Impacting the Coaching Profession

A coach training programme that brings people together to develop climate specific coaching skills and find unlikely collaborations

Our ICF-accredited Climate Coach Training Programme brings together professional coaches from around the world to learn how to apply their skills to the climate crisis. Being a global course not only brings a richer breadth of perspectives, but also helps to scaffold everyone’s sense of our collective willingness to tackle this problem. Often coaches tell us “I thought it was just me who felt this way.”

Part of what our facilitators love about this course is the broad range of coaches that we meet. We know that often those coaches go on to continue conversations long after they finish training with us. Some even collaborate together on mini-projects to bring to life the skills they learned with us.

For May Bartlett and Adam Lerner however, their happy meeting in our training programme has led to a life-changing collaboration!  Building on work that May did during her Masters degree and Adam’s sustainability work at Solvable, the two have teamed up to use their coaching skills to align the strategies and cultures of corporations with desired long-term climate impact.

May explains,

"The climate coaching course was a catalyst for my business collaboration with Adam, and eventually partnering with his colleagues Charles Holmes & James Tyer. It provided a platform for us to meet internationally that otherwise might not have happened, with Adam being in Canada and me in the U.S. The training process revealed our complimentary skills and shared perspectives toward corporate sustainability work. It helped provide the skills for us to refine our coaching framework that leads to lasting transformative change."

Adam’s enrolment in the climate coaching course was in part to consider how the coaching lens could be incorporated through a leadership curriculum. He explains,

"I came into this course as a non-traditional coach. I had spent fifteen years as a strategy lead, some of which involved working with executives directly. While I knew that the course would provide insights into the integration of climate work into a coaching practice, what I didn’t realize is how much I would learn from the seasoned coaching cohort and how those relationships would affect my journey. Through my connection with May and a number of others who took the course, we formed life-long relationships that continue to spur creativity, partnerships, and ongoing collaborations. This network of climate coaching collaborators around the world began with this course and continues to provide immeasurable value as we experiment with new ways to scale climate impact."

At the climate change coaches, we believe that systems change happens when people come together to create collaborative solutions that positively ripple outward. So for us, there is no greater impact than to have assisted in the formation of such a powerful relationship as May and Adam’s, which is in turn catalysing important change in the world. We are now discussing how climate change coaches and Solvable can collaborate to take this ripple effect even further. In the meantime, we wish them all the very best as they share their collaborative efforts with the world.