Coaching Archives - Page 2 of 4

Post Traumatic Growth

June 30, 2019

Post Traumatic Growth Post Traumatic Growth (PTG) is the positive change that can happen in the wake of a traumatic event – the positive psychological change that comes as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. This idea fits well with the work that many OTs are involved in – doesn’t it. We work with people who have their occupational lives challenged by many situations disability, injury, disease as well as isolation, marginalisation and displacement (and we…

There’s more to coaching than solving, sorting and making plans

March 31, 2019

jen

Coaching and OT

I know that many of you, if not most of you, are working as OTs in fairly understandable ways and the “barriers” to occupation you deal with maybe 1) physical or environmental, solved or improved with equipment, physical rehabilitation or care support 2) psychological/ cognitive/ sensory, which can be improved with a range of brilliant occupation focused interventions. However, something which increasingly perplexes me on a personal and professional level are those “barriers” which seem somewhat intangible and lack a…

Polly Brennan – Occupational Therapist and Coach

August 14, 2018

jen

Find an OT Coach or Mentor

My name is Polly Brennan from Adventurous Coaching. I believe that life is just too short to put off experiencing health, happiness and fulfilment in the workplace. To what extent are you achieving this at the moment? 23 years of experience as an occupational therapist in mental health services has prepared me well for mental health and wellbeing coaching. With a niche in vocational recovery, I have always had a passion for enabling people to build their resilience in order…

Understanding our occupational selves: coaching and OT

July 6, 2018

jen

Coaching and OT

I often write about how coaching helps us tackle barriers to occupation, be they lack of confidence or self-belief, the lack of a congruent, desirable action plan or the need to un-earth perhaps unconscious drives/desires which scupper our well-intentioned plans. However, I am often still asked “is this occupational therapy?” or “am I being an OT if I coach?” or “if a client figures it all out through coaching, why do they need me?” Of course, these are all complex…

Time to change our professions narrative – lets have a new story

June 12, 2018

Jen Gash

Business Development for OTs

One of my jobs as a coach is to help people spot their long standing, personal narratives and work to change the often unhelpful stories we tell about ourselves and hopefully create new ones. However, on this occasion, I am talking about the narrative our beloved profession of occupational therapy. From the first day I stepped into OT colleges in the mid 1990’s, I heard it. I’ve heard it for the last 25 years and I heard it when working…

Lorraine Western, Coach and Independent Occupational Therapist

June 11, 2018

jen

Find an OT Coach or Mentor

I specialise in enabling healthcare professionals to flourish in work that fits well with their values and priorities. With 29 years’ professional experience in diverse roles in the NHS, Social Services, the charitable and private sectors as well as independent practice I understand the benefits and pressures of working in the public sector in challenging circumstances, as well as what it takes to transfer professional skills to a non-clinical environment. I ran successful sole trader business for 12 years, and…

OTs Doing it Differently: Dr Lynne Goodacre, Letting go of being in the room

January 18, 2018

jen

OT Stories, OTs Doing it Differently

The inspiration for this post came from a comment Jen made in her last ezine when writing about her drives with her daughter: She faces forward and we don’t need to make eye contact. This is really helpful in terms of freeing up our brains to do their own sorting and regulating and so helpful in coaching, which is why I enjoy telephone coaching so much. This comment really resonated with me in terms of my coaching journey and my…

Sense of Coherence, the Creation of Health and Coaching

August 14, 2017

jen

Coaching and wellbeing

The ICF has a great blog resource and whilst is doesn’t have a health coaching category, I found this interesting blog (and several others) under their research section! I was immediately drawn to it for obvious reasons: Such a big, sexy title “Narrative Healing, Salutogenesis and the Wellness Paradigm” and there are many resonant factors with OT: we constantly engage with our clients narrative and how occupational meaning is constructed through narratives; salutogenesis literally means the creation of health and ofcourse we understand how occupational engagement can create health. Within this blog, the coach and author Dr Joel Kreisberg, cites the work of Antonovsky andhis Sense of Coherence model (he hasn’t referenced this…

“Mummy please can we go for a drive?”

March 1, 2017

jen

Coaching and wellbeing, Taking action, making plans

I have long been interested in how moving our bodies physically and a change in physical environment, can really create a much needed shift and evoke different insights during coaching. (There are examples of this in my Coaching Creativity book and elsewhere). Whilst coaching professes to shift outside of the medicalisation of other “helping” therapies, its practice often mirrors the medical model: Pre-planned 1 hour sit down sessions, “see” your coach, leave, come back at regular intervals. Nothing wrong with that, but coaching occurs in between sessions…

When it feels like a marathon

September 12, 2016

jen

Support for OTs

There are times in your life when you feel like you are running a marathon, except you are not physically running, you don’t have the training, the right trainers and sometimes there doesn’t seem to be an end! This is how my life has felt for the last year – I hit the 6 weeks school holidays exhausted. I had been looking after my teenage daughter full time since February and whilst she had been given a place in anew supported school, that wouldn’t start until September. I…