Ascent Coaching and Training

We provide one-to-one and group Executive Coaching and organisational change programs . Our focus is on enabling leaders to better engage with the complexity, unpredictability and ambiguity that permeates today’s organisational life.

Our coaching uses a trans-disciplinary approach and is informed by coaching psychology, sociology, leadership and organisational research, philosophy and complexity science. This allows for a creative and thought provoking process that facilitates the surfacing and challenging of assumptions. Clients are able to explore new and creative ways of engaging with complex problems such as career transition, leadership development, interpersonal and professional communication, performance management, organisational effectiveness, developing executive presence, enhancing strategic thinking, dealing effectively with conflict, and building effective team and adaptive teams.

To help you decide whether or not the information on this site is likely to be of interest to you you, we have provided some definitions that inform and guide our approach to working with you.

Coaching

Leadership

Evidence

Coaching

Coaching: Of the many and varied definitions of coaching the following description from Standards Australia (2011) is the one we have chosen to best represent our understanding of the coaching relationship:

“A collaborative endeavour between a coach and a client (an individual or group) for the purpose of enhancing the life experience, skills, performance, capacities or wellbeing of the client. This is achieved through the systematic application of theory and practice to facilitate the attainment of the coachee’s goals in the coachee’s context.”

Leadership

Leadership: Kilburg’s (2011) definition of leadership elegantly captures the multidimensional and emergent nature of leadership in today’s organisations.

“…a complex, multidimensional, emergent process in which the leader(s), follower(s), and other formal and informal stakeholders in a human enterprise use their characteristics, capabilities, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to create mutually influencing relationships that enable them to coevolve strategies, tactics, structures, processes, directions, and other methods of building and managing human enterprises with the goal of producing adaptive success in their chosen niche(s) in the competitive, evaluative, and evolving global ecology of organisations.”

Evidence

Evidence: Coaching should be informed by evidence: We should be able to explain what approach we are taking in a particular coaching context, and why we believe that approach is most likely to deliver the benefits that coaching can offer. We ascribe to the following definition of evidence based coaching:

“..the intelligent and conscientious use of current best knowledge integrated with practitioner expertise in making decisions about how to deliver coaching to individual clients and in designing and teaching coaching training programs” (Grant, Stober, 2006).

Co-creating perspectives and dynamics that open up the possibilities for genuine and sustainable problem solving.

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
attributed to Albert Einstein

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely arranging their prejudices
David Bohm

The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about is of course firmly embedded in our entire tradition

David Bohm