Coach Approach Blog

When I first started coaching, the whole coaching philosophy was night and day from what I had learned in the School of Life. I had spent years in a world of certainty, right and wrong, reward and punishment, and looking to others as authorities in my life.

In coaching, I began to experience something entirely different. I leaned into choice, agency, imagination, and possibility. That shift changed my life.

Yet as I continued growing, I realised that my early coach training was still built on …

I had a coaching conversation recently that I left feeling "ick" about. Something in me knew I hadn't served my client well. This was an amazing person with so many clear strengths, and they were in pain because of really difficult situation.

I focused on the person's qualities and the choices before them, and after I hung up the call, I thought, "Shoot. I totally missed it. This person needed me to just stay with them in the pain a little longer. They don't need fixing or changing or even empo…

I went through a massive burnout in 2003. It happened after an international move to France when I was placed with a boss who was dead set against having an American on his team. He thought good leadership meant keeping me at work doing menial tasks late into the evening, often closing the day by telling me how I would never be a great leader like him, and how miserably I had failed in creating the writing or presentations I was working on. It literally made me ill – I stopped eating and sleepin…

There's a moment in every coach's journey when technique falls away and something more profound emerges. It happened to me during a session last week – my client and I sat in silence for what felt like minutes, yet neither of us rushed to fill the space. In that sacred pause, something shifted. Not because of what I said or did, but because of what I allowed to be.

This is the essence of MCC-level coaching. It's not about accumulating more tools or perfecting your questioning technique. It's ab…

If you’ve been around Awaken Coach Institute for a while, you’ve probably heard the word loving-kindness. It’s the way we like to be. But how does it relate to compassion, another of our favorite words in coaching and community?

There’s a saying I love:

“When the sunshine of loving-kindness meets the tears of suffering, the rainbow of compassion appears.”

When sorrow or difficulty arises, and we stay connected to that kind, caring state we’ve cultivated in ourselves, compassion flows natu…

My friend Clare Norman, MCC (who's written several wonderful coaching books, including The Transformational Coach, which I highly recommend) has offered a guest blog for the Awaken community this week. The two of us have been having a joyful collaboration, sharing our thoughts on love and coaching. What a kindred spirit!

Clare writes: 

Love Doesn't Run Out

The word “uninhibited” keeps coming up for me in therapy. We were talking about how I show up in my marriage when my therapist asked about…

Group coaching, the Awaken way, where energy, income, and impact come into alignment. In community, coaches discover how to belong to themselves while creating spaces that transform others. 

Some people think coaching is about filling your calendar with individual sessions and constantly marketing to new people. That's how I started during my first two or three years as a coach, and parts of it were incredibly fulfilling. In fact, more than fifteen years in, I still love coaching a select few…

Transformational Coaching Begins Within: The Freeze Frame® Technique for getting unstuck

If you’re like me, sometimes you get stuck in ruminating, thoughts and feelings looping on repeat with no movement or positive action. It's exhausting. The brain seems to have a mind of its own, quickly pulling you down a path to nowhere.

Wouldn’t it be freeing to step back into presence, to find your way back to balance and choice?

One of my favorite practices for this is the Freeze Frame® technique, dev…

At Awaken, empowerment coaching is about more than individual change, it’s about belonging to yourself while finding strength in community.

I was in a coach training on a Friday afternoon with a man who considers himself a real champion of women's empowerment. At one point he taught our group of mainly women, "It's so important that I, as a white man, learn to give away my power."

From his perspective, I'm sure that felt true. To me, and the other women in the room, it felt gross. Something ab…