The Sessions 

with Chris Cooper & Pete Simmonds

Your Event Provocateurs for the 2023 conference, Chris Cooper and Pete Simmonds, kick off our two days together with a powerful, fun and highly interactive session focused on the theme for our 2023 Virtual and In Person conferences.

with Damian Goldvarg

In this session, we will explain ICF definition of team coaching, differentiate it from other developmental modalities such as facilitation and team building and present the 8 ICF Team Coaching Competencies.

with Bach Ho

What if growth involved, not getting out of your comfort zone, but actually digging into and enjoying your comfort zone? In this workshop, you will learn about a coaching paradigm, Organic Intelligence® (OI™), that focuses on helping both coach and client grow through experiencing their biological comfort zones. The biological comfort zone is a level of intensity that is easy and pleasant for your biology to process, which will typically mean a lower level of intensity. The more access both you and your client have to your biological comfort zones, in life and in session, the more effective your coaching will be.

with Peter Simmonds

Peter Simmonds is a professional life and leadership coach (PCC) and Points Of YOU Master facilitator, based in Boston, MA. He is the principal of Summit Coaching LLC and volunteer conference program director of the GCA. With humor, compassion, and accountability, he empowers people to increase self-awareness, and think through different perspectives. He will help you operate with originality to generate choices that are congruent with who you are, what you want, and the impact you want to have.

with Brian Gorman

The human mind is a story processor, and we are all good storytellers. From early childhood, we have been telling ourselves stories that became truths that shape how we live every day. In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to the neuroscience of story. They will learn and practice an approach to changing the stories that limit them ("gremlins to gurus"), as well as an approach to using story as the foundation for personal and/or professional transformation.

with Scott Span

Have you ever had someone say to you, “Who do you think you are?” Have you ever asked yourself, “Who do I think I am and who do I want to be, and why?” Answering those questions is the first step in defining your authenticity. How do you define who you are and what makes you - you? This workshop explores the topic of authenticity and provides insights on how we can identify what it means to us so we can be and bring our authentic selves to our personal and professional relationships.

with Jim Cartwright

This class/offering will examine using songwriting as a way of exploring key issues connected to coaching. Jim will be sharing several songs he has written while studying to become a coach and receiving coaching himself involving the following themes:

• A vow to support clients based on the ICF model.
• A song of support for another new coach.
• Envisioning future goals being moved towards as already being realized in the present tense.
• Songs of emotional granularity( e.g., anger, fear, etc.).
• Songs of inner voices(e.g., Inner child, inner critic, ego, etc.).
• Overcoming limiting beliefs.
• Use of metaphor as a change agent.

Additionally, Jim will share a couple of sonic self-care practices he uses to prepare himself to be fully present for his clients, involving vocalizing and chanting seed syllables and mantras. Participants will be invited to explore at least one of these practices during the presentation.
While Jim’s particular modalities are chanting and songwriting, and these can be shared as tools for clients to use when appropriate to their skills, wants, and needs, the practice of connecting coaching to creative modalities can be used with whatever modality the client is most drawn to.

with DeVante Love

Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded with information and, yet, feel more lost and confused than ever before. This workshop makes the bold claim that the copious amount of information we are consuming is the source of the disconnection we feel from ourselves. When feeling disconnected from ourselves, we not only struggle to understand (yet alone process) our emotions. We also attract conditioning and begin to behave inauthentically. From an eastern philosophical perspective, we lose touch with our authentic mind, body, and soul.

This workshop will show us how to disconnect from the flurry of information around us and begin to undo the disingenuous conditioning put upon us. We will begin by examining authenticity from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) philosophy. Then, we will integrate these mental principles into the body through a guided TCM-inspired meditative practice, Qigong. Throughout the facilitation, we will feel and understand how information has conditioned our behavior and caused us to feel lost. We will also consciously reconnect to our authentic selves and leave the session inspired to continue fostering this connection.