The Space Between: What is Coherence Coaching?
There are lots of forms of coaching. And coaching is incredibly valuable for your growth and development in all its different flavours. Try it!
You may know about executive coaching, which brings about enhanced business goals through leadership development. Or life coaching to support an individual shape and achieve life goals through personal development. There are then specialist and niche areas in all of these.
Coherence Coaching is available to all and can be applied to almost any scenario. It builds on and utilises coaching as its foundation and draws upon key elements of its underpinning philosophy, Philokosmia. But what is Coherence Coaching?
Coherence Coaching recognises the incredible value and power coaching has to offer. The fundamentals of coaching done well, allow individuals to make sense of their present and curate their future. When a coach sits with you, listens intently and focuses 100% on you, something magic happens. The coherence of your awareness increases. A coach can support you to observe your thoughts. You become more introspective and realise you are not only able to observe your thoughts but change how you think and decide what you will do.
In a coaching session your thoughts suddenly have more space and the flow of consciousness becomes more easily observed, like your coach is observing your thoughts with you.
You become the observer of your thoughts and this elevates your awareness of yourself.
You step away from yourself, so you may think, “well hang on, where are ‘you’?”
‘You’ are between your thoughts and your thinking.
Coaching creates the space for you to observe what and how you are thinking, to question it, to consider other ways of thinking about it and decide what you want to do in response. At its root, Coherence Coaching enhances you, your professional development, personal growth, spiritual growth and elevates your consciousness.
Coherence Coaching is created between the coachee and coach
One of the harmonics of Philokosmia is ‘All Things Are Interwoven’ and this relates to how coaching actually happens and how it feels. This is not new to coaching but names many of the most powerful aspects and allows focus on them.
Philokosmia states,
‘Nothing stands alone; all things co-arise and co-shape one another. Consciousness is not confined; it is a field that flows through every relationship that connects all systems at all levels.’
When you consider consciousness as something created between relationships, between a coach and coachee, for example, you start to consider how you can keep this in mind and potentially change yourself…
…And how you can tune your world.
Coherence Coaching recognises that when a coach truly listens and cultivates coherent thought, the outlet for the coachee’s stream of consciousness is created and it starts to flow more. The connection creates more thoughts, more awareness and more coherence, which elevates consciousness.
This can feel like your coach is thinking with you or like you are tapping into the processing power of 2 minds.
And there’s more to Coherence Coaching
Coherence Coaching goes beyond this still; coaching the individual and how they can change themselves is just the start. It is about more than the individual, more than just holistic.
Coherence Coaching is for you and your environment!
It propagates relational coaching between you and your environment that allows emergent goals to be achieved.
Coaching you and your relationship with your environment, gives you the ability to actively tune your world and curate your future towards harmony. There may be parts of your life that feel coherent but when they overlap or interrelate with your environment they feel incoherent in totality. For example, a person is just one node in a larger network (their team, their family, their company). Coherence Coaching coaches more than you; it’s also about how you relate to the networks and systems around you.
Executive coaching invites you to optimise for the business. Life coaching invites you to optimise for your life. Coherence Coaching invites you to harmonise the relationship between you and your world.
The Philosophy: Philokosmia
At the heart and underpinning Coherence Coaching is this philosophy called Philokosmia; the love of universal harmony. It is a worldview that asserts we are not separate, isolated islands fighting against our environment. We have forgotten we are living, breathing parts interwoven with it.
One of the harmonics of Philokosmia recognises the importance of thinking holistically about you and your world; As above, so below. For example, think about a musical instrument; our ability to play a beautiful symphony depends entirely on how we are tuned to the orchestra around us. We don't try to control the whole world. Instead, we incrementally tune our immediate environment. The physical, relational, and mental, to reduce friction and invite flow.
Tuning is not passive acceptance. It is active curation. It is about ensuring that the inputs into your open system nourish you, so the outputs you give back are harmonious. Get this right and you give back to the world in a very powerful way.
Instead of asking, "What do you want to achieve?" or "How do you want to feel?", Coherence Coaching also explores
“What parts of your life resonate with you?”
“How can you connect with them more?”
“What parts of your world have friction or flow?”
“How can you stop interacting with parts of your world that don't serve you?”
“What is one small change you can make to your environment to allow a better outcome to emerge?”
You may like to try the Personal Coherence Audit to map yourself in relation to your external world, locate the loudest points of relational friction, and discover the shift needed to create more harmony and coherence in your life.
Emergent Goals and The Ecological Approach
Traditional coaching often treats you as a closed system, seeking an outcome that might be against the current of your life. Coherence Coaching is more ‘ecological’ in approach, as it is coaching not just for you but also how you relate to your environment / your team / your own nature.
You can change the current you are swimming through, and how you swim.
Emergent goals focus on the space between you and the world. Why is this? Because this is where reality lives. Not inside your head or anyone else's but in the connections between. For example leadership is created between a leader and followers, coaching is created between coach and coachee, consciousness is created between thinker and observer of thought. Therefore, emergent goals are achieved between you and your world and focus on improving the conditions of this space, allowing the successful outcome to emerge.
To demonstrate this, consider yourself as an overstretched Director, setting goals through three different coaching lenses:
The Executive Goal: "I want to grow the business by £30mil and achieve promotion within 12 months." (Optimising the business)
The Life Goal: "I want to feel healthier." (Optimising the individual)
The Coherent Goal: "I want to stop forcing my career at the expense of my body, and start tuning my whole system so both high performance and health naturally emerge." (Optimising the whole)
‘As above, so below.’ You cannot tune your world and find coherence, if your body and mind are in chaos.
‘Biology precedes strategy’
To access higher coherence, you must first physically regulate your own nervous system, moving out of isolated survival mode and into relational coherence.
To follow through on our example, you may think about the space between you and your team. How could you tune it to be both a better leader and a healthier person:
Implement walking 1-on-1s or a team running club.
Encourage or mandate shorter meetings across the team.
Start the week with a team meditation.
The Fractal Impact
Coherence Coaching aims to enhance an individual and how they participate in their world. Building on the relational nature, coaching occurs in the space between the client and their world.
This can then be applied to many aspects of life and society by applying a fractal lens which brings clarity that we are part of something greater:
When a CEO becomes coherent, their team becomes coherent. When the team becomes coherent, the organisation shifts. It ripples outward.
When a family member becomes coherent, their family benefits and this ripples outwards to their friends and extended family.
Coherence Coaching creates the environment for you to curate and grow your future. What emerges may surprise you, and your world.
Crowd sourced coherence
