Western traditions:
Somatics
A way of understanding human behaviours that derives from “pertaining to the body experienced and controlled from within”. This perspective gives us the powerful insight that clients’ way of seeing their world is anchored in the structure and configuration of their bodies and that coaching them without clear attention to this aspect of their way of being in the world is likely to leave changes unsustainable and superficial. It provides our coaching with the resource and knowledge of triggering and sustaining shifts through the physical and structural.
Phenomenology
A seminal understanding that it is people’s interpretations of experiences that happen to them that shapes their world and either limits or opens up the possibility of choice. Our coaching works to transmit this understanding.
Hermeneutics
Anchored in the study of ancient texts this philosophical tradition provides our coaching with the profound realisation that we as coaches need to assist our clients in cultivating the ability to understand things from others’ points of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their own outlook.
Existentialism
A philosophical tradition which offers the gift that individual human beings create the meanings and essence of their own lives and that we as coaches need to gently but firmly push back the locus of control of how things are cascaded back to the way in which our clients are including or excluding people, events and realisations into their lives. It provides our coaching with a counterpoint to more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism which create the illusion of life happening in a structured and Cartesian way.
Linguistics
Linguistics compares language and explores their histories, in order to find universal properties of language. From this tradition we have drawn into our coaching the role that language plays to create and shape our coachees reality and how shifting language can generate possibilities beyond what seemed fixed or intractable.
Ontology
The study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being, ontology seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationship of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. It gives our coaching the perspective of trying to divine how our coachees way of being in their worlds creates meaning and how shifting meaning and what matters is likely to result in sustainable change for our clients.
Eastern traditions:
Buddhism
From this beautiful life force we draw the insight of how we need to work with our clients on building the capacity to skilfully respond to their world, rather than reacting habitually in ways which gets them stuck. We also draw the understanding that unless we are working to help our clients change at a deeply molecular level that our work together and their resultant insights will simply slough off like dead skin with the passage of time. We derive the power of how building our clients’ capacity to be skilled observers of how they show up in their worlds is a competency that leads to self-correction and self-generation, both quintessential outputs of our coaching programmes. We also access the gift of practice, the understanding that only ceaseless repetition of new ways of being leads to the biological and biochemistry changes in the body of our coachees – which in turn leads to changes in seeing and interacting with their worlds.