Reflections
Thoughts on coaching, supervision and the inner work of being a coach.
Don’t be so coachlike!
When I first started coach training back in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of emphasis placed on the coach being ‘coachlike’.
The profession may have become more accepting of the coach’s humanity over the last three decades, but in my work with coaches as a supervisor and trainer, I repeatedly come across concerns that some aspect of the coach’s life or way of being isn’t ‘coachlike’.
On Being Unprepared
People who know me well will know that preparation is not one of my strengths. I’m much more likely to try and wing it, then to follow a script - it’s not always a good thing; my lack of preparation can cause me to panic or to fluster when I realise that I don’t have an answer to a question asked by a student or workshop participant.
But it’s not always a bad thing, either.
Archetypes in Coaching
The main appeal of working with archetypes for me is that they are embodied. Each of the four archetypes I work with - Sovereign (Queen/King), Lover, Magician and Warrior - bring with them an embodied expression.
Rather than just providing an intellectual concept, the archetypes allow us to picture how a particular energy might show up physically, and invite exploration about what it might mean to adopt a particular energy.