Conference

With the 2011 Job EQ conference coming up in Belgium in a few weeks time, thought you may like to catch up on one of the previous conferences.

Allan and I have just returned from Paris for the ICF conference. Here’s a quick summary in pictures of our time there:

It was a great opportunity to meet up with some of the UK ICF team and discuss the upcoming 2012 conference which is going to take place in the UK!

We were able to catch up with some of our European associates: Flaminia Fazi of U2Coach in Italy and Silvie de Clerck, creator of the Clean Cards in France.

We’d also like to thank some of the excellent speakers we had the opportunity to see. I particularly enjoyed the following:

Ervin Lazlo who spoke about a shift towards a new civilisation and bifurcation in complex evolving systems.

Trinh Xuan Thuan, whose speech was entitled “The Big Bang and after: Man’s place in the Universe”, gave us an insight into astrophysics on a very human level.

And David Whyte who I have now seen 3 times didn’t fail to disappoint with his talk on “Life at the Frontier: The Art and Science of Courageous Conversations”. His discussion into the essential elements of real conversation carefully highlighted the art involved in coaching and the importance of communication in leadership. The Beyond Partnership has invited him to the UK several times and he is well worth seeing.

And thank you to the organisers for some inventive conference ideas!

To see all the photos have a look at our facebook page.

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We know that NLP works, right?
I am assuming your answer is a big resounding yes!

And yet, whilst the popularity of, and general awareness around NLP is definitely on the up, there is still some skepticism about its credibility. Improving this public perception of NLP is something we are very passionate about.

As part of our mission statement, we aim to raise the profile and reputation of NLP, and The NLP Research Conference is an excellent way forward and goes some way to increasing the credibility of NLP, which can only benefit us all.

As you may be aware, the second installment of this ground breaking event is on Saturday 3rd July 2010 at Cardiff University.

Come along, learn, and share ideas with other members of the NLP community

BOOKING IS OPEN – All are welcome to attend
NEWSFLASH: YOU CAN NOW BOOK SAFELY AND SECURELY ONLINE!

Last Thursday and Friday, Allan and I attended the Association for Coaching Going global conference as exhibitors. We’d like to thank all the attendees who came for a chat at our stand and joined in with our coaching games. We had some great quotes, jokes and tips from coaches as well as some interesting chats. We gave away a free iWAM certification course to lucky winner Julia A. Choukhno.

The main eye-opener of the whole conference for me was the range of different people there. I chatted to a woman who teaches coaching techniques to young offenders, a man who runs a mentoring programme for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, a counsellor who wanted a fresh approach, a war veteran who had turned to coaching post-trauma, psychologists, doctors, professors, publishers and authors, coaches who loved psychometrics and some who hated them, NLP-ers, business coaches, life coaches, family coaches, career coaches, HR directors, coach managers, fledgling coaches and experienced ones and do you know what? All of them had a different approach to coaching. Each one of them had a different reason for getting into the profession, and each of them had a different way of dealing with clients and running their coaching sessions.

To add to the variation of backgrounds, there were several international attendees who gave us an insight into how coaching is being carried out in Russia, Portugal and the Netherlands to name but a few. For a conference with a focus on Going Global, it was lovely to see people who had come from the corners of the world to be in London for the conference.

This of course is not to mention the extraordinary local and international speakers who appeared at the conference. Although we were on the stand, Allan and I took turns dropping in to sessions and I would personally like to say what a joy it was to attend Julio Olalla’s opening speech on his life in Chile and the US and his use of coaching to spread his message that there is no joy in pushing for a “better life” when surely the best thing is to live a “good” one. He spoke at length about gratitude and morality and the personal touch that we are losing and I, for one, can say I caught a few fellow coaches wiping away a tear during an emotional story of gratitude and generosity in his own life.

Following his talk I was able to attend varied other sessions where the breadth of coaching and what it can do really came alive. It was great to meet so many people and learn so much. Thank you to the AC for putting it all together and their hard work while we were there. And thank you to the coaches who are striving for the best our profession can be, it was a real joy to meet you all.