox.

“I think you really need to care to do this work, and I don’t think it’s possible to really care and not look for information. But the facts will just trip you up, and there are people with sustainability backgrounds who’ve had to unlearn what they know,” said Cox at the CCA webinar.

Stevens, an ex-sustainability consultant, said it was hard to let go, but agreed it was important to try to do so: “We integrate climate science but with no attachment. As Peter Hawkins says, never know more and never know first. Evoke curiosity but don’t hold onto what’s right because we don’t know.

Welch said: “We don’t expect anyone (on the AoEC’s training programme for climate conscious coaches) to be a sustainability expert. I think this is something to let go of.”

Cox said: “It’s always worth checking why we want facts. Maybe we’re scared…(maybe) there’s a power imbalance…there’s safety in facts…find safety in another way.

“We see people burning out or alienating family members because they’re really attached to things being a certain way. We’re influenced by Buddhism, including Joanna Macy and Tara Brach. The power of connection is what creates climate action and in coaching we have that superpower to listen and ask questions so that we can access agency and have hope in humanity,” said Cox.

In the session, From Caterpillar to Butterfly, the three organisations highlighted how training can help coaches bring climate into their coaching generally, and set out their organisation’s approach in their training programmes.

 

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