Coaching with Challenge
A Two Day Skills Course to Deepen & Expand Your Coaching
Writing in 2000, Mary Beth O’Neill invited us to Coach ‘with Backbone and Heart’.
This course is designed to help you as a coach challenge your clients with greater confidence, skill and conviction.
After all, as Fred DeVito offers, ‘if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you’.
Who is this for?
The course is designed for qualified coaches, both internal and external, who are looking to:
expand their skillset to lean into deeper challenge with their coaching client
develop their contracting and coaching presence to - essentially - get comfortable being uncomfortable in their coaching.
bring new forms of challenge to your coaching conversations
challenge more consistently from session to session with their clients
The Why
During our podcast conversation, Myles Downey offered that coaching today has become too nurturing. Many coaches honour the skills of active listening, of support, care and holding space.
And yet many coaching clients seek and need a healthy degree of challenge in their coach. Some tension. Some stress-testing of ideas or assumptions.
In coaching today is a scarcity of effective, healthy challenge delivered from a place of confidence and compassion.
This course aims to present a selection of different approaches and techniques that will help you evolve and develop your own approach to challenge. And to synthesise it comfortably into your coaching model and skillset.
The work we did together has really hit the right mark in terms of pushing me to learn and improve as a coach. I really appreciated your candour and the level of challenge. I have come away feeling that I have already grown a lot and acknowledge there is some way to go yet!
The How
Drawing on psychological theory and reflective practice, you will be invited to reflect on your current approach to challenge, and explore the inner work that may be required for you to challenge at your desired level and depth.
Honouring the complexity and messiness of the human condition, we don’t really do neat models or pithy acronyms here at the Edge of Coaching. Instead, you will be introduced to four differing approaches, or lenses, through which to challenge your coachee.
The course will introduce some constellations and systemic theory, helping you to bring ‘systemic challenge’ to your coaching.
You will also be introduced to ‘existential challenge’, an enquiry that invokes the profundity of the big questions in your client’s life.
Across the two days you’ll experience a live demonstration bringing some of the theory to live, and the opportunity to practice, receive and observe challenging coaching.
The course will provide 12 hours of CPD eligible both for Association for Coaching (AC) and EMCC accreditation or re-accreditaiton.
The What
Running 10am-4pm (UK) over two consecutive days, this course is perfect for coaches and leaders who want to coach with greater confidence.
The course will include blended learning involving theory, facilitated discussion and small group skills practice and coaching, with feedback.
The course will take place over Zoom, and will include practice coaching sessions on Day 2 where you will have the chance to coach and be coached.
Price: £325 total
Includes: Two day course, course handbook, certificate on completion of the course.
Dates
Thursday 16th & Friday 17th January 2025, 10am-4pm
Thursday 26th & Friday 27th March 2025, 10am-4pm
Monday 8th & Tuesday 9th September 2025, 10am-4pm
Thank you very much for your support, challenge, and exceptional coaching approach! It was a privilege to learn from you.
Your Challenging Coach
I’m George. An experienced Coach and Supervisor, who has trained many hundreds of executive coaches all around the world.
I hold accreditations with at PCC (ICF) and Master Executive Coach (APECS) and a big part of my work is helping leaders and coaches operate with greater conscience, confidence and competence.
As a coach, a supervisor and a trainer, my natural style is to lead with compassion, care and challenge to help you work with deeper presence, greater clarity and a better psychological understanding.
