Integral Coaching. Part 1: Orientations

Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine, and Ken Wilber

Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine, and Ken Wilber discuss the advent of Integral Coaching, whose services will be made available to the Integral community in the coming months.  They share some of the unique contributions the Integral approach offers to coaches and clients alike, providing the most comprehensive map of growth and human development available today.

To further explore the ideas and techniques behind Integral Coaching, we invite you to check out the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, now available.

Topics include:

- Brief Histories: Joanne and Laura share their own professional backgrounds, tracing the story of Integral Coaching Canada back to a serendipitous encounter years ago, when they discovered their mutual passion for growth, development, and Integral thought.

- Native Perspectives: The three discuss a powerful diagnostic tool used by Integral Coaching, a synthesis of two different components of the Integral model: quadrants and typologies.  Ken shares a brief theoretical summary of the Four Quadrants, then Joanne and Laura discuss how people relate to these four fundamental perspectives, in terms of both orientation and proficiency.

- AQAL Constellation: The Integral model serves as a very useful map of the world around us, as well as the world within us—but while it offers a tremendous amount of theoretical clarity around growth and development, it does very little in itself to help us figure out where in the wilderness we actually happen to be at any given time.  Joanne and Laura introduce the concept of the "AQAL Constellation," helping to triangulate our position in relation to our potential, and acting as a uniquely-tailored "You Are Here" sticker on the map of being.

- Ways of Being: Laura describes another process used by Integral Coaching to help guide a client's growth, in which we create two distinct metaphors for ourselves: one reflecting our "current way of being," and another that reflects some desired "future way of being."

Dear friends,
 

If you are ready for the next step in your own evolution, and are serious about dropping into your own personal growth and unfolding in a whole new way, so are we…
 

“Coaching.” We’ve all heard of it by now. A $3 billion industry that has swept the globe and shows up now in almost every professional field. And for many of us, a term so widespread that it has become almost meaningless, implying a diverse array of different techniques, approaches and philosophies of how to change and grow. And, remarkably, many of the coaching approaches out there do not even have a robust human developmental model at their core: that is, a view of how people actually expand and develop their consciousness by embodying a new and integrated set of skills, perspectives and capacities.
 

So when Integral Life set out to bring the rigor of integral philosophy to a truly comprehensive developmental coaching model, we formed a partnership with Joanne Hunt and Laura Divine of Integral Coaching Canada to do so.
 

I am very proud to bring to you the first in a series of media that will introduce you to what I believe is the most comprehensive coaching program available in the world today and which can offer you startling insights and tools you can employ right now to help you grow.
 

I should know. I have tried many approaches to development in the past. I have worked with some exceptional coaches, trainers, teachers, partners and mentors. And I have to say that I have never experienced anything as powerful or as comprehensive as the Integral Coaching method that we introduce to you today with this conversation among Joanne Hunt, Laura Divine and Ken Wilber.
 

If you are…

• An executive looking for a career change or to become a stronger, more powerful leader, integrating more perspectives with greater precision
   
• An entrepreneur looking for someone to support you in taking your development to a whole new level
   
• A parent wanting to become more effective with your children (or parents)
   
• An Integral Life Practitioner wanting to make sense and better use of all the disparate and complex elements of a personal growth practice
   
• A couple wanting to deepen and widen your ways of relating and evolving
   
• Wanting to make sense of it all, get stronger, develop what matters to you, live more joyfully and with greater efficacy and ease

Whatever calls you to your next level of development, the tips you can learn from listening in on this conversation can help you. (Soon you will be able to work directly with an Integral Life coach, too…)
 

These challenging times call for developing more capacities, greater presence and deeper wisdom so that the decisions that we make each day come from a place of balance, ease, and wisdom.
 

I invite you to explore how you can do this. Right here. Right now. We are all waking up and growing up together. And I hope you will continue to have us join you along the way.
 

Warm loving regards,

Robb Smith