Introducing our newest team member, Nick Martin
TLDR
- Nick Martin has been a coach for 21 years
- He is Faculty at the Co-Active Training Institute, where he trains people to be professional coaches
- This October, Nick will co-lead our Climate Change Coaching Mastery fast-track course
- Charly says “We are delighted to be bringing Nick into this programme. With his many years of experience in training coaches, Nick will bring new ways of communicating the theory and practice of our course, which we’re really excited about. As a masterful coach, our participants are in for a treat when he demonstrates our tools!”
Nick has recently joined the Climate Change Coaches after a long career as a coach, and having become increasingly more connected to the natural world and the climate crisis raging within it. Nick has had a really varied career, beginning as a chartered accountant, but the natural world called, and he soon switched completely into outdoor-based training, in which he ran leadership and team building courses on the west coast of Scotland and in the Lake District. From there, coaching was an obvious progression, “although” Nick jokes “this was so long ago that nobody really knew about coaching back then!”
A coach for over twenty years, Nick did his initial training with the Co-Active Training Institute, way back in 2003, and has been coaching ever since. He is also a systems coach, having trained in Organisational and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) with the Centre for Right Relationship, with whom we partner. Nick is also currently studying for Thomas Hübl’s Trauma-Informed Consulting and Coaching Certificate.
Nick loves coaching people who “know that there is something more - more for them to explore, more for them to step into. This might be changing their work, changing the way they work, taking on more responsibility. Most important is that they know that the inner work on who they are and who they are becoming is at least as important as the outer work of what they do.” Nick’s talent is in helping people to become more congruent between these two places of ‘human being’ and ‘human doing’.
Nick’s concern about the climate crisis has deep roots, beginning on a on a family holiday when he visited the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales as a fifteen year old. Then in 2016 he felt the same pull to action that he felt as a teenager, and joined Margaret Wheatley’s “Warriors for the Human Spirit” programme, which he is still connected with today. Getting up close and personal with the full reality of the climate crisis has equipped Nick for the work he now does with the Climate Change Coaches. Nick says:
“I have certainly found myself experiencing eco-anxiety and climate grief - even before they had been defined as concepts. This may sound strange, but I am glad to have experienced those emotions. I am glad because they woke me up. I have now arrived at a place of acceptance - which is not the same as resignation or giving up. I am also glad because I am now better able to support others who are in the midst of those emotions.”
Charly Cox, Executive Director of the Climate Change Coaches, says that
“Nick is calm and unflappable as a coach and especially as a trainer. There is nothing he hasn’t had to tackle before or doesn’t know how to answer. But there is also a twinkle in his eye and he is a bit mischievous when you get to know him! He wants to challenge the way the world works, and he brings that to the way he trains coaches, as much as to his coachees in sustainability. Nick is an optimist without being naïve. Instead, I have seen him steadfastly believe in change, when others are struggling to, by bringing in new perspectives that no-one else could see before."
Nick first heard about the Climate Change Coaches in 2019, and he sought Charly out at the ICF conference. Charly remembers:
“I was given a lunchbreak open mic slot, and had just 8 minutes to try to interest a room of hungry coaches in a totally new field of coaching. To say that people were uninterested was an understatement! Many looked at me like I was a bit unhinged. But Nick came up to me afterwards and told me that he thought we were onto something. We’ve been in touch ever since, and I’m so pleased that he’s joined us."
Nick remembers “The other speakers during the lunch session overran, so Charly only had a few minutes to put her message across. But I knew that what she was talking about was important, and that coaches have a role to play in the climate crisis”.
Nick will be co-leader with Emily Buchanan our Climate Change Coaching Mastery course this autumn, in our first ever fast-track version of the programme. For many years he has been Faculty at the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), the world’s largest coach training provider, where he has trained hundreds of people to coach.
We often hear that coaches appreciate the self-development in our courses as much as the new skills they gain. Many are surprised by how much they need to manage their own thoughts and emotions in order to successfully coach people about climate change, and are grateful for the emphasis that we put on developing this. Of this, Nick’s says “There is always a moment in someone’s training as a coach when they say ‘I thought I had come here to learn coaching skills. I have realised that I am learning so much about myself as well!’ It is always rewarding to hear this, just as it is to see people grappling with something new, telling themselves that they can’t do it, and then to witness them as they find their way to doing that new thing with ease and joy.”
Charly says “We are delighted to be bringing Nick into this programme. With his many years of experience in training coaches, Nick will bring new ways of communicating the theory and practice of our course, which we’re really excited about. As a masterful coach, our participants are in for a treat when he demonstrates our tools!”
Asked what his dream assignment would be, Nick says “Something where we can have an impact on a whole system. That might be coaching leaders who are in a position to shift the systems of which they are a part; or it might be working with groups of people in organisation at a scale where we can create a critical mass for change.” If you have an assignment like that, get in touch!
ALSO CHECK OUT!
Charly’s vlog with the Co-Active Training Institute here.
Connect with Nick on LinkedIN here
Follow the Climate Change Coaches here