Hosted by the European Mentoring & Coaching Council
Interactively exploring: What is playfulness in coaching?
Adult playfulness is a relatively new and exciting area of research in psychology. Drawing on a wide range of research areas as well as our own and other coaches’ experience, we’ll start by looking at what we mean by adult playfulness and playfulness in coaching, consider some of the underlying theory and start playing with what might it look like in practice.
Exploring what playfulness can bring to your coaching and explaining this to clients
We’ll explore what might be going on in our bodies and brains when we access playfulness and how this impacts us as coaches, our clients and our coaching relationship. Drawing on research and theory of the related constructs of humour and creativity, we consider how they overlap with playfulness and how they provide the possibility for rich contribution to coaching effectiveness. We will also shine a light on some of the barriers and risks to incorporating this approach.
Playfulness opens the door to somatic coaching, experiential learning and requires mindfulness from both client and coach and we’ll consider these perspectives as well as possibly facilitating a shift within you during the session.
Where are you in this landscape?
Join us for experiential explorations to gauge your level of comfort and how you might authentically step beyond this in service of your client. How is your current level of comfort or discomfort with playfulness serving your client?
We will explore how we can prime ourselves to be playful as coaches and how we might help our clients to do the same. Finally, we will offer a few practical ideas of how coaches can authentically experiment with more playfulness in their coaching.
Stephanie Wheeler and Teresa Leyman both hold a MSc in Coaching & Behavioural Change from Henley Business School. They are accredited individual and systemic team coaches passionate about supporting the development and flourishing of individuals, teams and organisations.
Stephanie is a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator, writes for The LSP Magazine and has written peer-reviewed research articles. Teresa is an agile coach and supervisor with experience of leading hi-tech, complex change.
Teresa and Stephanie are both interested in the possibilities offered by playful thinking in complex environments, supporting individual development and team maturation as well as the co-creation of new ideas and solutions across teams and organisations. They also work with coaches to support them in finding authentic ways to connect with more playfulness. Their book on playfulness in coaching will be published by Routledge in Spring 2023.The organiser
Beth Clare McManus
Beth works as a coach, psychologist and illustrator, supporting individuals and organisations to develop using a visual and engaging approach. Her work is dedicated to supporting people to be human at work, with a particular focus on well-being, emotions, and creativity. She is an active member of EMCC UK and is co-founding this Special Interest Group with an intention of making Coaching Psychology more accessible and promoting an evidence-led and ethically sound community of practice for coaches, supervisors, academics, practitioners and psychologists using coaching in their practice.