When people are exploring whether coaching is right for them, they have many great questions. In previous posts, I’ve discussed how coaching has helped me and what I think is most powerful about it. In this post, I want to answer common questions clients have asked me.

This week concludes the series on trauma-informed coaching focusing on SAMHSA’s “four R’s” of trauma-informed practice. The fourth R, resisting re-traumatization, asks us to think more broadly and deeply about more systemic change. In other words, it’s one thing to know how to respond to someone whose life has been affected by trauma. It’s another thing altogether to work to change the conditions that continue to traumatize that person.

In a previous post, I talked about what I study as a communication scholar, and how that background informs the work I do as a coach. Today, I want to talk about one of my areas of specialization many people find intriguing: communication ethics.

So what do communication ethicists do?

In this series, I’ve been talking about the SAMHSA’s “four R’s” of trauma-informed care and connecting them with coaching. This week focuses on the third R: Responding to trauma. This R is potentially the most unsettling so far because while the previous two R’s are simply about acknowledging and noticing, it asks us to do something about the trauma we see around us. 

When people are exploring whether coaching is right for them, they have many great questions. In previous posts, I’ve discussed how coaching has helped me and what I think is most powerful about it. In this post, I want to answer common questions clients have asked me.

In the first post in this series, I talked about how the drama of trauma and recovery plays a role in every human story, whether we know it or not. This week, I am focusing on the second R: recognizing. In trauma-informed coaching, simply realizing the existence of trauma and the importance of the role it plays in our lives isn’t enough. We also have to learn to recognize how trauma shapes how we show up in the world.

In this blog, I’ve been trying to make coaching more concrete—what it is, how it works, and why it matters. This week, I want to dig a little deeper by describing the four things I love most about coaching.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at a symposium organized by the Fiat Program on Faith and Mental Health at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. All the presentations were wonderful and thought-provoking. As a way of extending the conversation, I’m posting mine.

When I talked with anxious undergraduates about the job market, I always joked that I had a degree in dead languages (classics) and a doctorate in a field nobody could define (rhetoric). I still get strange looks when I tell people what I studied. It sounds pretentious, academic, unclear.

So what do I study when I study communication?

What is trauma-informed coaching? Because coaches aren’t psychotherapists, trauma-informed coaching doesn’t treat trauma.

But trauma-informed coaching can still be tremendously helpful. In this series of posts, I would like to describe and clarify what that help looks like and why it matters.

Today, we generally have an idea of how mentoring and psychotherapy can help people. But coaching is ambiguous. What is coaching, exactly? And how can it help me?

In this post, I want to make coaching and its benefits more concrete by talking about coaching’s impact on me.

Thank you so much for stopping by! I’m passionate about coaching, leadership, and trauma, and this blog will help us learn about all three of those things together.