We are just under a week away from our psychosynthesis coaching symposium, titled ‘Finding Agency in the Face of Crisis’ – Thursday 7 March in London at the NCVO (tickets still available here). What do we mean by crisis in this context?  For me this refers to the existential crisis facing humanity today – however we might frame this, whether as ecological or climate crisis or an all-encompassing meta-crisis of multiple interconnected dimensions and levels. As we engage with this theme within a psychospiritual context, I want to signpost a few pieces and sources that may inform our dialogu ..read more

The coaching at depth series 2. What does it mean to be a depth team coach? Team coaching seems to be the hottest topic in the coaching professional community at present. All the professional bodies feature it on their webinar or podcast programmes, and alongside an extensive existing literature, Relational Team Coaching edited by Eric de Hann and Dorothee Stoffels has just been published, bringing some welcome nuance and depth to the topic. And we at psychosynthesis coaching have just announced our new course on Team Coaching and Group Dynamics (more on which later). In this article I want to ..read more

Introduction Coaching is such a generic term, meaning different things to different people in different contexts, so it is increasingly important to say what we mean by it, and general distinctions between life coaching and leadership coaching or executive coaching, are no longer sufficient. The evolving coaching profession is going through a process of divergence into quite different conceptions of coaching and ways of working. I have previously written (Howard, 2022b) about the evolution of coaching paradigms, from behavioural and performance coaching, to relational and developmental coachin ..read more

The modern coaching profession as we know it today has evolved through a complex interplay of origins, including sports coaching, various psychologies and the human helping professions – in response to an ever changing panoply of individual and organisation needs. The profession has grown with a richness in diversity such that coaching can mean many different things to different people, so it is important to say what we mean when we refer to coaching.  Specialisations abound with developments being drawn from related fields including somatic and trauma work, constellations and systemic wo ..read more

In my last post I developed a hypothesis for how societal change or transformation takes place as a function of compelling narratives, emotionally connecting with tribal identities. In this third post I am adding the other key ingredients that influence how change takes place: the paradox of habituation and adaptability, the dynamics of power in human systems, as well as the role of catalysts in initiating or enabling change, the nature of momentum and inertia and how all these come together within the context of human societal systems. The paradox of habituation  ..read more

In my previous post I introduced a hypothesis for how societal change or transformation takes place – that it is a function of compelling narratives, emotionally connecting with tribal identities, mitigated or magnified by forces of habituation and power operating within the context of bio-psycho-socio-cultural-historical human systems, mediated by agency, enabled by catalysts and driven by momentum. In this post I will expand upon three critical elements or principles of human nature which are at the heart of this equation.  These are: The power of narrativ ..read more

Alongside great peril at this time of crisis, there is also hope and opportunity. Opportunity for us individually to use this recess or reset creatively in our lives as well as potential for a collective societal shift or transformation, as we eventually come out the other end. This is the first in a series of posts in which I explore psycho-spiritual principles in relation to the change dynamics at play, as we find time for inner reflection as well as engage in dialogue about how to reshape the world going forwards. There is already plenty of interesting discussion in the news media along the ..read more

Part 3 of a series on personal development in coaching  In the first part of this series of posts, I summarised the primary task of personal development as getting to know and mastering our personality, through exploring all levels of our consciousness. I also like the phrase our Italian psychosynthesis partners (IIPE) use to describe personal development: “know yourself, accept yourself, transform yourself”. This undertaking, both for ourselves and in support of our clients benefits from having some good maps of the territory. My aim in this third post on this topic, is to overview som ..read more

Topic Series: Personal development and the leadership coach Part 2: Seven perspectives on personal development for coaches In my last post on this topic I described personal development as “a vast and complex topic that can be approached in many different ways… inter-woven as it is with the whole field of psychology, the story of the human potential movement, the leadership and talent development world, the popular self-help industry and of course the modern coaching profession”. In this second post I explore seven key perspectives for coaches engaging with personal development, whilst contin ..read more