CoachFest - Coaching for Wellbeing

Join us on Friday 20 October to discover the latest insights from leading experts and join the discussion on coaching for wellbeing. This is a great opportunity to meet fellow members of the coaching community and to grow your network.

Our events throughout the day will prompt you to reflect on your role as a coach in relation to wellbeing for yourself and your clients. The day has been designed to help you immerse yourself in cutting-edge coaching thinking, research and practice.

Agenda:

09:00 - Registration

09:30 - The Annual Henley Centre for Coaching Awards Presentation

09:40 - The High-Performance Power of the Adaptive Mindset with Stef Reid and Martin Andreasen

10:45 - Coffee break

11:15 - Winning Under Pressure: A Neuroscientific Toolkit for Performance with Shayamal Vallabhjee - part 1

13:00 - Lunch break, Networking & Exhibition. Optional Worry Forum Session with Karen Foy and Verity Hannell

14:30 - Setting intentions after lunch break meditation - Lucy Stone

14:45 - Winning Under Pressure: A Neuroscientific Toolkit for Performance with Shayamal Vallabhjee - part 2

15:45 - Can Coaching Be Therapeutic Without Being Therapy? with Karen Foy and Verity Hannell

16:45 - Close

This session will explore the world of High Performance. What does it look like? How do I know if I’m achieving it? And once I’m there, how do I maintain it? Will I have to choose between my performance and my well-being?

The reality is that even the best athletes in the world don’t perform at their best ALL the time. External markers of success can point towards high performance, but what do we do when we're not getting the result we want? Is it game over? Or are there strategies and tools we can use to adapt and recalibrate and keep moving closer to our goal? You won't win every time. But you can always be a high performer.

The aim for this session is to leave the audience with:

• a working definition of high performance
• insight into a personal journey of resilience and achieving high performance in a different way after a life changing injury
• a framework for the day to day experience of high performance – The Rule of Thirds
• some new tools to add to their High Performance tool kit

This session will break down the neuroscience of performance and explain our body’s relationship to stress and the subsequent hormonal fluctuations. It will cover simple techniques and practices that you can use to circumnavigate stress. We will look at the relationship between the inner game (mind) and the outer game (environment), the neuroscience of habit cultivation, training the brain for flow, and more.

A guided mindfulness practice to help everyone fully arrive and tune back into the intentions for the day.

Coaching and therapy are different ‘helping by talking’ disciples, with different purposes, principles and assumptions. However, in practice it can be challenging for coaches to make ‘in the moment decisions’ about where coaching ends and therapy begins, especially if the coachee is finding coaching therapeutic and cathartic. In these moments, what is coaching hindering by avoiding or engaging with conversations that feel therapeutic? Do coaches feel comfortable (and appropriately resourced) to sit alongside coachee discomfort and distress? Who are coaches really protecting when they engage in boundary conversations and referrals?

Join Karen Foy and Verity Hannell in this interactive discussion exploring whether coaching can be therapeutic without breaking any professional boundaries. This session aims to spark curiosity and inspire you to think about your own individual coaching practice by questioning some of the common practical challenges coaches face when coaching conversations become therapeutic. By exploring professional body competences, drawing on emerging research and crucial coaching experiences, Karen and Verity hope to positively challenge some coaching misconceptions and assumptions. Participants will develop their own unique coaching maturity around boundary conversations, which will be coachee-centric and enabling.

In her late thirties, after having her dream career in broadcasting and entertainment PR, a beautiful son, husband and home, something wasn’t right; Lucy had lost any sense of who she was. So she burnt out, resigned from her corporate career and travelled to India to fully immerse herself in meditation, something she had practised on and off for twenty years.
That was six years ago. Since then, Lucy has taught meditation to over 15,000 children and at many top organisations across Europe, including sessions for the UK Parliament. Lucy is equally at home in the boardroom and the classroom and is fast becoming a leading voice in mindfulness meditation. She is a successful wellbeing.

Shayamal is a bestselling author, sports scientist, psychologist and a high-performance coach to elite athletes, sports teams and C-suite executives. With over two decades of experience, he has helped hundreds of athletes around the world enhance their competitive edge, including Olympians, World Cup cricket teams and top-seeded athletes in tennis, track and field.

He has helped many organisations develop a culture of innovation and adaptability to keep their businesses agile in a competitive environment. Shayamal concentrates on maximising focus, team building, creating a culture of excellence and managing pressure. His approach to optimising human performance blends evidence-based science with modern psychology and spirituality.

After almost four years living as a monk, who owned nothing, at a Hare Krishna Temple in Durban, South Africa, Shayamal moved to India and built a multimillion-dollar company. He is the author of four books on sports science and motivation, including Breathe Believe Balance.

He has hosted shows on ESPN, Star Sports and TEDxGateway Live, has been featured in National Geographic documentaries, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated. He is a sought-after speaker who has delivered over 1,000 keynote speeches at various international conferences and other prestigious platforms.

Shayamal is also a course faculty member at the Stanford Business School LEAD Program on the Neuroscience of Exemplary Leadership and Managing Effective Teams. He is currently pioneering psychological research with elite sports teams and athletes on the relationship between personality and stress. His research focuses on the common personality markers found in high achievers and interventions that develop those markers over time.

Karen Foy is a Lecturer in Coaching and Behavioural Change at Henley Business School.

She has 15 years' experience as a coach and holds an MSc in Coaching Psychology from the University of East London and a degree in Psychology from the University of Sheffield. Karen is a Master Certified Coach (MCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and is a certified coach mentor. As a past UK ICF Board Director, she led the professional development for UK coaches and supported the local coaching groups around the country. She has worked with aspiring coaches from global organisations to support their development and learning towards becoming accredited coaches, providing training, mentoring and supervision.

As an Executive Coach Karen provides coaching to support executive board teams and individuals of complex organisations to navigate their way through a constantly changing environment. Her facilitative style steers her clients towards a more systemic view of the business to create and deliver a more strategic vision.

Karen has significant experience in the NHS, providing board level and leadership coaching to managers and clinicians. She has designed and delivered bespoke change programmes to improve performance and uses a range of diagnostic tools to help individuals, teams and organisations to develop. She weaves creativity into her knowledge of psychology and change management to deliver innovative solutions for individual and organisational issues.

Verity Hannell is an award winning mental health coach and psychology doctoral researcher, with over 10 years of coaching and consultancy experience.

Her research into mental health within coaching practice has gained global recognition and has led to presenting her research findings at international coaching events and facilitating workshops and discussions about mental health.

She has worked with organisations, coaching companies and professional bodies to raise awareness of mental health, providing training so coaches and employees can engage confidently and ethically. Verity is also an advocate for mental health inclusivity within coaching and the workplace, and is a module convenor for Stage 2 of Henley’s MSc in Coaching for Behavioural Change.

In 2022, she was named British HR Coach of the Year for her pioneering research. Verity is particularly interested in ethical dilemmas within coaching and exploring the boundaries between therapy and coaching.

Stef Reid has spent her life breaking boundaries and pursuing high performance. She is a world champion (2017), a 4 time Paralympian, a triple Paralympic medallist (2008, 2012, 2016) and a five-time world record holder. She has an honours degree in biochemistry, and away from the track Stef works as a keynote speaker, broadcaster, executive coach, actor, and fashion model. Stef was the first amputee to walk the London Fashion Week catwalk! She competed in the Tokyo 2021 Paralympics and took part in the British reality show Dancing on Ice 2022, making it to the quarter finals and showing the world you can learn to skate with an artificial foot!

Stef was born in New Zealand to a Scottish father and English mother, grew up in Toronto, and moved to Dallas, Texas with her Canadian husband all before settling back in the UK in 2010. Stef’s talent and passion for sport were spotted early, and at 12 she was already dreaming of playing rugby on the world stage. But at 15, Stef was involved in a boating accident and suffered severe propeller lacerations. Her life was saved but her right foot was damaged beyond repair and amputated.

Stef’s focus shifted from her sports to her studies, and she graduated as valedictorian earning a full academic scholarship to Queen’s University in Canada to study biochemistry. While at Queen’s, Stef joined the university athletics team just to see how fast she could still run. Upon graduation, Stef put her plans of medical school on hold and decided to give her childhood dream of being a professional athlete one last chance! After a glittering 18 year Paralympic career, Stef announced her retirement from elite sport in June 2022. She is now on a mission to inspire others to find their version of High Performance.

Martin is an executive coach and current student at the Henley Business School for the MSc in Coaching for Behaviour Change. He co-founded KEY33 in 2022, a purpose-led coaching and leadership practice with the mission to make success contagious. His passion lies in positive psychology, strengths based coaching and creating high performance teams.

Martin is originally from Denmark where he obtained an MSc in international Business whilst playing and coaching basketball on elite levels. He then pursued an international career in management, living in Germany and Switzerland before moving to the UK in 2013.

Martin lives in Maidenhead with his partner and two teenage kids.