The Integral Coaching approach is at the heart of Breakthrough Leadership’s philosophy and processes.
Integral Coaching is an ongoing, evolving methodology intended to be the most comprehensive response to human life. Its practitioners reach deeply into the past, gathering wisdom from East and West, while simultaneously staying current with the frontiers of new discovery in cognitive science, genetics, and other disciplines.
What makes this work ‘integral’?
We call our work integral because we include everything about the client and the client’s world in our coaching. The inclusion contains what the client is aware of but also their potential—what could be brought about through focused, skillful methods. Integral Coaches bring a view of the client that includes how the client represents themselves. In addition, integral coaching investigates their social world, habits, relationship with their body, the quality of self-care, the amount of attention and energy available to take on change, and much more.
The method attends to the individuality of the person as well as the social context in which they are always embedded. Our individuality includes our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and intentions and everything that is happening to us physiologically. Our social context includes the language(s) we speak, the culturally specific practices we engage in, the relationships we are a part of and the history of the groups we belong to. Additionally, we are always in a shared physical environment that includes nature and human artifacts, and our background sense of possibility and our mood are shaped by the physical space we’re in.
What do we mean by ‘coaching’?
In the most straightforward terms, coaching means building someone’s competence to face their life situation. Practically speaking, successful coaching leaves people with the following outcomes:
1. Long-term excellence
2. The ability to self-correct
3. Competence in being self-generating
In action, this means coaches understand their clients with great depth and scope, converse with them in a way that opens up insights and possibilities, and offer a path forward that includes activities custom-designed for them.
Addressing the inner and outer world of the individual and the inner and outer world of the group opens up a huge template in which coaching can occur. Working this broadly requires coaches who can understand how each of these human domains operates, both singularly and in their combinations.