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Climate Change Coaching

The Power of Connection to Create Climate Action

This 280-page book offers practical, easy-to-grasp coaching skills that build connection, shift mindsets and motivate people to act and embrace change. Includes real life stories from 40 practitioners who have galvanized climate action using coaching skills.

Climate change and coaching are made for each other. While activists can raise general awareness, coaches are key to enabling leaders to focus on making climate change happen. Future generations will judge the coaches and coaching organisations of today on how we meet that challenge.

David Clutterbuck

Special Ambassador, European Mentoring and Coaching Council

Have you ever had a conversation that inspired and energised you to play your part well in responding to an emergency? If so, perhaps the person you were talking with had read this book or drawn on the understanding it shares.

The human change dimension is so often a missing piece of the jigsaw in responding to our climate crisis. The practical guide fills many of the gaps, with tools that can help us become better allies to each other in supporting the personal and systemic shifts needed in our time.

Chris Johnstone

Co-Author of Active Hope

Climate Change Coaching is an invaluable resource for anyone working in sustainability today. It provides practical techniques that get us to the heart of what is holding back progress, and tools to enrol others in our vision of change. For professionals engaged in tackling the biggest challenge ever faced by humanity, it also teaches us how to coach ourselves to build our resilience and prevent burnout. Climate Change Coaching gives us powerful relational tools to complement our technical abilities, to help us move faster and farther, together.

Patrick Bürgi

Co-founder, South Pole

about the book

In the first book to bring together climate change and professional coaching, Climate Change Coaching – the power of connection to create climate action offers practical, easy-to-grasp coaching skills that build connection, shift mindsets and motivate people to act and embrace change. When we build strong relationships and connect with people, we can change systems, because connected people moving together change the world around them. It will help you to:

  • understand and overcome psychological barriers to change
  • have more impact with every conversation you have about the climate
  • understand how individual change can lead to systems change
  • learn to coach and support yourself to avoid climate-related stress and burnout

Whether you want to drive change in an organisation, community, or with individuals, this book will change the way you connect and influence. Includes real life stories from 40 practitioners who have galvanized climate action using coaching skills.

available now

All orders outside the UK can be accessed through your local Amazon website

about the authors

Charly Cox

Charly Cox is an award-winning climate change coach and Founder of Climate Change Coaches. A professional coach for ten years, Charly specialises in developing leaders in environmentally-focused businesses. She has a background in the creative sector and worked for seven years in West Africa.

Sarah Flynn

Sarah Flynn is a psychologist and coach who supports sustainability professionals to thrive as they create change in the world. With a background in research, she specialises in the psychology of change and resilience, and teaches on the topic of ‘Resilience for Sustainability Professionals’ at Cambridge University.

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Tip #1 to galvanize climate action: belief is the secret sauce of change

To celebrate the launch of our book Climate Change Coaching: the power of connection to create climate action series, we have created this series of 5 actionable ways to galvanise your and others climate action. If you’ve ever had a conversation about climate change with another person, it’s highly likely you’ve heard someone say “what’s…

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Tip #2 to galvanize climate action: neutralizing scarcity is a superpower

How many times have you felt frustrated by the lack of political will to curb greenhouse gas emissions, or experienced the fierce grip of panic when thinking that we have just a few years left to limit global warming to 1.5°C? We’re sure that just like us, you’re familiar with that voice of scarcity that…

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Tip #3 to galvanize climate action: resistance is code for what we care about 

More often than not, when we come across someone who dismisses our ideas out of hand, we judge them for being obtuse and begin to see them as problematic and a roadblock. In the context of climate change, our response can be even stronger, when we feel the heavy breath of urgency on our necks. …

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Tip #4 to galvanize climate action: climate grief is a door to love    

Keeping climate grief at arm’s length may be one of the biggest barriers to climate action we know. Many sense, even if only subconsciously, that to fully engage emotionally in the climate crisis, would mean to open our hearts to deep pain, hopelessness, and grief for what we have lost, are losing and may lose…

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Tip #5 to galvanize climate action: rest is essential to climate action

At the start of a new year, it’s tempting to dream big, create ambitious goals, and jump straight into action. And if you have the energy and motivation for this, fantastic! But for those who haven’t hit the pause button recently and have been pushing on through, something else might be needed first. Climate work,…

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offers to your audience

20% off the book for audiences in Europe. Live demonstration of coaching with an audience member. At least one practical skill they can immediately use.

who it’s for

People who need to get climate action done: sustainability consultants and leaders; environmental protection professionals; coaches (internal and external); activists; businesses that have set climate targets; climate academics.

what it’s about

In their transformative book, “Climate Change Coaching – The Power of Connection to Create Climate Action” (Open University Press, 2022) Charly Cox and Sarah Flynn tackle the psychological dimension of change, offering practical, easy-to-grasp climate coaching skills that build connection, shift mindsets and motivate people to take climate action. This book will help your audience to have more influence and impact with every climate conversation. Plus real life stories from 40 practitioners who have galvanized climate action using coaching skills, including a forward by Kimberly Nicholas “Under the Sky We Make”.

Charly and Sarah speak about

  • The psychological dimension of climate change
  • How to shift an organisation’s culture to achieve your net zero targets
  • How to move resistant people from “I can’t and we won’t” to belief and possibility, and finding their stake
  • The tools to shift people into climate action mindsets
  • How to tackle the overwhelm of systemic, existential challenges
  • Why disempowerment is a collective, not an individual challenge
  • How to make use of dissent and reduce polarisation
  • How to coach yourself, including how through grief, anger and burnout
  • Why coaches are uniquely placed to support and enable climate action

Session formats

Sessions are highly interactive, and always involve Q&A. Both Charly and Sarah will demonstrate coaching skills live with members of the audience, and visit breakout rooms. We suggest breakout rooms for sessions of 90mins+, and solo reflection/plenary discussion in sessions of <60mins.

author biographies

Charly Cox is Co-Founder of Climate Change Coaches, whose team teaches people and organisations to use powerful coaching skills to overcome powerlessness, connect and engage people better, and drive forward action on climate change. Charly is an accredited coach (ICF PCC) and the recipient of the Coaching at Work Editor’s Award for Contributions to Climate Coaching. Charly headlined the final day of the 2020 International Coach Federation UK Conference to an audience of 550+, and is a regular guest on webinars and podcasts.

Sarah Flynn is a Psychologist, an ICF accredited coach (PCC), and a trained Organisation, Relationship and Systems coach. She is a founding member of climate change coaches, and specialises in the psychology of change and resilience. She has researched the dynamics of resilient change within complex systems, and applies this to helping sustainability professionals to thrive as they create change in the world. Sarah teaches the topic of ‘Resilience for Sustainability Leaders’ at Cambridge University, and has spoken on the topic to staff at National Grid and AXAXL Insurance.

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