Meaning, Purpose, and Imagination: An Introduction to Imaginal Coaching

January 13th - February 10th

Course FacultyAftab Omer, Melissa Schwartz, and Meggan Hartman

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 plethora 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.

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 course explores how coaches can develop imaginal perception to discern the archetypal patterns, metaphoric structures, and nascent possibilities alive within client systems. By following the movement of images, both literal and metaphorical as they arise in coaching conversations, these are understood not as mere symbols to be interpreted but as living presences that mediate between conscious intention and previously unaware wisdom.