Tracy Sinclair: Coach and Coach trainer, Public Speaker, Author, Past Global Chair, International Coaching Federation, Forefront Mentor

In this episode Tracy Sinclair, a highly experienced coach and former ICF Global Chair, shares her journey from linguistics and corporate roles to coaching, emphasizing the evolution of coaching as a profession. 

She highlights how coaching has shifted from a remedial perspective to a developmental and desirable tool in various sectors, including corporate environments and social impact initiatives.

The conversation explores the growing diversification and specialization within the coaching field, illustrating the expanding scope and impact of coaching practices. 

Sinclair stresses the importance of coaching in tackling complex societal challenges, showcasing its versatility and relevance in a rapidly evolving world. 

She also discusses the integration of AI in coaching, advocating for a careful balance between technological advancements and the preservation of coaching's human element.

Sinclair's insights reflect the adaptability and significance of coaching in personal and professional development, particularly in the context of global changes and challenges. 

The podcast offers a comprehensive overview of the current trends and future directions in coaching, highlighting its potential as a transformative tool in various aspects of life and society.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Tracy Sinclair

(interview blurb)

Tracy: One of the interesting things is that coaching is all about change, in a way, positive, generative change, and we as practitioners need to also be able to embrace and engage with the change in our context and our environment and ourselves. So, I think there is a risk if we don’t do that and an opportunity if we do.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a Master Certified Coach by the International Coaching Federation and is a specialist dedicated to the development of the coaching profession and community. She co-authored Becoming a Coach: The Essential ICF Guide and was awarded the ICF’s Impact Award for Distinguished Coach in 2023. She was also the ICF Global Chair in 2018. Please welcome Tracy Sinclair.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Tracy.

Tracy: Hi, Alex. How are you?

Alex: I’m good. It’s nice to see you, nice to have you on the podcast today.

Tracy: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here.

Alex: Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Tracy: Well, in my case, it’s not coffee, it’s tea.

Alex: I am matching you with tea. So what kind of tea are you drinking?

Tracy: I’m drinking good old-fashioned English breakfast tea.

Alex: Good old-fashioned English breakfast tea. I mean, you can’t go wrong with that. I am matching you because I like to match my guests whenever possible, although the other week, I had someone that wanted to have whiskey at 9 a.m. in the morning because it wasn’t 9 a.m. for them. I did do it because I like to. I like to kind of match my guests. But, yeah, I try not to drink before 10 a.m. 

Tracy: Good plan.

Alex: Yeah, it’s usually a good idea. Let’s go through your journey. Your face is one that I’ve seen out there in the coaching community for many years, your voice, your ideas, so you’re a very influential coach and I am always very excited to hear people’s story because you know about all these well-known coaches and all the great work that they do out there but rarely do you get the chance to hear when was the first time they heard about coaching? What was that career like? In the future, we’ll have careers in coaching that are a lot more defined because there’s more pathways to becoming a professional coach. There’s an understanding of what being a coach is like that perhaps wasn’t there 10, 20, 30 years ago. So please take me through your journey of becoming the great coach that you are today.

Tracy: Well, gosh, where do I start? So, there were probably two things that have always been very important for me in the work that I do that kind of takes me towards coaching. One is communication and the other one is people. So, on the communication side, I, in my much earlier career, was very fascinated by languages and how we communicate using different words and different ways of expressing ourselves. So, I started out in life as a linguist, working, teaching, translating, interpreting in English and Spanish, living in Spain for quite a few years. So, communication in that regard has always been important to me and I also, in my corporate life, had quite a lot of roles that were associated with project management, change management, so communication there, clear, effective, meaningful communication was very important. And then on the people side, I have always loved working with people. I’ve always worked in my corporate career in financial services on the operational side of things so working with teams and realizing that, to facilitate change, communication is also important as well as the people so really engaging people and bringing you with them. And alongside my corporate world many years ago, I also used to work as a counselor. I trained in addiction therapy, focused on working with drug and alcohol addicts, because I really wanted to connect with those people to see how I could support them to maybe navigate situations that were really very difficult for them. So people and communications have always been there and how it came together with coaching was having run a leadership development business for many years, when I took some time out to have my children and I wanted to step back into my business, I wanted — I guess, if I’m really honest, I was a bit bored. So I get bored quite easily, I like variety, and I’ve been doing the same kind of thing, offering the same kind of programs for a long time and I’m not very good at doing the same thing over and over again, so when I was thinking about coming back into my business, I started to look around for something else to uplift the work and I was considering going back into broader training as a therapist at that time and then I happened to be at a conference that was about coaching and I thought, “Oh, what’s that?” and someone told me that coaching was about a way of communicating that would meet a need in the world and I thought that was quite intriguing and inspiring so I looked into it a little bit more and, as they say, the rest is history. I thought, yeah, I’d like to do that.

Alex: That’s wonderful. I like the background communication, how it all came together. I didn’t know you speak Spanish. We could do the inaugural episode of Coaches en Zoom Tomando Café.

Tracy: Conté Englis.

Alex: Conté Englis, love it. So I’m very interested in your insights around how coaching has changed over the last many decades, that you’re one of the people that have been in the middle of driving that change, very involved with the International Coach Federation. Where are we now and how has it changed over the course of your career? Let’s start high level and then we can focus on specific areas of coaching. There’s so much to explore. I’m excited for this episode. I’ve been wanting to kind of hear from you your thoughts of where we are, where we’re going. Small questions.

Tracy: Where we’re going? Yeah, that’s a big question. Where are we going? I mean, who knows where on earth we’re going. But, yeah, I think things have changed an awful lot. When I first got involved in coaching, I would say it was a relatively new and unknown discipline and people didn’t really understand what coaching was vis-à-vis sports coaching or counseling and therapy or mentoring and so there was a lot of mystery, I think, about what coaching was at the time. And, in some ways, some of that mystery still exists because I at least am still coming across people and organizations that still don’t fully understand perhaps what coaching is, but I think we’re in a much, much different place now. I think another change that we’ve noticed is that coaching started out being misconstrued perhaps as a remedial piece of work, that people were sent to coaching because they were a special case and there was — if you got allocated a coach, you were possibly on your way out the door if you didn’t make some changes so I think that’s a misconception around how coaching was being utilized or interpreted that is quite different now, even though there are, again, still some pockets of that. And then I think there was also a place where coaching was viewed as being something that only the very, very senior and elite got access to. You had to reach a certain paygrade and then you might be lucky enough to get allocated a coach so it was very specialized for very senior leaders. And I think we’re in a much, much different place now. I think that coaching is something that is much more spoken about, is much more — people are a lot more aware of what coaching is even though we do still have some level of differences of interpretation. I’m also seeing a lot more diversification of how coaching is being utilized and a lot more access to coaching. So, we see now, moving from in the early days, when I first started, I would only get to work with very, very senior leaders, whereas now, organizations are purchasing large-scale coaching opportunities for all of their leaders. I think the reach of people that are utilizing coaching is much, much broader and we’re also starting to see enormous diversification of the kinds of coaching. So, a few years back, it was either leadership coaching, executive coaching, business coaching, or life coaching. Now, we have people who are specializing in neurodiversity, for example, or coaching for young people or retirement coaching or specializing in career transition coaching, coaching within education or different sectors. So there’s a — within the spectrum of what coaching is, there’s enormous amounts of it might be called niching or people really taking that work and applying it to a very specialist area. I found a new niche the other day that someone shared with me which was what she called coaching for the sandwich generation and everyone was, my gosh, what’s the sandwich generation? And the sandwich generation is the generation of people who are stuck in the sandwich between still actively having to care for their own children as well as actively having to care for their parents whilst holding down quite a demanding job and they’re sandwiched between all of these things and that person specializes in that kind of work, in those kinds of clients. So, there’s a whole range of ways that people are picking up on this work now and making it their own. And also really taking coaching outside of the mainstream corporate environment. So, coaching now for a lot of social impact projects, coaching within education, coaching within the not for profit, the charitable sectors. So it’s really, really grown and diversified and I think we’re at a place of enormous variety and opportunity now.

Alex: Absolutely. The specialization of coaching is, I think, one of the ways in which you start enacting some of these large-scale change that coaching can bring to the world. And I specialize particularly in coaching with an organizational setting so within organizations, the specialization actually is incredibly interesting because, as you were going through that journey, that coaching spin through the remedial face into now, really like with the millennials and Gen Z, if you’re not going to have a coach, it’s almost like they don’t even want to work with you. How am I going to develop myself? The way in which people look at coaching has really shifted but the specialization I find particularly interesting because now you have organizations recognizing, well, if I’m going to have someone that is employed in my company and let’s say that they’re a first time mother, how cool if I can bring them a coach that specializes in helping VPs of marketing go through the transition in their lives where they’re having their first child. That level of specificity and expertise, both from the coach side but also the knowledge organizationally, that if you deploy a coach to help someone transition through that period, they will probably be better at their job when they come back and what is the impact of doing that at scale and finding these specialized niches in areas of coaching, which also places importance on coaches in terms of having a well-rounded approach to their practice and I think being a generalist as a coach is probably a really good thing but a generalist that can dip — if you can dip your toes in different, more specialized areas and then, ultimately, become super specialized without becoming hyper specialized where you can’t just do coaching and meet the client where they are, to me, that is that fine balance that the coach needs to accomplish. And if you have all these coaches that are very well rounded, they also have different areas of specialization, then you have this army of people that can be deployed in organizations to help people through different aspects of their life and career and how they blend together and that’s something that we never had before. I mean, I don’t know if the army comparison is the best one but you have this cadre that is not just a cadre internal in an organization, it’s this cadre of people all around the world, potentially millions and millions of people, that are specialized in human development and how to meet people where they are and help them navigate through the challenges of their life and work. So, to me, I mean, it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? And when I’m hearing you go through your journeys, it’s like, wow, we’ve gone through a lot in terms of just the coaching profession from being this, essentially, I want to justify to HR that I tried to do everything that I can to how do I support, how do we support you through that journey, which really is fascinating.

Tracy: Yeah, I completely agree, Alex, and what’s nice about that as well is that not only does that mean that coaching is going to be more tailored and suited to those various pockets within society and within organizations. I think it gives another way that the coach themselves as a practitioner can be fulfilled through this work because as well as the baseline discipline and knowledge and competence that we have as coaches, if I can do my work in a field that I have passion for or I have experience in or I have a deep interest in, then it’s going to be even more meaningful for me, isn’t it, as a practitioner, when I’m fulfilling some of my other goals, like this lady that’s specializing in the sandwich generation. It’s something that is very meaningful to her and so she thrives, therefore, in that field because it’s something that’s important to her. And I think that it’s very important if we’re going to grow and develop as practitioners that we also listen to and follow our own energy, our own passions, our own desires so that we are being the best that we can be as well as encouraging our clients to be the best that they can be.

Alex: You’re talking about meaning and meaning is so important and it’s also something that was ingrained in the way we were living for many tens of thousands of years because everything was about survival and doing it together. I mean, meaning was — didn’t have time to slow down and think about what is meaning. Then in these industrialized or post industrialized societies, all that automation also has automated humans in a way where meaning is something that you have to very explicitly seek and organize your life around. Knowing what is meaningful for you and also having things around you and doing things that connect you with that meaning, and I think it’s part of part of why I think a lot of people go to coaching is that this connection with that meaning, whether it’s at work or personally, it is such an important aspect of modernity to be able to connect with that and coaching I think provides — it’s interesting because a lot of coaches that I talked to, meaning is something that is so important to them, like the coaching profession attracts people that are seekers for growth and development and they want to help other people. So, when I look at society today, I see this hunger for meaning and there’s many different paths that sometimes don’t lead to the right direction when it comes to meaning and coaching seems to be very intertwined and perhaps is very timely that coaching is emerging as such a powerful force because it connects you with meaning and the pathways to achieve it, understand it, connect with it. What do you think?

Tracy: Yeah. I mean, once again, I agree, and I think that takes my mind back to the conference that I was at where someone said that coaching is emerging to meet a need in the world and, to me, it’s no surprise that the rise of coaching is coming at exactly the same time that our world on many, many different levels is experiencing such complexity and, in some cases, challenge, difficulty and challenge that comes with that complexity. For me, that’s where coaching is coming into its own. And I agree with you that, as coaches, we happen to be the kinds of people that are interested in those kinds of questions, man’s search for meaning, as we might say, to quote a book, and it is very important. And my experience, at least, just anecdotally from my own life, is I notice many, many people around me, both personally and professionally, what is the meaning of the way I currently live my life or the meaning of my work? I mean, a classic example of that would be what we noticed during the pandemic or as a result of the pandemic where so many people reflected upon how they wanted to work or, more importantly, how they didn’t want to work. We had a sort of a real resignation wave, if you like, yeah, the big resignation, that comes from, rightly or wrongly, people reflecting to say is this how I want to live my life? And I think there are many, many examples of things that are happening around the world, positive things as well as difficult, challenging things, that are inviting all of us to say what is the meaning of my existence? Am I happy with how I spend my time? Am I happy with the relationships that I have? Am I happy with how I take care of myself or those around me? And, ultimately, even though we might be talking to an executive leader about their next career change, it comes down to meaning, doesn’t it? Of what’s important to me about that change and why do I want to make that change. So I think it’s very much meeting that human need and I think that need is quite overt at the moment.

Alex: I also agree. You co-authored a book called Becoming a Coach: The Essential ICF Guide, which was published during the pandemic in 2020. So that book provides a guide for coaches at different levels to understand the psychology of coaching and also goes through the ICF competency model. So tell me a little bit more about that book. Was it intended for people that were already coaches? Is it also for, let’s say, let’s call them civilians that are interested in becoming coaches?

Tracy: The idea really, the intention of the book is that it’s got something that’s valuable to coaches or people who aren’t even coaches yet, anyone on that part of their journey. I’m pleased to say that I’ve had some feedback from coaches at many, many different levels that there’s been something in there that’s useful for them. Probably the biggest audience for the book would be earlier days coaches, so people who are doing their training or preparing for their ACC or PCC credentials, but I’ve had many people also read the book who aren’t coaches and aren’t even intending to become coaches but they’re looking to the competencies just to reflect upon how they engage with people and to give them ideas of another style for connecting more deeply and communicating more effectively. So the idea, I think, is that it does have broad appeal and, at the same time, it is intended to be a really comprehensive guide of the ICF core competencies as a body of work, and, most importantly, to try to bring it to life. I think that was what compelled me to get involved in that as an initiative with Jonathan was the fact that in my day job, if you like, training and mentoring and supervising coaches, very often, coaches will feel that they understand what it means on paper but there’s a difficulty sometimes in how you translate that into behavior. So my intention with the book was to try to bring the competencies to life a little bit, give them more meaning, as we’re talking about meaning, and make them more accessible.

Alex: I like that because when you look at competencies, they may look a little bit dry, but once you put them into action, then they start coming alive and then you can see them in a coaching session, you can see when you should utilize a certain approach, when you should listen a little bit more. It gives you a framework for understanding how to operate and also understanding and meeting your client where they are. We’ve started when we launch programs, right now we’re doing a neuroscience coaching program with Ann Betz that I’m very excited about and one of the things that we started doing is on the page when you sign up for the program, you can actually look at, module by module, which competencies you’ll be tapping into and addressing on a module by module basis with the same intention, which is to provide life to those competencies so that they’re more than just some letters in a document you had to read as part of your journey.

Tracy: Absolutely. And they’re the kinds of conversations I have with coaches almost every day. When we’re looking at something, I don’t know, where it says to be sensitive to the client’s context, just to pluck an example out of the air, and some coaches will look at that and say, “Yes, I get what that means. That means this to me,” then other coaches will look at that and say, “Well, what on earth does that actually mean in reality?” and so that’s where I think working with the competencies, whether we do that through books, through webinars, through discussions, whatever it is, the more we can bring this work to life, then the better that’s got to be surely. I happen to be a bit nerdy though as well about the competencies. I just think they’re a great body of work so anything that I can do to help bring them to life is helpful.

Alex: So you’ve been very involved with the ICF. So take me through that journey. How has the ICF evolved over the last, what is it, almost 30 years? And what is the role of the ICF in coaching today?

Tracy: I got involved with the ICF in 2011, as I was saying, and I think it has changed an awful lot. I mean, my initial experience with the ICF was very much focused on the UK. One of the things that excited me about the ICF was the fact that we are a global organization and my work has always been international so I was very interested in working with a professional body or being part of a professional body that had that variety. It’s back to variety again for me. I love the international feel for the organization. And I think that you’ve only got to have a look at a few statistics around the ICF. It has grown phenomenally in the last few years and if you look at the sort of membership lists or the amounts over the last 10 or so years, I mean, there’s just quantum leaps. And I think this is mirrored against just the growth of the profession itself. I think one of the big changes that I’m aware of that I was involved in and part of during my work with the ICF has very much been just the restructuring, if you like, of the organization to be able to have dedicated areas, family organizations, as we call them, to really, really focus on meeting the needs of these various areas. So, before, the ICF as a body, there was one board, one set of staff, and everyone had to focus on the whole agenda, and we very, very quickly found as the organization was growing and the profession was growing that everything was being stretched just far too thin. There are only so many areas that you can discuss and set strategic goals for, there are only so many areas that staff can spread their attention to, and so a huge change for the ICF was really when we looked at setting up family organizations that were really, really focused on dedicating their attention and their energy to specialized topics, so things like credentialing and standards, foundation, organizations, membership, program accreditation, and a very exciting one, thought leadership. So, for me, that is a very, very big shift. And when I — having just been, as you and I both were, in Florida recently at the ICF Converge 23 event, it was such a joy to really see all of that coming to life and just how the organization has grown and diversified to meet these needs. So, in the same way that we were talking earlier that coaches are now specializing their attention, whether it’s to retirement coaching or coaching for young leaders or sandwich generation coaching, whatever is their specialist energy, the ICF as an organization is also mirroring that specialization while still having a great overarching perspective on the profession as a whole.

Alex: It’s been a great evolution because I remember maybe even 10 years ago, people were concerned in organizational settings that being an ICF coach didn’t really mean that much because you could be a hairdresser that took a couple of courses or you could be an executive that was retired and took a different kind of course and you’re all a coach and you’re all ACC or PCC. That’s one of the critiques that I used to hear when I started my career in coaching and I think the ICF has evolved tremendously and that part of that specialization is now no one questions your ACC, PCC, MCC, whether it has the right rigor or the right focus, but they’ve done that in a way that it still acknowledges that life coaching is a very powerful type of coaching and it meets a lot of clients where they are in their context. So it is a hard thing to do to elevate the profession on the organizational side and also to allow other types of coaching, like life coaching, personal coaching, to thrive and flourish and how do you establish a set of rules that apply to all but also recognize the nuances of different approaches. And, I mean, there’s been a tremendous evolution in the ICF. It’s been a very long time since I heard someone kind of say that old adage of like the weekend warrior that went to a course and now they call themselves a coach. I think there’s a lot of that in the coaching world but I think the ICF has done a really good job at positioning its pathways for accreditation in a way that are both inclusive but also set up quality across the board. I know that you are undergoing yoga teacher training. I used to do a lot of yoga and I need to go back to it. I miss it. But I love that we call coaching a practice and we also call yoga a practice and I think there are some very interesting synergies. I mean, just starting with breath work, I mean, as a coach to be present, nothing better to ground yourself than through your breathing. So, I’m curious, how long have you been doing yoga? What was the appeal of going through yoga teacher training? And how are you planning on using it with your clients? Or perhaps you already are.

Tracy: Yeah, I think there’s huge synergy as well between coaching and yoga, which I guess is why I’m following that pathway. I first got introduced to yoga probably about 22 or so years ago and I got very engrossed in my yoga practice and considered yoga teacher training at the time but it was around the time when I was thinking of starting my business or refreshing my business so I went down the route of coaching instead of carrying on with the yoga side. But it’s interesting it came back on the table, and it came back on the table, oh, I don’t know, probably when my children, I have twins who are 20 years old now, by the time they were sort of 16, 17 and were a little bit more adult and independent, I found I had a bit more time back for me. And —

Alex: Makes sense. 

Tracy: Yeah, makes sense, so just started my yoga practice. What made me do yoga teacher training was actually because I didn’t have any intention to teach at all. I went on the yoga teacher training because I wanted to more deeply understand not just the physical practice of yoga, but more importantly, the philosophy and the history and the principles and values that underpin the broader spectrum of what we know yoga to be, with the physical postures obviously being one very small part of that. So I did that. It became just a very important hobby to me. Yoga is a great thing, I think, for your physical wellbeing, for stretching and flexibility and elements of strength as well. That was almost a given. It was really more I’m — and I’m going to sound nerdy again now, but I’m fascinated by the yoga sutras and the history behind why and how yoga in the broadest spectrum of what it is has evolved. And part of that was, if I’m really honest, to have something that is deeply passionate for me outside of my work because I am very, very passionate about my work and the slight danger with that can be it becomes all consuming. And, for me, coaching and coaching-related things can be my work and my hobby at the same time and so I started to think it would be good to have something that also is, you know, I have passion for that’s not directly related to my work. So that was partly why I did that for very personal reasons. But the more I study and the more I know about it, and I’m still very much learning, I realize that there are enormous correlations, for me, at least, between yoga and coaching, from the purpose or from the point of meaning, again, connection, connecting with my body or connecting with what’s important to me, trusting in myself, going into and finding my inner wisdom, noticing where my own inner tension is and being curious about that. There are so many parallels. Every single time I read my yoga books, I read my anatomy books, or I go on to my yoga mat, I’m seeing little light bulbs going off in my own mind around how that could link to what, for me, are some of the foundational principles of coaching. And so the two are a perfect partnership for me in my world. How I would like to use yoga, I’m hesitating because I haven’t quite got my thoughts on that yet but I do have — I am probably now going to teach a class because I feel that that’s a way of really keeping some of my learning alive for me in a different way but what I’m also exploring is how can I combine not necessarily just the physical practice of yoga but more some of the broader elements of yoga into the development of coaches, both in terms of the development of their own wellbeing but also the development of their awareness of themselves as an instrument of the work that they do. I can’t say too much more about that yet because it’s very embryonic for me but that’s where my curiosity is going at the moment. That’s my creative project.

Alex: That’s exciting. I love how you wanted some boundary between your hobby and your profession and, very quickly, you realize that perhaps the boundary, there’s not a strong bifurcation between them. Now, you’re starting to kind of do both but that’s kind of part of the fun too. 

Tracy: Yeah. 

Alex: Sounds like a fun part of the journey. 

Tracy: Absolutely. 

Alex: So as we close out our episode today, we talked about where coaching is going, so what are some of your thoughts around where coaching is today. You’ve been involved with the ICF for over 10 years. Where is coaching today? How is it changing? There’s a lot of talk about AI, how it could help coaches, how it could potentially replace coaches so there’s all sorts of talk. There’s people that are super excited, there’s people that are less so. Where do you stand? What’s exciting, what’s concerning to you? 

Tracy: To be honest, most of it is more exciting to me than concerning because I think it depends on how you view yourself and your role in this work. There are a number of pivotal pieces, I think, that are informing all of this. One of them, as you’ve said, is AI. I think it’s probably rather futile to ignore the advent of AI and the role that AI is going to play in our work. 

Alex: Sometimes, there’s more risk in not taking a risk, right? So, as a coach, if you don’t kind of start to tap into how that could actually help you, perhaps you may be left behind.

Tracy: Well, that’s exactly it, and how can we embrace and meet the reality and the emerging trends within society, AI being one of them, rather than resist or deny or ignore, because that is difficult. And one of the interesting things is that coaching is all about change, in a way, positive, generative change, and we as practitioners need to also be able to embrace and engage with the change in our context and our environment and ourselves. So I think there is a risk if we don’t do that and an opportunity if we do. And although AI is undoubtedly going to meet the needs of many people when it comes to some basic developmental conversations, I do fundamentally believe that there will still be a role for the human being and that doesn’t have to take away from the work that we do. I think it complements and supplements the profession. For that, we really do need to I think engage in it and really think about this, what is the role that we want to play? And that takes me back to what we’ve been discussing already about meaning and how can we support people to have those really deeper, more nuanced conversations and inquiries about what meaning they are finding and making in their various elements of their lives and work. The other thing that I think is there in the space is something that we’ve already spoken around is the diversification and the specialization of coaching. I think that’s going to continue. We’ll see more of that. And then two other areas that I think are very much on the landscape, one is, of course, the amazing impact that coaching can have on society and social progress. What can we do to meet that opportunity and allow that equity and accessibility to coaching in a much broader way? And the last thing, I think, that’s an interesting thing to navigate that we’re maybe not quite clear about at the moment is the boundary between therapy and coaching is there’s never been a complete binary boundary between coaching and therapy, there’s always some level of crossover, but I think with the fact that mental health and wellbeing are areas that are so much on people’s minds, both personally and in the workplace, there’s something evolving and emerging there around how do we navigate most effectively those two disciplines and what do we need to be most effective and also to be safe and ethical. So I can see there’s some changes in those areas as well. 

Alex: Absolutely. Very interesting time for coaches and for the world at large. Coaching is so much very much needed in this world that’s becoming more digitized and, in so many ways, more transactional. Coaching has this deeply humanizing effect and there’s a lot of elements of technology that can expand that. So, it’s interesting. A lot of people that are drawn to coaching mostly are very people centric so what we have to work on is really to find a way to leverage technologies in ways they can bring us closer. As humanity, we don’t have a great track record so far of doing that over the last many decades. It seems like the more connected we are through this technology, IT infrastructure, the less connected we are to each other, perhaps even to ourselves. But I think it’s a pocket in time and that’ll shift and part of that shift perhaps is related to coaching and that’s why coaching is on the rise in a time of both great potential but also great challenges that — it’s the history of humanity, potential meets challenges and that leads to opportunity. And, to me, coaching is a central aspect of that and I’m actually very excited about the next 5, 10 years how we’re going to be interfacing with technology and different layers of it to enhance the value of this thing we call coaching that we all love. Anyone listening and anyone that’s sat in your chair as a guest in this podcast, I think we all our advocates and lovers of the impact of coaching and how do we all work together to harness the power of it and the nature of exponential capabilities through technology and I think the challenge partly is just the acceleration of time. Everything happens so quickly so how do we connect with some of those perennial truths. When you’re applying the yoga sutras to coaching, what does that mean? What does that mean in a world where things happen and change so quickly? So lots of challenges but, again, I think I anchored on the opportunity for coaching to continue to impact more people around the world, which is super exciting. Thank you so much, Tracy, for joining me today. It was a super fun conversation and I’m looking forward to seeing you in person very soon.

Tracy: Thank you, Alex. It’s been great talking to you. Yeah. Let’s see you in London shortly.

Alex: Yeah, we’ll see you soon.

Tracy: Thank you.