The program for the International Gay Coaches Conference 2023 is designed to provide a broad range of educational opportunities, cultural activities and opportunities to socialize with other attendees. We always aim to create a relaxed feeling of community, conducive for both learning and enjoyment.
Sessions will be added to the list below as they are confirmed. Here is an overview of the timetable:
The final detailed timetable will be published a few weeks before the conference.
Use the button below to register. Select your choice of available accommodation and complete your booking.
Peter Simmonds
How familiar are you with your erotic blueprint? Not too dissimilar to love languages we can also start to learn the language of sex.
This workshop is an opportunity to connect in a deeper way with yourself, fully understand your own erotic Blueprint and understand those of others, in a way that relates to your love life and intimacy.
Alex Benedict
An important facet of identity, for coaches and clients, is how we feel about our bodies. Many clients feel disengaged due to their lifestyles which include nearly constant connection with technology rather than to their bodies. But that’s not the only issue—especially for gay men, who often experience body dysmorphia and unreasonable expectations for their appearance.
Dean Meyers
Are you comfortable with technology, now that coaching remotely via Zoom, Teams is here to stay? Or wondered about what else you can do with the tech you’ve invested in, now that you’re used to being on camera, such as creating video-based programs, podcasting, or live streaming? Here’s an opportunity to ask questions about video/audio tech you can manage (and afford) and how to create and run podcasts and programs for online marketing and other services.
Jeff Nally, PCC, SHRM-SCP
It may seem obvious that you’re bringing the real YOU to your coaching clients and your audiences. But are you bringing ALL of YOU and what your coaching clients really need from you? And do your audiences leave challenged knowing more about themselves because you brought the real YOU to the stage? Discover the magic in YOU that will grow your coaching and speaking businesses, attract the clients and audiences you really want, and live out your purpose with the real YOU front and center in everything you do.
Joe Carapella
How we introduce ourselves today is different than how we did in the past and it will change as we continue to grow. How much of our identity do we choose to share with others and when? What is the relationship between what we do and who we are?
This highly interactive workshop is designed to help you and your clients expand your perspectives and experience new insights on how to tell the story of your identity.
Participants work in small groups as they explore the use of diverse images and text from Points of You as a catalyst to help their clients ignite the process of articulating their identity journey.
Reed Waller
Participants will experience how to coach clients using a fun, physical approach that taps into body wisdom to shift perspectives and become unstuck. Inspired by kinesthetic, floor pattern-based coaching methods such as the Bigger Game and Balance Coaching, participants will come away with tools to help clients generate their own frameworks to ideate possibilities, generate solutions, and unlock creative growth. Help them create their own Happiest Place on Earth!
Chris Cooper
Helping our clients to grow and develop means we need to help them explore ‘who’ they are as a person rather than just ‘what’ they want to achieve. As we develop as coaches our competency at focusing on the ‘who’ increases, and the power of our coaching conversations with clients intensifies.
This session focuses of the coaching tool Chris uses with every client in the first session: ‘Well Formed Outcome’. This is a structured NLP exercise that enables your client the freedom to explore the outcomes they want to achieve through the coaching partnership, focusing on how they will change as a person as they work towards achieving it. It speaks to both the conscious and unconscious mind, bringing to the surface level, information that will help shape the structure of the coaching engagement.
During this session, Chris will present the ‘Well Formed Outcome’ tool, how it is structured and how to use it, including why it is so effective that he uses it with every client. Sometimes more than once. There will then be an opportunity to work in pairs to experience using the tool as a coach and from the position of a client.
The outcome will be a valuable new tool to add to your coaching toolbox for your work with clients. You may also learn something new about yourself in the process!
Michael J. Kline
Based on the Barrett Values Center research and assessment tool, you will identify and explore 7 levels of your own psychological development and life journey. Discover the levels you've been through, and those parts of you still inviting exploration and enjoyment. More than just where you've been and where you're going, we'll learn how we bounce around, retreat back and leap forward as the beautiful, messy creatures we are. You will leave with a deeper sense of who you are and what really matters to you, as well as a deeper acceptance and appreciation of all the variations, derailments, setbacks, joys, and fears of being human.
Wil Fisher
How do we bring the intelligence, strength, and alchemizing power of the heart into our coaching? It starts with finding ways to open our hearts. It continues with finding strategies to do this in ways that maintain professionalism, honors boundaries, and keep us (and our clients) protected. In this playful and experiential workshop, we will explore what it means to be open hearted in the context of coaching. We will discover strategies to tap into this way of being. We will discern ways to work with this loving energy mindfully and responsibly. We will also have a lot of fun as we co-create a dynamic space that welcomes the ever-expanding energy of love. 3
Dean Meyers
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a facilitation method that promotes all possibilities to be the normal in the moment, because everything is done from the safety of being “at play”. This is the perfect environment for coaching people to explore and potentially emerge as their authentic, non-heteronormative selves, even if only in the safety of a world made and told by him/her/them through the LEGO models they make. This workshop will give you the experience of being both facilitator/coach AND maker/coachee, where you can first experience discovering the unknown unknowns that lie at the heart of your own identity, and then discover how to help others on that journey.
Craig Cullinane
The Body Electric School is one of the most trusted names in erotic education and this workshop will welcome coaches to get to know the work of the School both for personal development and to support their clients in healing, transformation, and growth.
The Gay Coaches Alliance was actually born from the work of two Body Electric Teachers: Harry Faddis and Michael Cohen. There are many powerful synergies between both organizations.
This clothing-on workshop will explore conscious, consent-based eroticism, breathwork, and the relationshiop to pleasure. Erotic energy is one of the most powerful forces in our world. This workshop asks coaches: Who am I as an erotic being? What healing and growth can I experience if I am willing to explore my relationship to the erotic, to pleasure, and to embodiemnt? And, most importantly, how can coaches support clients in doing the same?
This will be facilitated in a workshop space with clearly articulated norms, agreements, and boundaries.
The workshop will also include large group work, exercises completed in pairs (which will be assigned during the workshop), movement exercises, breathwork, and heart-centered sharing.
Matthew Bennett
The three presenters of this workshop, Matthew, Mr Bennett, and English Leather Master, will discuss how avatars and personas can help you achieve your goals. By deciding who you want to be, when, but always being true to yourself, you can access different scripts to become more effective and successful. We'll play a card game that allows us to try out different personas and see how they help us as coaches. The game can also be used in coaching situations to help clients achieve their goals, particularly around confidence, empowerment and overcoming imposter syndrome.
John O’Brien
Coaches are trained to work with clients to enhance their quality of life through clear problem identification and development of effective coping strategies. Our training helps us to show up for our clients to support their self-development both physically and emotionally. However, we may be less skilled at considering our own needs, especially when confronted by the demands of a highly stressful work environment.
This session will help participants to define aspects of wellness and well-being, assess their own level of wellness, and identify key strategies to avoid burnout and live with greater vitality.
Matt Winters
Rage, envy, greed, lust, resentment, lying, blaming—these are feelings and behaviors that we probably don’t want others to see, but sometimes they happen anyway. They are just a few examples of the personal shadow—the parts of ourselves that we hide, repress, deny, or don’t know are there. We usually put things there for a good reason at the time, but with those “bad” things, we also pushed away a lot of our energy, personal power, and gifts. This session introduces Shadow Work, a process of bringing these parts of ourselves back into the light so that we can learn from them, transform our patterns of behavior, and get our power back.
Frank Kewin
In this experiential workshop coaches will explore the ways that internalized homo shame arises in their lives and experience multiple ways of identifying, understanding and healing in order to liberate their original blessing. Coaches will deepen their undetstanding of the science of shame and how shame drives negative self talk and self sabotaging behaviour and how to become shame resilient in order to bring their shameless selves to their lives and their coaching practise. "if you haven't got it, you can't give it away!"
This workshop is intended to be clothing optional. Feel free to dress in as little or as much as you choose for this workshop and to adapt that decision as the workshop progresses. This is a safe space and all men's choices are accepted and celebrated.and I will facilitate this workshop naked.
Dr. Kyle Elliott
Bringing the ‘real’ you to coaching sessions can feel like a significant risk, particularly if you identify as a gay man. In this session, you will learn what may be holding you back from being genuine and fully authentic with clients. You will also uncover strategies to maximize your impact with clients through intentionally sharing your fabulousness during coaching sessions. Lastly, you will leave with tactical strategies and a renewed sense of confidence.
Craig Cullinane
This evening session invites you into a clothing-off space where we will explore erotic touch, consicous breath, and pleasure. We will establish clear agreements about how we engage with each other. In this playshop, we touch with hands only! You will learn tools about how to pleasure yourselfand others. You will explore their personal relationship with pleasure. This is an opportunity to raise sacred, pleasurable erotic energy and deepen your emodied experience of your pleasure body. Come join the fun!
Peter Simmonds
Get one step closer to discovering your "reason for being" and let's put it to work for you! Pete will use innovative, fun methods and tools to facilitate meaningful discussions and insights around putting your identity into action. Each participant will revisit or unlock the potential in who they are with deep opportunities to share, and listen to stories of past, present, or future self. The Point Of YOU tools we will explore can be used with your coaching clients to explore new perspectives and possibilities too.
Mike Findlay
It’s an unfortunate reality that many of us LGBTQ+ folk have poorer mental health overall than our heterosexual counterparts. The stats tell us so. Many of us still experience prejudice and discrimination against us, and some of us deal with internalised shame we have felt since childhood.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Things are potentially improving and arguably, there are more mental health services for LGBTQ+ people than ever before.
This session invites participants to examine their own personal contributions as coaches to improving the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people globally. We will also discuss the ‘boundaries’ of coaching when it comes to our clients’ mental health.
Aligned to the component of ‘Bringing more of the real you into your purpose as a coach’, this interactive session will invite participants to talk honestly about how much of themselves they bring into the profession as a coach (and any other professional hats they wear). We will explore the gains of being authentically you, including better connecting with clients, as well as the setbacks and pitfalls i.e. what does and could go wrong?
Chris Cooper
“Be Yourself” is a phrase we hear from others many times in our lives. But who is this “you” that you are being advised to inhabit?
Our identity comprises many component parts and yet we don’t always know or appreciate what they are and how they make us the person we are.
During this session we will explore what identity means, identify the many facets of our identities and make the link between identity and happiness - including how the latter is amplified when you fully embody your true identity.
The workshop is designed to involve self exploration to help you learn more about yourself, while using questions and tools that you can employ with your coaching clients. We will discuss the work we do with our clients around their identity and why this is an important part of the coaching process.
This session will kick off the conference, creating a space for conversations with other attendees about the identities we hold across different areas of our lives, and how all the parts link together to make us who we are.
It will be fun, insightful and highly interactive.