Coaching
Our Coaching Principles
Our coaching is guided by Inspire to Change’s principles of Be & Become, Remember & Create, Learn & Unlearn, and Disrupt & Liberate.
This means that our coaching is:
Invitational
We are inviting you into a deep inquiry about who you are, who you may become, and the ways in which you may want to be, behave, think, or feel differently as you become
Timeless
We can reach back as far as our ancestors and look forward as far as our descendants as we remember what was and create what’s possible
Intentionally Biased
We are unapologetically feminist and anti-racist. We want to help you disrupt systems of oppression as you move towards liberatory elation
Learning-oriented
We all have things to learn and unlearn. Once we start identifying and leaning into those (un)learnings, we change in ways we could not have imagined or anticipated
Our vision is a whole, beautiful, and just world. We, as changemakers, must take care of ourselves and each other if we are to realize this vision. Care can take a lot of forms. One of the forms it takes at Inspire to Change is coaching. We are not coaches in the traditional sense—we are not going to help you be stronger, faster, or more efficient. Instead, we think of coaching as creative navigation: We journey with people and organizations as they find their true north. It’s about helping people get where they want to go while recognizing that this often means changing something from within in the process.
Coaching Relationships
We offer the following three types of coaching relationships
Individual Coaching
Our individual coaching is tailored to your unique personal and/or professional goals. Why personal and/or professional? Because we know that for changemakers, these two aspects of our life are intimately connected. Sometimes we must focus on one to bring about a desired shift in the other. The coaching relationship is designed to foster curiosity and inspiration, inquire creatively, and promote motivation to further your growth. Your natural strengths and aspirations are at the center of coaching. We assist you in aligning your strengths, talents, and experiences with your purpose to help you map effective guiding principles and strategies for future success. You can customize the level, duration, and goals of any coaching program
Group Coaching
In this format, more than one member is coached during a given group session. Members often do not know each other before entering a group coaching relationship. While the group sessions may include experiential exercises, education, or instruction in techniques, the focus is predominantly on coaching rather than support, education, instruction, or therapy. Modeled by the facilitator, all group members learn to provide encouragement/affirmation, focus on positive progress (no matter how small), carry a nonjudgmental stance throughout the exploration, encourage rapport-building through personal chat, and harness reflective listening. Group members are able to observe the myriad ways that individuals try out new behaviors in the learning process, amend their behaviors, and retry. This variety of approaches encourages creativity and provides the courage to try something new. Courage and willingness to try new things that inherently have a greater risk of failure are further augmented by a supportive “let's explore this together” tone, allowing members to experience empowerment and try new things with less fear
Team Coaching
Team Coaching is an approach that begins with creative expression to introduce and build community and set the stage for group inquiry. Typically, members of a team work together in an organization or on a collaborative initiative, and are seeking coaching–in the form of support and facilitation–for a co-creative process. We discover where the members or group are starting from; we ask generous and generative questions that help us understand how they see themselves and their work and their integration into their communities, and then we connect our expertise and resources to best serve identified needs. We assume collective wisdom in the groups we work with, and strive to pull this wisdom forward. We love to laugh. We love to learn, and we love to share stories and practices that we have accumulated in our years of facilitation and being a part of various communities
Our Commitment to You
Our President, Nora Murphy Johnson, identified guiding principles to support inner work after following sixty changemakers on their wellbeing journey for several years. You can read the full report here: “Wellbeing Inspires Welldoing Research Report: How Changemakers’ Inner Wellbeing Influences Their Work”. Our principles form the basis for our commitment to each person who joins us in a coaching relationship:
We will meet you where you are
We understand that inner development work is unique to each person, multidimensional, multifaceted, and ongoing. We will meet you where you are and move at your pace.
We will let you lead
We will engage with you to support your inner development work while allowing you the freedom to choose how to participate and engage
We will not hold pre-determined expectations
We will place individuals, not their work, at the center, and we will not hold premeditated expectations about personal or professional outcomes
We will help you hold space for YOU
We will engage with you to support your inner development work while allowing you the freedom to choose how to participate and engage
We will provide meaningful frameworks
We will provide a variety of consistent, coherent, and useful inner development frameworks
Your Commitment to Us
Coaching is about relationships, and we ask the following commitment of you. Again, these commitments were inspired by Nora Murphy Johnson’s wellbeing research (see above). Notice that we don’t ask you to do anything specific other than to show up with openness, and to continue showing up even when it gets hard
Say yes and return to yes
Say yes to exploring the profound connection between how your relationship with yourself deeply influences the way you are in the world. Return to “yes” by choosing to continue the exploration
Experience and be open to new relational possibilities
Experience and be open to new possibilities in your relationships with self and others, with your daily work, and with the work of changemaking in general
Our Intended Outcomes
We hope that a coaching relationship with an Inspire to Change team member will result in the following shifts:
Discovering and accepting your whole self by focusing more attention on awareness and presence and less on self-judgment.
Moving towards greater inner wholeness by integrating fragmented parts of yourself and creating the space to grow more fully and deeply into your whole selfhood
Bringing your whole healed self to your work in a way that fosters curiosity, openness, vulnerability, and a stronger sense of purpose
Aligning inner wellbeing and outer action including finding relief and healing from burdens while allowing more time to practice active empathy, celebrate, laugh, dream, create, and relax
Building proficiency in reflection, reframing, questioning, problem-solving, planning, and time management
Deepening emotional intelligence and inspiring creative thinking
Our vision is a whole, beautiful, and just world. We, as changemakers, must take care of ourselves and each other if we are to realize this vision. Care can take a lot of forms. One of the forms it takes at Inspire to Change is coaching. We are not coaches in the traditional sense—we are not going to help you be stronger, faster, or more efficient. Instead, we think of coaching as creative navigation: We journey with people and organizations as they find their true north. It’s about helping people get where they want to go while recognizing that this often means changing something from within in the process.
Meet the Coaches
We have a number of coaches to work with you on your specific needs
Book a Session
