Spark Coaching and Training

Loss, Grief and Bereavement | LinkedIn Grief is a universal language, yet it speaks differently to everyone. Join us for an insightful LinkedIn Live interview featuring guest Julia Menaul and host Philippa Thomas. Together, they will explore the many forms of loss and the complex emotions associated with it. Grief and feelings of bereave...

Finally after 6 yrs, meeting online, writing a book together through a pandemic Maggie João - Coaching and me meet in real life for a lovely lunch in 😁🎊🎉🍾

Join me and Maggie João - Coaching for Conversations with Authors hosted by EMCC Global where will be chatting about our Bereavement book on Wednesday 10th April 16:30 UK Time. Free chapter available on booking (member benefit)

Conversations with Authors 2024 Welcome to Conversations with Authors, where we read a book of the month together, and then meet with the author in a monthly webinar, where we pick their brains and get their expert insights. We are excited to be reading the latest and best books on coaching, mentoring and supervision. Click the bo...

Join me and MaMaggie João - Coachingor "Conversation with the Authors", a series by EMCC Global will be talking about the writing of "Coaching and Supervising through Bereavement: A Practical Guide to Working with Grief and Loss" (free event) https://emccuk.org/Public/1Resources/2024/coaching-and-supervising-through-bereavement.aspx?WebsiteKey=1d13aaf8-bbb6-4d79-8911-edffbb65069a

You'd be amazed (or maybe not) how many clients in career coaching have never pondered on the influences that led to their particular profession. What did you dream of as a child? What did your parents want you to do? In my latest e-book for Bookboon, Happiness at Work, I include a section on Childhood Messages.

Career Coaching Mum & Dad's Influence Reflecting on beliefs about work and where they come from

This 28-minute video will give you top tips on how to get the best out of coaching sessions giving you a greater chance of gaining a new client. It contains top tips from 20+ years of experience. It will help to reassure and cope with rejection (when you don't get the gig!) Also how to tell a if you can't or don't want to work with them (for whatever reason).

Video: Coaching Chemistry Sessions: How to handle them ethically and successfully Top tips on how to get the best out of coaching chemistry sessions

Further to the sad news of the death of fellow coach, Diane Hanna I thought it might be fitting to share the case study she wrote for myself and Maggie João, MCC in "Coaching and Supervising Through Bereavement: A Practical Guide to Working with Grief and Loss". The topic seems apposite now, and that Diane was able to share her experiences of a good deal of personal loss and how that informed her coaching. How much her words resonate our own sense of loss at her passing.

A Tribute to Diane Hanna Her words resonate our own sense of loss at her passing

My latest short e-book for Bookboon is "Happiness at Work" and unlike my other books for them this one is for the general public and is useful for new starters, mid-lifers and retirees. Bookboon e-books can be read in 2-3 hours.

Happiness at Work This book is about finding lasting happiness at work based on latest research. It is distinctly suitable for new starters on the career ladder and those approaching a midlife crossroads in any sector.

The AC have a great series of career coaching podcasts with open access to all. My edition is the latest and is on "Ethical Considerations in Career Coaching".

Visit our website to learn more about this event. Enjoy this practical and honest conversation between our podcast host, Mark Crossfield, and Accredited Master Executive Coach, Supervisor and Author, Julia Menaul, about the ethical considerations specific to career coaching.

Lovely to do a deep dive podcast for Animas Centre for Coaching and talk about , , and in (and not just through ). Thanks to Yannick Jacob for asking some great questions!

Exploring Grief, Loss and Endings in Coaching - A Conversation with Julia Menaul Julia Menaul started her career in retail management in 1984 after a Biology/Psychology degree. In 1991 she followed her passion for people development and w...

The next coach support and CPD session on Monday, June 12th 4.30pm - 6.30pm will be on the trials and tribulations of coaching chemistry sessions. One of the most tricky types is when coaches are in competition with each other during the process as this blog amply describes:

Beauty Parades for Coaches How to cope with a competitive tendering process

This session I did last month is available to watch in the Onlinevent library. It's £9.99 however it's good value to sign up to the library as there is tons of other stuff by some great speakers in there.

You're Fired! Coaching Through the Bereavement of Job Loss This workshop will look at the psychological dimensions of job loss and is especially useful for coaches who are dealing with clients who have reacted with a great deal of emotion to being fired and/or made redundant.

So sad and at a shockingly young age. Our paths had crossed now and again over the last 20 yrs as Darren was a leading figure in the early days of the Association for Coaching. He leaves a massive legacy to the coaching profession.

We are deeply saddened by the news of Darren Robson’s passing. Darren was an extraordinary person and his legacy has left a lasting impact on the Association for Coaching (AC). Darren was committed to our work at the Association for Coaching (AC) for over 18 years and his contributions will forever be cherished. Our thoughts and hearts go out to the Robson family as we share in their sorrow with love and friendship.

In honour of Darren, we have put together warm messages to his memorialized page here(http://ow.ly/aG1J50NOfHg) and we hope these messages will bring comfort to his family and friends.

From all of us at the Association for Coaching.

I am thrilled to be one of the speakers at the ICF Converge event organised by the ICF Japan Chapter. On the 16th of June at 11am UK time we will be talking about unexpected triggers for the coach during the coaching sessions and how they might impact the partnership and our presence, and what can we do about it.
More information about the ICF Japan Converge event here https://www.icfjevent.com/%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B0%E3%83%A9%E3%83%A0/ and to reserve your place here https://peatix.com/event/3562246/. Looking forward to it!. Looking forward to it!

Join me on Wednesday 26th April 1pm - 3pm for another webinar on bereavement. This time the focus will be on the grief of losing one's job. This can be redundancy, firing, retirement, resignation not by choice, etc. Online Events operate a self-select fee so it's great value for money!! See you there.

You're Fired! Coaching Through the Bereavement of Job Loss - Julia Menaul You're Fired! Coaching Through the Bereavement of Job Loss Workshop with Julia Menaul

Next gig to promote our bereavement book is April 26th and as it's a 2-hour workshop with a self-select fee, it's great value for money.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/youre-fired-coaching-through-the-bereavement-of-job-loss-julia-menaul-tickets-579941760417

This coaching dilemma is real. It happened to me in 2019. What would you have done?

Do I do the right thing? How developing ethical sensitivity is a lifelong journey

I am gutted that the Professional Executor Service where I had my professional will, is closing. I tried my best to encourage coaches in supervision to think about what process they had in place for their possible incapacity and/or death while in practice. We even mention it in our book
https://www.sparkcoachingandtraining.co.uk/publications-by-julia-menaul
Who knows of an alternative service?

A couple of days late with the monthly calendar from the gorgeous Action for Happiness guys. Which is your favourite day? Number 6 looks good.........a good reminder to just "be".🤓

Post holiday blues..... yes, a first world problem I know, but this really cheered me up from one of my supervision clients:

"I wanted to end the year by thanking you for your continued support. I can't express how much I get from working with you. I value our supervision sessions and the headspace it gives me as well as the challenge which enables me to grow."

Existential Anxiety in Coaching.
Anxiety is part and parcel of daily life. It feels different for different people and can be situation dependent. The emotions attached to a person’s anxiety can feel very real to them.
Here are some musings based on a webinar given by Simon Cavicchia in 2020.
Simon talks about 2 different types of anxiety that we see within ourselves and in clients.
• Neurotic anxiety
• Existential anxiety
Neurotic anxiety comes about as a form of survival or defence strategy to enable us to deal with a complex and ambiguous world. The threat of this complexity can overwhelm us and makes us try to simplify and reduce that complexity in order to wrestle control over it.
“Let go of Control – you never had it anyway”

Underneath neurotic anxiety is how terrified we are about facing our own mortality, existential anxiety. Put literally, this is anxiety about our very existence which is finite although we run our lives and pretend that it is not. Neurotic anxiety shows up instead of existential anxiety.

Death is still a taboo subject in a world where lots of taboos have disappeared over the last few decades. How come we still can’t face the one thing that is inevitable for us all?
Simon Cavicchia says, “Whilst existential pain is inevitable neurotic suffering is optional”.
As coaches and supervisors our ability to work from the existential end may enable us to bypass some of the neurotic anxiety by “calling it out” (gently) for the distraction technique that it surely is.
We often see a direct line in coaching between control and perfectionism and Cavicchia talks about our need to be perfect coaches which sets us up to over identify with being the expert. Wanting certainty and perfection means we just dial up the anxiety.

This creates a scenario of us feeling omnipotent on a good day, as we bounce out of a coaching session on a high because the client has praised us and said how much they got from the coaching. However next time we meet our client maybe it doesn’t go as well; it feels “clunky”, and we can collapse from omnipotence all the way to impotence.
Many coaches, as they become more mature practitioners, begin to feel more comfortable working at the more transformational end of coaching as opposed to pure skills/performance coaching (Hawkins and Smith 2006) where they work holistically with their client and encourage them to take a meta view of their lives rather than being bogged down in the smaller details which may be a smokescreen for where the real problem lies. E.g. a client wanting help to reduce her emails and shorten her working hours is maybe at one level tentatively saying she wants a different life but is presenting in a “small” way. How do we make our clients step back, take a meta view and start with the “big” picture?
As a coach much can be gained by providing the space for clients to look at time management as being their life, because that is what it is. So, if they are working on having three score years and ten then what are they doing with it? What do they want to look back on? Most coaches have tools and techniques in their kitbag that create awareness around this e.g. writing their own funeral eulogy or a letter from the future.
Clients facing a midlife crisis are often suffering a crisis of purpose and meaning at a particular age (40-50 on average) because they have just had a big whiff of their own mortality.
Michael Carroll in his Six Levels of Reflection (2010) talks about the lower levels whereby one is moving from self, and a narrow focus on limited interactions around us, up through to higher levels of systemic and transcendental reflection. He has suggested that many people probably do not get to the upper levels until at least aged 40 (although that doesn’t mean you have automatically reached that stage just because you are aged 60 either!)
How many coaches though actually bring up the D word with clients?
Not many, if my supervisees are representative and this is because many coaches have not thought about their own existential anxiety and feelings of mortality. One coach talked about being comfortable with the fact of death as she had worked in a hospice but had not reflected on her feelings about her own death or had even discussed this topic with her nearest and dearest due to many of the fears we have described elsewhere.
In supervision, we try to help coaches to embrace their vulnerability and to be comfortable with the “not knowing”. In the criteria for attaining Master Coach from the Association of Coaching it says one of the factors they look for is “knowledgeable and confident yet working from the mind set of knowing little”. What a great place to start.

Notes from Befriending Existential Anxiety in Coaching – A Relational Approach
Simon Cavicchia: Coaching at Work Virtual Conference Masterclass 25th November 2020

Here is the final part of a three-part series on handling tricky coachees. In the final video, we look at the Defensive Coachee and gain some practical tips. If you missed the other two they were the disengaged and talkative coachee and can be found alongside this video on my blog page at Spark Coaching and Training website.

Video: Part 3 Handling Tricky Coachees – the Defensive Coachee Video discussing ways in which you can handle defensive coachees

Join me on Wed 18th January 2023 18:15 GMT when I will be speaking at a virtual event for Association For Coaching. The session will be on Bereavement in the Workplace and is suitable for internal and external coaches. It will provide practical tips on helping line managers and organisations handle bereaved employees better.
https://www.associationforcoaching.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1648546&group=

A short e-book on Happiness in Work sounds like a nice respite from all the Bereavement writing of the last 3 years. Just digging around in my old Happiness folders and found this video on managing stress. I often say to clients "faulty thinking leads to faulty feeling leads to faulty behaviour" ( thank you, Peter Bluckert)

90:10 The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do For Your Stress Check out our new website http://www.reframehealthlab.com/Follow Dr. Mike for new videos! http://twitter.com/docmikeevans DocMikeEvans follows up his viral h...

In our book "Coaching and Supervising Through Bereavement" death is not the only loss we focus on. and divorce pop up too. The latest suggests that 7 out of 10 women said menopause was a factor in their failed marriage. So a double whammy of can show up in the room. #

Julia Menaul on LinkedIn: Menopause puts final nail in marriage coffin Death is not the only loss we talk about in our book. "Coaching and Supervising Through Bereavement". We consider lots of losses including menopause and…

The great and the good have also been here. Hope the magic rubs off!

We will be at the Portico Library in today for the Maggie João - Coaching will be zooming in from Lisbon and we have 30 people expected! So far we have received great feedback about "Coaching and Supervising Through Bereavement" and hope it will be a major addition to our professional field. Buy here using 20% discount code ASM09 until November 22nd.
https://www.routledge.com/Coaching-and-Supervising-Through-Bereavement-A-Practical-Guide-to/Menaul-Joao/p/book/9780367540715

Here is a very short practical video by me on how to handle disengaged coaching clients.

Julia Menaul on LinkedIn: Video: Part 1 Handling Tricky Coachees – the Disengaged Coachee Here is a short, practical video from me on how to handle disengaged coachees https://lnkd.in/eWHXNHVS