Creating ripples in the system
Coaching at Work free half-day conference for Climate Coaching Action Day 6 March
This half-day free online event is hosted by Coaching at Work to mark Climate Coaching Action Day 2024
Timetable UK time: 10.00-10.30
Opening practice and reflection with Liz Hall
Sign up here.
10.30-11.15 Reconnecting to our true nature through dialogue in coaching with Jane Brendgen
11.15-11.45 Networking/Breakout with speaker
11.45-12.30 Coaching in the Movement case study: exploring coaching climate justice leaders, with Adam Klug and Faduma Hassan
12.30-13.00 Networking/Breakout with speakers
13.00-13.15: Takeaways and Closing.
Additional pre-recorded talks will be made available on the day
About the sessions
Session 1. Reconnecting to our true nature through dialogue in coaching with Jane Brendgen
We’re at a critical juncture in history where the fault lines of global systems breakdown are becoming increasingly more visible. We see this in the impact of the Covid pandemic with a widespread sense of disconnection, the mental health crisis, rising wealth and racial inequality, increasing political and ideological polarisation, geopolitical instability and climate change and the crisis of sustainability.
One of the primary underlying causes of the chaos in the world as we know it today can be traced back to Plato who saw the human being as composed of an eternal soul and a mortal body in conflict with each other. This split view of humans became dominant in western traditions and led to the over-reliance on our conditioned left-brain linear conceptual processes of reasoning and rationality where values such as power and competition are the norm. Through this lens nature is viewed as a machine with resources to be extracted and exploited.
This is the moment where we need to reconnect with our right-brain capacities, with the vivid, concrete, sensory experiences of our physical bodies, our heartfulness and our wisdom. We need to harmonise our conceptual consciousness with the animate mammalian intelligence of our right brain which connects us to nature, to all of life.
One of the ways in which we can contribute to systemic change is through integrating these two aspects of our human cognition in the practice of generative dialogue. In this relational space we are invited to let go of our habitual ways of thinking, speaking and listening and enter into a liminal space together. This is the gateway into a collective intelligence that is far greater than the sum of its parts, where our thinking can expand through shared meaning-making, discovery, and transformation.
In this 45-minute talk Jane Brendgen will introduce you to the principles and practices of generative dialogue and their application in coaching.
Session 2. Coaching in the Movement case study: exploring coaching climate justice leaders
When Coaching in the Movement’s pilot went live in July 2022, there were many unknowns. Based on their experiences as social movement activists in high pressure situations, the co-founders had a belief that introducing coaching in climate justice movements would be useful. But that’s all it was – a belief. They didn’t really know if there would be the appetite amongst activists, or if people would find it useful. They didn’t know for sure whether they’d be able to recruit values-aligned professional coaches, nor whether they’d be able to adapt coaching models and approaches to make them feel relevant and useful to climate justice leaders. However, they did know that they were determined to give it a go. It has been granted funding to continue, with successes including coaching more than 80 climate justice leaders from 30 different countries, building a global network of accredited coaches, with coaches from across Africa, Asia and Europe, and supporting two fellowship programmes – Climate Activist Speakers Fund and Youth Transport Fellowship Programme.
In this talk, Adam Klug and Faduma Hassan will share the successes, lessons learnt and next steps.
About the speakers
Jane Brendgen is a highly experienced executive coach and has coached individuals from board level through to graduate trainee in sectors including media, finance, music and health. She is accredited with Harthill Consulting to use its Leadership Development Framework, a well-established primary conceptual map for understanding adult development. Jane is also passionate about integral leadership, where the ‘whole person’ cognitive capacities of rationality, discernment and strategic thinking are married to intuition, wisdom, compassion, embodied connected presence and empathic listening, creating one vibrant coherent whole. She has a masters’ degree in mindfulness-based approaches and has many years of experience of Insight Dialogue, a relational form of mindfulness. Jane is a columnist for Coaching at Work.
Faduma Hassan is a coordinator of Coaching in the Movement – a project to put the proven method of coaching into the hands of climate justice leaders. Faduma has a background in training, coaching and mentoring and has extensive organising, campaigning and stakeholder engagement experience working for both grassroots organisations and for the UK Labour Party. She worked on the Doreen Lawrence Review which documented the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities and has supported the design and facilitation of leadership programmes for groups underrepresented in politics, including the Bernie Grant Leadership Programme.
Adam Klug is a coordinator of Coaching in the Movement – a project to put the proven method of coaching into the hands of climate justice leaders. Adam is a certified coach, former school teacher and social justice organiser. He supports emerging global leaders who are working to build a more sustainable future, combining coaching with his own social movement experience as a co-founder of Momentum in the UK. Adam played a leading role in introducing a host of distributed organising techniques, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to participate in campaigns at scale and is a founding member of Europe’s largest political festival, The World Transformed.