Coaching is quite common these days. Even corporations and bureaucracies now appoint coaches to help their staff do their jobs.

I’m trained in an approach to coaching that works with three areas of lifelong learning:

• our language
• our emotions
• our bodies

For those who like to know the lingo, my approach is called Ontological Coaching. ‘Ontology‘ simply means the science of being, and Ontological Coaching invites us to examine how we go about our lives, individually and together.

How Does It Work?

Through language, we generate our reality, individually and collectively. We tell ourselves (and one another) stories that help us make sense of life, though sometimes the stories can have the opposite effect. We are constantly interpreting existence by means of the words we use to describe our experiences. Is our language helpful or unhelpful? Does it limit or expand our view of life?

Alongside language, we all have emotions that are running through our lives. Some we acknowledge, some we do not. Some of them are clear to us but others hide in the background. Some are a feature of daily life, while some only come out at night when we’re asleep. How do we express our emotions? How do we manage our moods?

Finally, alongside language and emotions, there is the body, the vehicle which shapes how we carry ourselves through life, how we hold ourselves, how we (literally) organise ourselves. Do our bodies work as they should? Are we at home in our bodies? Do we know how to reorganise ourselves physically in order to live differently?

Ontological Coaching looks at any or all of these areas and how we put them together. The aim is to support each person’s lifelong learning.