Imaginal Coaching Certificate

Imaginal Coaching as an approach applies readily and seamlessly to coaching contexts including performance coaching, health coaching, life coaching, and team/leadership coaching.

Complete in 6–12 Months

A Transformative Approach to Coaching the Whole Person

About the Imaginal Coaching Certificate

The Imaginal Coaching Certificate is a program offered through Meridian University's Center for Transformative Learning. Designed for professionals seeking to develop a deep, integrated approach to coaching, the certificate draws on Meridian's graduate curriculum to provide a comprehensive foundation in Imaginal Coaching.

As a certificate participant, you will take courses from the anchor and other parts of Meridian's graduate curriculum offered during the period of your enrollment. This means you will engage with the same rigorous, faculty-led coursework that graduate students experience, tailored to the certificate's focus on Imaginal Coaching principles and practices.

What is Imaginal Coaching?

Coaching may be understood as a postmodern expression of transformative learning. Drawing on neuroscience, mindfulness, embodiment, and the creative arts, Imaginal Coaching is sourced in over 30 years of innovation in the theory and practice of transformative learning at Meridian University. Imaginal Coaching integrates somatic, dialogic, depth, and transpersonal dimensions of human experience. An imaginal approach to coaching activates the transformative potentials of conversation sourced in the imagination while engaging the whole person, via practices of expressive embodiment and creative action.

Imaginal coaching is a distinct approach that engages the imagination as a primary instrument for catalyzing transformative change. This recognizes that sustainable growth and change occur through the cultivation of imaginal capacities allowing for new possibilities to emerge from the liminal spaces between current reality and future potential. This approach enables coaching to engage the whole person while being finely attuned to the cultural context of the person's life-world. In Imaginal Coaching, conversational dialogue empowers well-being and creative action, serving personal and professional development.

The Context of Contemporary Coaching

Over the last 50 years, coaching as a practice for enhancing skills and capacities has grown in accelerating ways. This steep global rise of coaching can be understood as a response to the cultural crises and complexity challenges that permeate workplace teams, communities, and societies. Coaching practitioners serve in many professional domains including health, management, academics, sports, and overall personal and professional well-being. Coaching is now the globally dominant practitioner frame that is focused on enhancing individual and collective development.

A multitude of approaches to coaching have made for an eclectic marketplace lacking in sufficient structures of quality assurance. Most approaches come with their own specific concepts, principles, and practices that are aligned with very distinct outcomes. However, a versatile yet coherent approach to coaching optimally draws on many approaches, enabling integrated perspectives and practices instead of merely and sporadically choosing from an eclectic assortment.

Thematic Areas of Study

The following themes represent the key areas explored across the Imaginal Coaching curriculum. The specific courses you take will be drawn from Meridian's graduate offerings during your period of enrollment.

Module One

A Five-Layer Model: The Imaginal Core of Experience

Coaching as Transformative Learning
Contexts of Coaching: Performance; Health; Life; Team-Leadership

Module Two

The Body's Imaginal Knowing: Exploring the Neuroscience of Coaching

Neuroplasticity and Brain Development
The Gating of Experience: The Brian's Default Mode Network
Navigating Connection: The Foundations of Safety
Turbulence and Flow: The Vicissitudes of Motivation and Emotion
Designed to Learn: The Brain's Cognitive Powers
The Brain's Negative Emotional Bias

Module Three

Consciousness Alive: Engaging the Images of Perception

Mindfulness and Contemplation
Imagination and Activation of Trance States
Psychoactive substances and altered states of consciousness

Module Four

Poetics of the Embodied Mind

The Triumph of Sophistry: When Mind Turns Towards Self Deception
Models of Structural Development
Curiosity Drives Development
Knowing, Thinking, and Enaction

Module Five

Exploring Mysteries of Personality

Empathy and Resonance: It Takes Others to Become a Person
Modeling Personality Patterns: The Enneagram and MBTI
The Other Within: Engaging in Parts-Work like IFS plus Other Approaches to Multiplicity

Module Six

Identity as Barrier and Catalyst

Shadows of Identity: Conflict and Scapegoating
Freedom of Identity and Freedom from Identity
Recognition: From Subject to Object
Beyond Resilience, to Anti-Fragile

Module Seven

Imagining Worlds: The Cultural Context of Coaching

Compassionate Accountability
Dialogic Communication
Attunement and Relationality
The Catastrophic Risks of Chronic Liminality
Social Imaginary and the Transindividual
Culture as Developmental Space

Certificate Details

16 credits of graduate-level coursework (4 courses at 4 credits each).
Complete in 6 to 12 months — take 8 credits per quarter (6 months) or 4 credits per quarter (12 months).
Courses are drawn from Meridian's graduate curriculum offered during the period of enrollment.
Content and collaboration via Meridian's social learning platform.

Tuition

$476 per credit

Total certificate cost: $7,616 (16 credits)

Credits earned through the certificate may be applied toward a Meridian University graduate degree program, as applicable.

Accreditation

The Imaginal Coaching Certificate is part of Meridian University's California state approval and WSCUC (WASC) accreditation. WSCUC is a higher education accreditor recognized by the United States Department of Education. WSCUC is also the accreditor for Stanford University, UCLA, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Imaginal Coaching Certificate is a 16-credit program offered by Meridian University that provides a comprehensive foundation in Imaginal Coaching. The certificate draws on courses from Meridian's graduate curriculum, offering rigorous, faculty-led coursework aligned with the certificate's focus area.

The certificate can be completed in as few as 6 months (taking 8 credits per quarter) or up to 12 months (taking 4 credits per quarter). Each course is 4 credits, and the program requires a total of 16 credits.

Tuition for the Imaginal Coaching Certificate is $476 per credit. The total cost for the 16-credit certificate is $7,616.

Yes. Credits earned in the Imaginal Coaching Certificate may be applied toward a Meridian University graduate degree program, as applicable. This allows you to build on your certificate work if you choose to pursue further graduate study at Meridian.

Yes. The Imaginal Coaching Certificate is part of Meridian University's California state approval and WSCUC (WASC) accreditation. WSCUC is a higher education accreditor recognized by the United States Department of Education, and is also the accreditor for Stanford University, UCLA, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Certificate participants take courses from Meridian's graduate curriculum that are offered during the period of their enrollment. The specific courses available each quarter are drawn from the anchor and other parts of the graduate curriculum, providing a rich and varied learning experience grounded in the certificate's focus area.

You will need an email account, a high-speed internet connection, and access to a computer, iOS or Android device.

For live video sessions, you will need a webcam and microphone for your device. Course video calls are conducted with participants video-enabled.

The certificate requires four courses. At Meridian, each course is 4 credits, so the 16-credit certificate is completed by taking four courses. You can take up to two courses per quarter (8 credits) to finish in 6 months, or one course per quarter (4 credits) to finish in 12 months.

The program support team will be available to assist from start to finish. Please send your questions, requests, or issues to admissions@meridianuniversity.edu

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