Nadine and Benji talk about how coaches can help their clients to identify who they are, and who they would really like to be. This often has to be discovered in a context of pressure and expectation in the corporate world. Here is an extract of their conversation, which you can watch in full in the video.
Nadine: For coaches, the ability to increase our own flexibility makes us more able to choose, moment by moment in the session, how we want to respond. So when we are more aware of what is going on inside us and for the client, and when we see the combination of the two – how the client can impact us and how we can impact the client – and we stay aware throughout the session, that increases our presence in the service of our clients.
Benji: I’ve been exploring for the past year or so how we can help ourselves and our clients identify who we really are and who we really want to be. There are some new tools that really zoom in on this, helping us to identify messages we have received about who we are that aren’t who we really are, and also messages about us and other people that can stand in our way when we don’t address them directly. So the ability to identify them quickly can add a lot of value to the coaching work, and I’m excited that we’ll be presenting this in our upcoming workshop.
Nadine: In the corporate world, there are a lot of pressures to comply to expectations. One of the things you want to make sure of as a coach is that you work on what your clients truly want for themselves, and not just those things which comply with others’ expectations. So finding what people truly want for themselves, for their teams, and for the company is really essential. The whole work starts from there, and it’s about bringing that energy in service of what you want to accomplish.
Benji: In a professional context it’s so easy to adopt a false self and run with it. Sometimes, one of the problems with adopting a false self is that it actually works! It actually works, but ultimately it fails, because it doesn’t give you a satisfying professional life. This is why you find people facing some very difficult situations in their work, almost amounting to an existential crisis. One of the beauties of the work we do in ACT and coaching is that it helps us get back to who we really are, and who we really want to be.
In this workshop we are going to show our participants some practical and fairly simple tools which really help to promote and foster that in a directly applicable way.
Register for the ACT and Coaching workshop with Benji Schoendorff and Nadine Hemmer. The workshop, which explores how you and your executive coaching clients can develop emotional and behavioural agility, takes place online on 25 April and 3-4 May 2022. This experiential workshop, accredited by ICF, will enhance your understanding of the ACT approach and help integrate it into your professional practice.