What is Gestalt coaching?
Gestalt Coaching is a present-focused approach that seeks to identify critical choice-points for action that exist “in the moment” but promise long-term effects. Gestalt coaching mastery requires an “awareness intelligence” that simultaneously—intuitively and accurately—tracks both self-awareness and client awareness throughout the coaching encounter, and enables the coach to be ready in-that-moment to offer the meaningful observation or intervention that moves the client forward.
A Gestalt coach brings the gift of an integrated presence to the coaching encounter: expression, behavior, and use of self are aligned with core values and with full access to cognitive and emotional life. The coach’s presence empowers clients to share their interior, and to have the experience of being heard through the avowed premise that they are already healthy, whole, and resourceful.
A Gestalt coach supports clients’ capacity to accurately scan and assess their internal and external environments, gather data, and make sense of that data in order to heighten their awareness, expand their choices, and take confident and productive action.
A Gestalt coach’s “use of self” (the intentional leverage of presence) in the coaching encounter is primarily guided by the conceptual process models of the Cycle of Experience and the Unit of Work. The coach continually references the Cycle as an awareness tracking lens to determine available energy to shape coherent Units of Work.
Gestalt Coaching Meets Today’s Challenges
Gestalt coaching is a present-focused, process-oriented approach that seeks to identify critical choice-points for action that exist “in the moment” but promise long-term effects. Masterful Gestalt coaches have an “awareness intelligence” (Awareness IQ) that simultaneously—intuitively and accurately—tracks both self-awareness and client awareness throughout the coaching encounter. Such mastery enables the coach to offer, in the moment that matters, the meaningful observation or intervention that moves the client forward.
A Gestalt coach brings the gift of an integrated presence that aligns somatic and verbal expression and behavior with core values, and accesses cognitive, emotional, and spiritual resources. The coach’s presence inspires clients to share their interior, and empowers them by recognizing that they are innately capable and competent. A Gestalt coach supports clients’ heightened awareness: to attentively scan and assess their internal and external environments, to gather relevant data and make sense of that data, to perceive expanded choices, and to take confident and productive action.
Click here for more information on the Gestalt theory and concepts that inform Gestalt coaching.
When you work with us, you will:
- Learn experientially and experimentally. Effective experiential learning is attuned to your particular ways of seeing the world and making meaning of it. We keep clients focused on whatever emerges in the moment — this is the data that connects them immediately, at a gut level, to obscured or unaware challenges. Using what arises in the moment allows for exploring and experimenting with new choices.
- Identify your own goals to guide your change and development processes. Clients need to be invested in outcomes that have personal resonance and emotional commitment. We assist clients to recognize and articulate the goals most important to them, and support them to move forward on those goals to achieve what they have envisioned.
- Understand your resistances to change. Habitual behavior and response patterns often become unconscious and prevent us from acknowledging a need for change or from enacting a change we consciously desire. These patterns may once have served a positive function, but have since become obstructive. We work with clients to surface unaware resistances and to co-create experiments with alternative perceptions and behaviors that liberate clients to see new outcomes and unexpected possibilities.
- Recognize moments of awareness that can lead to deep knowing and transformational change. Awareness is in itself a catalyst for change. When we work on cultivating our awareness, unimagined possibilities and extraordinary opportunities are opened to us. We engage our clients to be aware in the moment, paying attention to the somatic and internal feedback data that informs their responses. Awareness often offers a kind of knowledge and intuition that can’t otherwise be accessed.
- Learn how to take small steps to manage and achieve big projects. Self-awareness and self-work are key.
Our Mission
- To provide excellent and transformative Gestalt-based coaching and consulting services to individuals, teams, and organizations
- To provide world-class leadership training and development through coaching for awareness intelligence
- To create a cross-cultural, broad-based network of intellectual exchange with outstanding leaders and thinkers in coaching and consulting to help evolve Gestalt theory, concepts, and practices.
