The Coaching Psychology Pod Dr. Natalie Lancer | The British Psychological Society

In this podcast episode, Dr. Natalie Lancer with Dr. Divine Charura, Dr. Sarah McKay, Gry Osnes, and Amy Brann, discuss the integration of neuroscience into coaching practice. They explore the benefits and challenges of applying neuroscience concepts in coaching, emphasising the need for a more-informed understanding for coaches who choose to work in this way. Our guests explain how coaches can stay informed about neuroscience research and offer insights into how to effectively apply neuroscience concepts into coaching sessions.
We discuss:
•    What can an understanding of neuroscience bring to coaching psychology?
•    How is neuroscience research advancing and what is its impact on coaching?
•    What is the role of neuroscience in organisational leadership and the workplace?
•    How can we use neuroscience to help us understand emotions, cognition, and behaviour when coaching people on change processes?
•    How can coaches access reliable neuroscience information and education?
•    What are the risks of coaches using neuroscience principles without a solid understanding?
•    What neuromyths can we debunk?
•    What are the difficulties of integrating complex neuroscience concepts into coaching practice?
•    What are some useful neuroscience insights coaches can immediately apply?
•    How can we create brain-friendly work environments that foster better habits and heightens creativity?
Drawing on neuroscience in our coaching needs to be done in a considered way. We must draw from peer-reviewed research rather than 30-year-old neuroscience ideas that have since been revised, such as the oversimplified 'lizard brain' concept or the left brain-right brain dichotomy. Coaches must ensure their understanding of neuroscience is solid before practically applying these concepts in their practice. Our guests today are:
Dr Sarah McKay is an Australian-based (Kiwi-born) neuroscientist, speaker, author and founder of Think Brain, which offers professional development programs in applied neuroscience and women’s brain health, and the Neuroscience Academy suite of training programs. Sarah attended Oxford University to complete an MSc and DPhil in Neuroscience. She sums up her thesis with the words, 'Nature, Nurture or Neuroplasticity' and worked on research in spinal cord injury as a post-doc. Sarah is the author of The Women's Brain Book: The neuroscience of health, hormones and happiness. Her second book, Baby Brain: The surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds (for the better), was published by Hachette in April 2023.
Professor (Dr.) Divine Charura is a practitioner psychologist registered with the Health and Care Professions Council in England and a Chartered Coaching Psychologist. Divine is an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and an adult psychotherapist. Furthermore, his work as an Executive leadership coach, has included working with members of senior leadership teams, within corporate organisations, and private institutions in the UK and abroad.  Divine is also passionate about coach education and how the coaching profession can support the development of coaching practitioners as researchers. He believes that this will enable them to continue to contribute to the coaching evidence base and enhance the development of the coaching profession. Divine has co-authored and edited numerous books.
Gry Osnes is a clinically trained psychotherapist and consultant and received her PhD from the University of Oslo and an MSc from HEC/INSEAD. In the domain of organizational leadership, she applies Active Inference Psychology and The Emotional Brain to top leaders and teams. Her expertise includes cognitive and affective neuroscience and the intricate dynamics of human behaviour. Her work revolves around understanding people's roles, their strategic manoeuvres, and the fulfilment

In this podcast episode, Dr. Natalie Lancer hosts a discussion on the role of coach development, self-awareness and the concept of self in coaching. Dr. Julia Carden presents her research on self-awareness, distinguishing it from self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Heather Frost explores the concept of self, drawing on her doctoral research looking at 25 belief systems, highlighting its complexity and the practical impact of understanding a client’s concept of self. Dr Elizabeth Crosse details the three developmental strategies that emerged through her doctoral research: the craft, the being and the art of coaching.
We examine:
•     Why is self-awareness important for coaches?
•     What is the difference between self-awareness and the concept of self?
•     How are self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-consciousness linked?
•     What are the challenges involved in demonstrating competency vs capacity development?
•     How can we utilise the coach’s and coachee’s self-awareness in coaching practice?
•     What do clients’ beliefs about self mean for how coaches tailor their coaching?
•     How can the three underpinnings of concept of self: stability vs instability, thoughts of self as a unique expression of me vs the self as an illusion, and unity versus multiplicity, be used to generate a concept of self scale?
•     How does understanding the concept of self increase the coach’s self awareness of beliefs and bias? And how can this benefit coaching outcomes?
•     What is the difference between Continuous Personal and Professional Development (CPPD) and Continuous Professional Development (CPD)?
•     Why is it more helpful to think of coach development as a learning journey than a linear progression?
•     How do we know what coaching development opportunities to invest in?
•     What are some practical ways to develop self-awareness?
Self-awareness enables coaches to forge deeper connections with clients and furthermore, it seems we can only take clients as far as we have gone ourselves. We discussed how a focus on preparing the self rather than content, allows coaches to trust their abilities and concentrate on other aspects of their practice. As we wrapped up the episode, the guests shared how engaging and reflecting in formal and informal professional and personal experiences have influenced their development. Our guests today are:
Dr Julia Carden is an accredited Master Practitioner Coach with the EMCC, a Professional Certified Coach with the ICF, an accredited coaching supervisor and is a Visiting Tutor at Henley Business School.  Julia was an officer in the Royal Navy, and then specialised in assessment and development centre work, and Learning and Development.  She fundamentally believes that as coaches we must first, and continue to do, the work on self – because who we are is how we coach.  This approach is underpinned by her PhD research which explored the role of self-awareness in the development of the coach. She is a NLP Master Practitioner, an accredited Time to Think Coach, a Fellow of the CIPD, and is licensed to use a range of psychometrics.  Julia completed the Henley MSc in Executive Coaching and Behavioural Change in 2014.  
Heather Frost is the Founder of People and Practice, Co-founder of Think Perspective, an accredited coach, Doctoral Researcher and Visiting Tutor at Henley Business School. She is a Henley accredited coach, an accredited Senior Practitioner with the European Coaching & Mentoring Council (EMCC Global), and an accredited Coach with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Heather has over 20 years of global experience coaching individuals, teams, leaders, and organisations for systemic behaviour change and development. With an MSc in Coaching & Behaviour Change from Henley Business School (UK) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology (BPsych) with a minor in Philosophy from the University

In this podcast episode, Dr. Natalie Lancer with Dr. Sarah Brooks, Paula Dixon, and Natasha Vorrasi discuss the vision for the future of coaching psychology and the two current routes to becoming a chartered coaching psychologist. We outline the high standards required for chartered status, which is recognised by the British Psychological Society. We explore the division's goals, developing an impact statement, a coaching psychologist toolkit and role profiles, as well as the different membership levels within the Division of Coaching Psychology (DoCP). We answer:
What is the value of being a Chartered Coaching Psychologist? How do you become a Chartered Coaching Psychologist? How can the DoCP support Chartered Coaching Psychologists? How is the DoCP advancing professional recognition of the field? How does the DoCP work with our stakeholders? What is the DoCP’s current vision and mission? What is the five year plan for the DoCP? How does the DoCP uphold a high level of ethical practice and academic rigour? What are the benefits of being a DoCP member? How can people get involved with the DoCP committee? The Division of Coaching Psychology's vision is to be a global leader in coaching psychology, setting standards for excellence and supporting members' professional growth. In this conversation, we discuss what leadership the DoCP can provide around research, sharing new tools and approaches, supervision and providing professional development opportunities, whilst fostering a diverse and inclusive community. Our guests today are:
Paula Louise Dixon is the Chief People Performance and Wellbeing Optimiser at Hazon Consultancy Limited. As a Business & Coaching Psychologist, she is passionate about optimising people potential and has practiced within independent consultancy over the last ten years supporting public, private and not-for-profit clients. With a particular interest in neurodiversity, she enjoys working with newly diagnosed adults to devise workplace strategies to support performance and well-being, alongside refining their self-identity. Paula is the current Deputy Chair/Secretary for the British Psychological Society’s Division of Coaching Psychology and is the Chair of the Chartership Subcommittee. She also helps to co-lead the committee’s internal team development activities and sustainability events.
Dr Sarah Brooks runs the ‘Powerful Dreaming’ coaching practice. She is an ICF and EMCC accredited coach and is a committee member for the Division of Coaching Psychology. She is a Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the Institute of Work Psychology, Sheffield University Management School and as Academic Lead for Employability has developed a coaching tool designed to help students think critically about their career. Sarah's research focuses on how employees voice their concerns about unethical behaviour to managers in the workplace, or if they choose not to voice, why they remain silent. Prior to becoming a lecturer, Sarah was a change implementation manager and an operations manager and has 17 years of industry experience. 
Natasha Vorrasi is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist and is the Head of the Lobbying Subcommittee of the BPS Division of Coaching Psychology Committee. Natasha works with an international portfolio of clients, designing consulting and coaching programmes to focus on culture, behaviours and skills, notably in the areas of leadership, career development, performance, and well-being. She is also an HR consultant with extensive experience in strategic organisational projects and culture change programmes, leveraging her coaching approach grounded in psychological theory and change management methods. She is also accredited in Facet5 Personality Profiling and certified in project management with ESCP. Natasha worked for 18 years in Human Resources for BNP Paribas holding senior roles including Group Head of Learning & Development.
Your host, Dr Natalie Lancer, is a Chartered Co

In this episode, Dr. Natalie Lancer and her guests, Anthony Eldridge-Rogers, Maria Iliffe-Wood, and Dr. Iain McCormick, explore the significance of self-care, presence, and reflective practice in coaching psychology. They discuss the role of self-care in managing the challenges coaches face. The conversation highlights the importance of meaning-centred coaching and the impact of coaching presence on creating a nurturing environment for clients as well as coaches. Reflective practice is also examined as a tool for professional development. We explore:
What is self-care, presence, and reflective practice and how are they linked? What’s the relationship between reflective practice and supervision? What is the significance of working with meaning for both clients and coaches? What is whole-person coaching? How can self-care help coaches build strong, co-created relationships with clients? How can we ensure that we are role-modelling self-care to our clients? How can we further develop our ability to be present to our clients? How can we counteract negative self-talk and ‘heroic thinking’ in order to be a better coach? What does the research say on the effectiveness of reflective practice? In this conversation we ask what self-care, presence, and reflective practice mean practically for both the coach and the coachee, and the impact that they have on coaching outcomes. Furthermore, we can consider self-care, presence, and reflective practice as tools for professional development, self-improvement for our own well-being and as part of a duty of care to our clients. Our guests today are:
Dr Iain McCormick is the founder of the Executive Coaching Centre in Auckland, New Zealand. He initially trained in clinical psychology, working in the forensic sector, and subsequently completed his PhD studying work stress during a long overland traverse of Antarctica. Iain then moved into organisational consulting, becoming a Partner in Deloitte, working in Canada and New Zealand. He subsequently moved to Hong Kong where he helped build a consulting and coaching firm that was sold to a US multinational.
 He returned to New Zealand in 2000 and started the Executive Coaching Centre. He currently coaches a range of board directors, chief executives and senior managers. Iain has been running intensive reflective practice sessions for coaches since 2020.  In 2023 he published the book ‘Reflective Practice for Coaches: A Guidebook for Advanced Professional Development’. 
Maria Iliffe-Wood has been a leader, coach and mentor for over 30 years. She is also a Coach Supervisor. She is MD of Meridian Iliffe Ltd, a small leadership development consultancy. She helps business leaders with leadership, team and coach development. She has a broad experience working with a range of business sectors including housing, retail, financial, construction and charity sectors, both in the public and private sector.  
 
She holds several postgraduate qualifications related to coaching, mentoring and coach supervision. She is the author of ‘Coaching Presence, Building Consciousness and Awareness into Coaching Interventions’, which has been published in three languages and has been read in over 20 different countries. She is a member of the Association for Coaching and the Association of Coaching Supervisors.
Anthony Eldridge-Rogers is an executive coach, supervisor, coach trainer and organisational consultant in human wellbeing and coaching. He has worked with board members, CEOs, senior management teams and entrepreneurs as both coach and mentor within the context of recovery, wellness and leadership. He has co-authored a book on Recovery & Wellness Coaching Tips (due to be published in 2024 by Routledge) and is a contributor to the WECoach Coaching Tools book series.
He set up and runs specialist recovery and wellness coach training and consultancy, FRC Worldwide, which delivers his Recovery and Wellness Coach training programme b

In this episode Dr Natalie Lancer, with Professor Jonathan Passmore, Xenia Angevin and Kaveh Mir, discuss the realities of running your own coaching practice or working for a large, digital coaching platform. We cover the fundamental questions to help you consider how to find your clients, decide on a niche and philosophy and tap into different coaching markets. We explore:
•    What counts more: coach expertise or experience?
•    How can coaches be tactical and strategic when navigating the gig economy of coaching?
•    How do you develop your own unique coaching identity in a business context?
•    What do you want your day-to-day coaching life to look like?
•    How has coaching evolved to where we are in the current coaching marketplace?
•    What can a coach earn, as a novice or an expert, working for a large digital platform?
•    How do you choose whether you want to work for a digital provider and which one?
•    What are the selection criteria for coaches that digital platforms use? 
•    What are the benefits and constraints when working with a digital coaching provider?
•    What are the different roles a coaching psychologist can adopt as part of their portfolio?
•    How can coaching become more inclusive as a profession?
•    Why is coaching psychology a good second career?
The digital coaching landscape is evolving and has arguably transformed coaching from a ‘cottage industry’ to a global, scalable enterprise. We query whether coaching education needs to be updated and how coaching standards can be maintained and measured to reflect this new context. Our guests today are:
Professor Jonathan Passmore is an award winning and international renowned Chartered Occupational Psychologist and the Inaugural Chair of the BPS Division of Coaching Psychologists. He has published widely, with 40 books, 150 book chapters and 100+ scientific papers. His forthcoming books in 2024 include: ‘Becoming a Team Coach: The Essential ICF Guide’ (Springer), ‘The Digital & AI Coaches Handbook’ (Routledge), ‘The Health & Wellbeing Coaches Handbook’ (Routledge) and the second edition of ‘Becoming a Coach: The Essential ICF Guide (Springer), with three new titles plus a host of research projects in progress for the future.
He is listed in the Thinkers 50 Marshall Goldsmith Top 8 Global Coaches and Global Gurus Top 30 Thought Leaders. He is currently Professor of Coaching and Behavioural Change at Henley Business School, Senior Vice President at EZRA (the coaching arm of LHH) and previously worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM Business Consulting and OPM. His current research interests include AI, digital and well-being.
Kaveh Mir is currently an ICF Global Director at the Institute of Thought Leadership and a Master Certified Coach who works with Executives on critical psychological processes using Positive Behaviour Change and evidence based Coaching Psychology. He is licensed in a portfolio of psychometric assessments tools and a BPS qualified assessor on User Test Occupational Ability and Personality. Kaveh has a degree in Computer Science, a Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, a Master's degree in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology and an Executive MBA. 
Kaveh has coached senior executives from international organisations such as Deloitte, Amazon, and Google. He has held various senior executive roles and was the founder of a technology start-up firm. He wrote ‘Wars at Work: An Action Guide for Resolving Workplace Battles’ which seeks to identify causes for workplace conflict and offer solutions to effectively resolve these issues.
Xenia Angevin, MBA, is a Coaching Psychologist, promoting a dialogue within the Helping and People professions, and across the scientific domains. Xenia’s specific expertise is in differential psychology and atypical neurodevelopment. She is a Principal Coaching Psychologist and Head

The final episode of Season 2 of The Coaching Psychology Pod is split into two parts. Host Dr Natalie Lancer discusses coaching in sport with Dr. Angela Mouton, Dr. Matt Dubin and Ben Davies. In Part 1 Angela and Matt delve into their interest in coaching, the role of positive psychology, and their research, exploring the concept of 'flow' and its impact on peak performance. In Part 2, Ben elaborates on Prof. Steve Peters’ Chimp Model, providing insight into how the mind works so that athletes and all human beings can better overcome the issues and challenges we face, in order to improve our experience of life and our day to day interactions. We explore:
What is the role of positive psychology in coaching for peak performance? What is the Chimp Model and how can it be used? Why is flow important for athletes, in daily life, the workplace and other non-sporting contexts? How can you coach towards creating the optimum conditions for flow? What are the strongest predictors of peak performance in sport? How can you work with both athletes and coaches to achieve the best results? How does coaching the ‘whole person’ lead to better performance on the field or court? What are the main barriers people have when trying to find their zone of peak performance? How can coaching psychologists help people work out what is in their control, and to work with and stick to their strategies? What can enhance or derail someone’s sporting experience? How can we develop a personalised plan to handle the unexpected? The panellists share their research on attention control, the importance of focusing on one task at a time and the balance between challenge and skill in achieving flow. They also discuss areas of future research. Furthermore, they examine the usefulness of applying sporting analogies in non-sporting contexts including business, the army and the NHS. Our guests today are:
Dr Angela Mouton specialises in strategic human capital, including Organisational Development, Management Consulting and Executive Search and Assessment. She focuses on peak performance, driving business results, goal setting and prioritisation, leadership, and organisational design and effectiveness. She spent a decade practicing Law at multinational firms, and then moved into Management Consulting in 2010. She was a Positive Organisational Psychology doctoral student of Dr Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University and publishes her research on hope and flow in peer reviewed journals.
Dr Matt Dubin is an Organisational Psychologist and a Culture and Leadership Development expert who uses the concept of flow to facilitate the development and transformation of people and business. Matt holds certifications to administer the MBTI, EQ-I 2.0, Korn Ferry 360, Gallup Clifton Strengths, DiSC, and the TKI conflict modes assessment. Matt was a Positive Developmental Psychology and Organisational Behaviour doctoral student of Dr Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University focusing on cultivating flow in the workplace. He was awarded the inaugural Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Dissertation Award.
Ben Davies is a Chartered Psychologist and researcher, who has worked for Professor Steve Peter’s Chimp Management organisation for over 8 years. Ben has supported various top golfers, premier league football teams, elite international equestrian organisations and GB Taekwondo in their preparation for the 2021 Olympic/Paralympic Games. He also worked alongside the British Army providing mental resilience training to soldiers and trainers. He helps his clients understand the way in which their mind works, and how to develop tools to optimise the use of their mind.
Your host, Dr Natalie Lancer, is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist, and British Psychological Society (BPS) Registered Supervisor. She is the Chair of the BPS’s Division of Coaching Psychology and an accredited member of the Association for Coaching. She is the host of this podcas