Love is important to me, as you know by now if you’ve been following this blog series! And it appears that I am not the only one who is sharing their love of love out loud and into this coaching space. I want to build momentum through this beautifully loving community, so have invited those I have connected with to write something of their own here. The remit was to articulate something that they hadn’t seen in my writing to date.
So that’s what you’ll get over the next few posts, a range of guest posts about such topics as love and contracting in coaching; love and gestalt; your own personal social history as a coach and where / how you might have learned about love; and much more besides. I am looking forward to hearing your continued expressions of connection (or not) with the nudges towards love in your work.
Helena Clayton inspired this whole exploration into love in coaching for me (for which I shall be eternally grateful), and so naturally, she writes the first guest blog post. If you would like to listen to Helena and me in conversation about my exploration of love, you can listen to her latest podcast here. Her flagship workshop The Love Lab 2025 is running on 28th November 2025. I’ll be there, and I’d love for you to join me and Helena.
As a coach, it’s all about you
Of course it’s not. But it is also about you – it starts with you – when we think about how love might show up in our coaching.
Let’s start with what Bill O’Brien said: “The success of the intervention depends on the interior conditions of the intervenor”. So if I would like to bring more love to my coaching, how might I begin with me?
And then let’s add in the following commonly used lenses for us as coaches:
- We lead out of who we are
- We coach from our own autobiography
- We see the world not as it is but as we are.
So, two key questions for us:
- How well do we know our own story – the place love has in it, and what it taught us about love?
I often invite a new coaching client to complete a Lifeline activity as we begin our work together. Once they’ve completed that, we explore ‘what key events or people helped shape you to become the person you are today?’
Running Love in Organisations, a leadership programme specifically looking at how we might bring more loving leadership into our work and world, we instead ask ‘who or what taught you about love, and how you have come to understand it – what does love look like in practice for you today?’
So for us as coaches, considering love, we might think about the assumptions and beliefs we might have absorbed consciously or unconsciously from our own story that guide us today. How might they be playing out in your coaching, or even in specific interventions? Consider:
- The culture or faith you were born into and what was said and taught about love
- Your upbringing more generally – what your parents or primary caregivers, teachers or grandparents, your home or school life taught you about love, implicitly or out loud.
- Your ‘origin story’ or the story of your birth – generally known as the perinatal period, which includes from when you were conceived and carried in the womb up to the first year of life. What happened to you then that might have a bearing on what love has come to mean for you now?
- What are the blocks to love in our life – and in our coaching work?
Probably obvious to you in your Lifeline might be a sense of whether there’s anything that feels like it blocks or gets in the way of your capacity to connect with love, to let love in, to feel or express love, or to use the word love.
Some of the blocks to love that I have written about elsewhere (including here) will also show up in coaching, whether in the coach or our clients. For example:
- The ways we (unhelpfully, but understandably) associate love with religion, sex or intimacy
- The fact that love is gendered, with men and women experiencing and thinking about love very differently – and both men and women often finding it difficult to talk about love or connect with love
- That various forms of trauma get in the way of connecting with some of our more vulnerable feelings, including love. Research shows that between 40-60% of adults in the UK have experienced some form of ‘slow trauma’ or Adverse Childhood Experiences.
- The assumptions that love belongs in the personal and not the professional domain
Bringing love into our coaching
So just as we might explore trauma, shame and fear in our coaching work – also big and sometimes taboo words – might we not also explore love?
True, you might never front-up love like Joshua Abramson does, beginning every exchange, whether in person or email, with ‘I love you, Helena.’
But you might, like me, sometimes ask a coaching client, ‘What’s the most loving version of that situation?’ or ‘Where is love in this for you?’ Or like coach and consultant Christopher Miller, whose Let’s Talk Love coaching cards include questions like: ‘What would love do – what would love say here?’
And you might, as Robin Shohet suggests we do, become more aware of which lens we’re using. He suggests we have four key ways of looking at something – through the lens of compassion, judgment, fear … or love. As we coach, might we be aware of which lens we might be looking through? Can we shift our inner state to be closer to a loving one? And how might doing so mean we can bring love in without needing to use the word itself? We’re coming to Bill O’Brien’s interior conditions here.
And talking of lenses, a wider lens can help here. Bert Hellinger, from the field of systemic constellation, invites us to think of ‘love as a wide angled lens’ which means that the more we come right ‘up and out’ and see something in its widest context, the more likely we are to find understanding and compassion, and from there love. As Deborah Rowland says, “All action makes perfect sense when you can see the system in which they are situated”.
And I most certainly know that I generally need to check my inner state before arriving at a coaching session. Am I well regulated? Am I as ‘open to the field of possibility’ as I can be? Can I connect with the client and myself with acceptance and with love? And am I relaxed? ‘You can’t be a hurried person and a loving person, ’ as you might have heard me say before.
And finally, a good question for us might be: how might I make my coaching even 10% more loving?
Not all of what I’m writing about above will have a place in your coaching work. But if, as human beings, we are hard-wired for love (other views are available …), then why would love in some capacity not also be part of our overall work and our coaching work in particular?
Resources
- For understanding more about my own upbringing, including my perinatal experience, I found The Hoffman Process really helpful, and workshops with Celebration of Being taught me about love in all sorts of ways.
- More on ‘blocks to love’ in Ep. 22 of my podcast, a conversation with Joshua Abramson is Ep. 19 and with Christopher Mille is Ep. 27.
- For more on a very particular form of Trauma, Boarding School Survivor Syndrome is an excellent read if you or someone you know went to Boarding School, but I also found it really helpful to understand the impact of trauma more generally.
- I trained in systemic constellations work with The Whole Partnership. For more on systemic constellations specifically in coaching, John Whittington’s training comes highly recommended from colleagues of mine.
- You can download my 2023 Research Paper from my website.
Contact
Helena is a coach and coach supervisor, working in leadership and organisational development. This is her website, and her email is helena@helenaclayton.co.uk if you want to contact her directly.
