The Purple Book of Coaching

While the mind can drive us to achieve great things, it is equally important to listen to our bodies and understand their signals. Intuition and gut feelings play a significant role in leadership and coaching, helping us build relationships, gain insights, manage risks, and facilitate growth.

Every day offers an opportunity for me to practise ontological coaching by tuning into my inner observer and noticing my body, emotions, and language. This is where consciousness comes into play—being aware of how I think, feel, and act in every moment.

In coaching, just as in life with Marianne, it’s essential to build and maintain environments where support is readily available, expertise is valued, and collaboration is the norm. This supportive framework accelerates progress and leads to more sustainable and impactful results.

I see coaching not as a promise of constant happiness, which is utopian, but as a support for our well-being in various aspects of our lives for a period, whether that is weeks, months, or even years.

Becoming a maestro comes when you are able to add an emotional tune, return to it as needed for desirable results and ultimately be more daring in the emotions you wish to experiment with. Being able to ENTER and EXIT any emotion, generates trust of this learning process, allowing you ‘to try on’ unfamiliar or difficult emotions you tend to avoid.

The intersection of skill-based and value-based passions can be described as a ‘sweet spot’ where personal fulfilment and professional contribution align. This is where you enjoy the work you do as well as feel that you are making a meaningful impact.

The ontological approach emphasises the importance of the parent’s context, as we all carry unresolved traumas and unmet needs from childhood, which can influence how we are currently ‘being’ in the world. Ontological parenting coaching helps parents gain awareness and empowerment, allowing them to parent from a place of wholeness and presence rather than reactivity.

Embodiment and emotional awareness play pivotal roles in shaping our daily lives, both personally and professionally. These concepts highlight the interconnectedness between our physical experiences and emotional states, influencing how we perceive, react to, and navigate through the world.

Leaders who create a playful culture are bringing out the best in everybody. Playful leaders create curiosity around them, both individually and collectively, knowing full well that whatever you put in front of a curious brain goes straight into long-term memory.

Looking back, one of my biggest observations is that relationship and challenge can and MUST coexist. Nationbuilding, as I learnt at the dinner table, was never just about being nice to one another; rather, it was about creating relationships that would allow challenge, task, difficult requests, and conversations to coexist.

I believe that one of the major reasons that coaching emerged is as a response to our longing for safe space and authentic connection to reflect on the big questions of our lives. Questions on the best way forward when our traditional ways of thinking and doing are exhausted and our goto solutions aren’t working as we’d like.

Organisations may be understood as networks of interdependent conversations … networks of interdependent commitments. That is, the results that organisations produce are directly driven by the ways people talk and listen and coordinate action with each other within that organisation.