Ep. 6 - Climate Change Coaching (w/ Charly Cox)

Transcript

Charly Cox: My start point is less agitating for change and more empowering people to believe that they can be actors in their own lives.

And I think that's probably why The Climate Change Coaches is the way it is. We fundamentally believe that everyone has a stake in climate change, that everyone can make, can affect change around it.

Jeremy Blanchard: Welcome to the Wider Roots podcast, a show about how we can use the power of coaching and personal transformation to create the world we most want to live in.

I'm your host, Jeremy Blanchard. I'm a coach for social movement leaders.

And today's episode is with Charly Cox, author of the book, Climate Change Coaching.

In this conversation, I really loved Charly's approach to holding a systemic view. And not only believing in our client's ability to change, but also believing in the system's ability to change. And helping our clients see it from that perspective.

You'll get to hear her story about how she realized that we don't have to be quote unquote neutral as coaches and how we can really bring our own values forward.

A little background on Charlie Cox and her work. She founded an organization called The Climate Change Coaches, which focuses on empowering climate leaders with coaching skills.

Their climate coaching approach helps leaders and individuals find their unique role to play in addressing the climate crisis and feel motivated to take action and enact behavior change at the personal level, the organizational level and the systemic level.

If you're not already following the podcast on Instagram, you can find us there at wider roots pod. It's a great place to see some of the highlight clips from each episode, as well as quotes and other things that don't fit into an episode.

All right. Let's dive in.

[00:01:39] Charly Cox's Journey to Climate Change Coaching

Jeremy Blanchard: Hi Charly. Thanks so much for being here.

Charly Cox: It is lovely to

join you today.

Jeremy Blanchard: I first heard your name through our mutual friend Jess Serrante, who is a climate coach and who was our guest on episode one to help me get the whole foundation of this podcast set up. And, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about obviously climate change coaching and the book climate change coaching and the work you're doing there.

Particularly because there's this sweet, generative nature of getting so specific at an intersection like this that I really admire. And the way that you've brought coaching and climate change together. And,

So I just appreciate what you've explored here. I want to like have the chance to share that wisdom with our listeners.

Charly Cox: Thank you. Thanks. It's a real pleasure. And Jess obviously is in the book as well, so, it's, there's a lovely kind of, loop closing here

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I love that you have all these case studies and examples and stories from people out in the field doing climate coaching of different sorts or facilitation or other forms of inner and outer work like that. So, it really adds like this whole richness to, the content of the book. To start out, I'm curious who is someone who inspires you to do the work that you do for transformation? I'd love to like invite that energy or that person into the spacel

Charly Cox: I think this might sound like a hacked answer, but it's probably my children.

If I'm really honest, it probably is my children that keep me doing this in the sense that they are in my life every day. They are in the future in as adults in a very powerful way. And they're the reason that I, feel like I woke up to climate change in the first place.

So I would probably say it's them more than anybody else.

Jeremy Blanchard: Well, it makes so much sense. This is such an intergenerational challenge topic that we're facing that makes a lot of sense to me

I'm curious to hear, was there a moment when you realized that climate coaching was a part of your calling? Was there like a turning point for you in that journey?

Charly Cox: There was a moment that I realized climate change was a part of my calling or what I needed to focus on. Because when I started, climate change coaching wasn't really a thing.

And when we started and launched our website, which was the climatechangecoaches.com which is very unimaginative, we were just flooded with coaches who said things like, this time last year, I Googled it, there was nothing. And then I Googled it and I found you.

So in a way, when I decided that I wanted to do something about climate change, I assumed immediately I would have to stop being a coach because it didn't seem to exist.

And I was lucky that I knew people, some of whom are in our team who were coaching people in sustainability. And that was allowed, you know, if you ask people in coaching, you know, is that allowed? They say that's allowed, yes. Because they're coaching sustainability leaders as leadership coaching.

I said but I'm not allowed to have the same kinds of conversations with people who aren't in sustainability or, the environment movement. No, that's having an agenda. You're not allowed to do that.

So this huge chasm we had to cross in helping people understand that, that these two things lived together. And I'd say for me personally, it took me a good two years to feel. The courage to change my website. So it said climate change coach and, work out exactly what that was. I mean, I, from 2016, 2018, I just fumbled around having lots of conversations, trying to piece different things together, drawing lots of maps of systems, trying to work out where everything fitted, and still thinking I'm probably gonna have to quit and become a solar panel engineer or a climate scientist or something that wasn't me at all because I couldn't see my place in it.

And it really makes me realize that it's not that long ago that, that that was very normal. And now we have things in to step outta the coaching industry. We have, programs like Terra.Do that are aiming to move a million people into climate jobs in Europe.

So in a way, my starting point was reading the Uninhabitable Earth and sitting on a beach in Dorsett in the UK, which is a sort of coastal county, and feeling homeless and feeling huge despair, feeling like I wanted to run and realizing I couldn't, there was nowhere to run to, and said that was my starting point.

And then I don't like those feelings, so I have to do something. I have to roll up my

sleeves and do something. So yeah, and then it took me two years to work out how to marry that to coaching.

[00:06:20] Bridging Climate and Coaching

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, it makes me curious, at some point in that exploration around coaching, which you were already in, and then climate, which you were, waking up to in a really big way, in like a full, wow, I need to do something about this kind of way. Was there a moment where you started to see a possibility for how these two came together?

What did you see was possible to bring coaching and climate together?

Charly Cox: I think there were multiple little moments. There were lots of little eureka moments. I started out by. Learning

I began to listen and I had conversations with people and I would always say, tell me the problem you need fixing. And most of them, they would give me problems I couldn't in a million years fix. But occasionally they'd give me something that sounded a bit like what I did. And then I would also listen to lots of podcasts and interviews.

And I remember there was this moment where I stopped listening, like a person and started listening like a coach. And I suddenly heard. Powerlessness and disempowerment writ large. But I also heard threat response when I listened to politicians and I thought, oh, I've been listening to these all wrong.

I've been listening like a, punter. I should be listening like a coach. And actually there's a huge emotional component. So that was one of those kind of moments.

But I think the, the fundamental one for us was that, I was invited to give a speech at London's first zero waste Christmas market, which was this cold Saturday in a railway arch with lots of people selling zero waste products, ready for Christmas.

And I said, I have no idea what I would give a speech on, you know, back then in 2018. You know, what am I gonna say? I've only just started this thing. I don't even know what it is. But I said, I've got this idea. I think we could bring coaches to your market and I think we could coach members of the public for free.

I wanna prove that you can coach this topic, that part of the problem here is disempowerment. And I want to see what happens if you offer people a conversation in which they can move from disempowered to empowered. Not information about climate change, but just this shift. I want to know if it's possible, 'cause people tell me it isn't.

And she had fortunately just trained as a coach by some fluke and she said, do it. That sounds great. So I rang a bunch of people, and I said, can you come to London on your own dime on a cold Saturday, right before Christmas?

And they all said yes. Some of them canceled paid jobs to come. They all came down and we stood in the freezing cold and it was really hard getting shopper's attention and nobody liked having to kinda grab people. And, but then I saw, when I looked across the room, I saw people hugging, the coaches I saw real relief on people's faces.

' I, coached a group of three young women who, it was quite a lot to handle. They, all of them had huge amounts of doubt and despair and scarcity going on, and, and I just sort of got them to kind of almost coach each other in the conversation and watch that change happen.

And it was just, it was just magic. So even though we said we are never doing a market on a Saturday again, it was freezing and it was really hard. We said, we're never doing that again. But we've proved the concept. You can coach this topic with people who are not involved in this topic.

We just have to work out how to find the, the people that really need it the most and give it to them.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.

Something that's occurring to me as you're saying that is I come from social movement spaces, right? I was politicized in college, got involved in the climate movement and

Our theory of change was. social movements are the means for change that we're kind of, most have a proven history, a proven track record of creating massive social change.

And in my theory of change, there's a lot of space for someone getting politicized and like joining together with community to take collective action. But the on-ramp to that. Is some kind of political moment where someone helps you see that community organizing and collective action is a thing.

What I appreciate about what you're saying is I imagine you're taking people who have a care in their heart around climate change, who are obviously willing to have this conversation and you're inviting them into a conversation where you help them, increase their sense of agency. And as you said, empowerment. It just feels like a different on ramp into how someone is now, engaged in work and the particular work that they might do after that could obviously look very different, but that, That's such an important pivot point.

So, so cool.

Charly Cox: That's really interesting. I think our starting point was, there was actually research that said, you know, the majority of the British public are concerned.

And so, we grabbed that. We're like, okay, so it's not the case that people don't care. 'cause people had loads of advice for us, some of which was unh unhelpful.

You know? And then there were, there were other pieces of advice, like, you know, people don't care. People don't really wanna change, you know, I don't wanna change. Nobody wants to change. Forget, don't talk to individuals. It's not about individuals, it's about systems and governments and corporations.

I still agree with that, but I see individuals as one corner of that triangle, which is, you know, the way that Kimberly Nicholas sees it, who wrote the foreward for our book, she's a climate scientist, and she says, you know, there are these three, and we see individuals as the. trend setters, you know, no one individual won't change everything, but individuals grouping together as to your point of people, people coming together in communities have enormous power.

They just don't realize they do. So I sort of don't, I don't buy that individuals don't do it either.

My start point is less agitating for change and more empowering people to believe that they can be actors in their own lives.

And I think that's probably why The Climate Change Coaches is the way it is. We fundamentally believe that everyone has a stake in climate change, an obvious point, but that everyone can make, can affect change around it.

I really get upset when I see people making decisions from a place of fear.

I want people to make decisions from a place of values, groundedness, logic, whatever you want to call it, but not these threatened, frightened, disempowered places where we don't make good decisions. And so that's probably our start point. It's about connecting well to each other, finding love, finding safety, and changing from that place.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Beautiful.

So much I resonate in what you're sharing. Just to share a few anecdotes on that. One is I can so relate to the people who came to you and said, we're Googling climate coaching or climate change coaching and we're not finding anything. That has been my journey over the last like 10, 11, 12 years of Googling social justice coaching, social change coaching, social movement coaching, and really finding almost nothing for a very, very long time.

Jeremy Blanchard: And then eventually starting, a very brief project called Coaching for Social Change that was bringing coaching skills to social movement leaders here in the US and I still Google it frequently and the number of results we're seeing is going up and up. There's a few coaching schools that have a social justice focus or, especially in the us and there's way, way, way more coaches out there.

I found like hundreds of coaches who mentioned social change, social justice, systems of oppression, collective liberation, those kinds of things on their websites. And I'm like, I was so heartened the day I started realizing just how many there were, how many individual coaches who already had this focus.

Charly Cox: That's amazing.

[00:13:48] The Unique Approach of Climate Change Coaching

Charly Cox: What does climate change coaching have its sight set on? Like what is it paying attention to that might be different than other kinds of coaching or mainstream coaching? I think the difference between climate change coaching and. more traditional types of coaching is that we have to see and believe in the system as well as the individual.

I've trained as a systems coach and it's phenomenal training.

It's really powerful and I was still able to be outside of the system I was coaching. So a good for instance is I still coach a husband and wife team who are run a business together and I coach them on their business and I'm coaching them as a system, but I'm not in their business or their marriage for that matter.

So I can be un-triggered, unattached to whatever is going on, and I can just stand as this beautiful, impartial advisor and help them. when we are coaching people and they bring climate. We may start to feel like we've got a stake there or we've got a similar topic running, you know, in our own heads.

So in, in traditional coaching, you might say to me, I really want this podcast to be a success and let's say I have a podcast and I think, yeah. And that's really important when it's not about podcasts, but it's, I'm worried my kids aren't gonna want to have kids and I won't get grandchildren.

And you think, yeah, I've got that one. And then they say, and that makes me feel really bereft. I feel, empty. And you think, yeah, I feel that way too. And then you have to get to that lived experience. So their relationship with those feelings is different to my relationship, to those feelings. So that's the sort of practical way we have to be able to unattach ourselves from this.

But we also have to, in a really bloody minded way, believe in change and, and that's daft to say because change is happening all the time, whether we like it or not. But we have to believe in the system's ability to change positively. And we have to believe in the person in front of us ability to change.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I'm curious about the belief part you mentioned there, right? Like, oh, one of the biggest things we're doing, because this is such a big topic, it is so easy to get resigned to feel at a distance from it. I know for me, when I, realized that part of my life was about. Working on climate

I was in college and I was studying something else, and I took a class and every week of the class was a different inequality. So it's like racism, sexism, economic inequality. And we ended on environmental inequality and we only spent a week on climate. part of what was so compelling to me about why it needed to be addressed and why I needed to devote myself to it was because it was such a complex problem.

And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so hard to understand and to see causes and then we have 20 links in the chain, or a hundred links in the chain between that and effects, and our brains are not good at that. And so, because of that complexity, I was like. Anyone who feels any inroad into caring about this needs to be working on it because it's gonna be so hard to get enough of us working on it.

And, you know, this was before the effects of climate change were as in our face as they are right now.

I guess where I want to go with that is I'm curious about this belief piece because what you're doing is helping people increase their sense of belief and autonomy, the sense that they can have some kind of an impact on such a large scale complex issue.

Jeremy Blanchard: What do you do when people don't believe? What do you do when belief wanes?

Like That's, gonna come and go. And for me,

sometimes I think about how belief is really good, but also not that stable. It's not the most reliable resource that we have in our work for change. And I've needed to explore that in myself of like, well, what are the other things I can draw on that are actually kind of more reliable?

So I'm curious how, how do you think about that when belief. It isn't there. Or when it wanes.

Charly Cox: I like that belief is unstable. It's almost like sort of a nuclear isotope or something that we're holding. You can swap out belief. For me there's like disempowerment empowerment, disbelief, belief, indifference, motivation, dissonance, resonance, which for the coaches listening, they'll, you know that, that it is all the same fear and love.

It's all the same sort of feeling with different words around it. And all coaching is ever done is moved people, I mean, this is very reductive from one to the other.

So I suppose, in terms of what do you do when people don't believe? It depends. 'cause you name different states there. So if someone's just, not believing in their own agency, like, oh, I'm not the kind of person who, then there's an obvious piece of building up their belief with some championing, with some, helping them work out, what the initial steps might be.

If someone is, outright resistant, then it's almost certainly about finding out what the values are that are holding them in that resistance. What do they feel is about to be threatened? Soon as they're aware of what the value is, they return to feeling good and right. Resistant. People feel bad and wrong, they feel outcast.

And then what they do is they may get other people around them. So they've got a group of people who are resist and then they don't feel that way anymore. So actually helping those people work out like what is this core value that's sitting underneath and how can we release it, work out whether it really is a threat, and if it is, then what can we do to make sure it isn't in this change?

Because if you ask someone for what they want to do when they're sort of demotivated, feeling stuck, feeling unsure, feeling frightened, they will just give you low grade poor-quality risk averse-ideas. And so you might get them into action, but it'll be pretty rubbish action.

Charly Cox: And as coaches, we know that when we build that resonance with people, we just tap them and they say, I'm gonna do all this stuff, you know, because they're feeling capable again.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I mean, that's so true, right? The one thing that I consistently have my sight set on, especially in leadership coaching, is this person is going to keep growing as a leader, growing as a leader, growing as a leader. It's like the transformational agenda as some schools put it, right?

I have my transformational glasses on of who this person is becoming .

What this person is getting out of coaching is not solving the problem that they brought to the session. I'm pretty uninvested in whether they solve the current problem I'm invested in, who are you becoming as a leader? So that 12 months from now, this problem doesn't even phase you so much anymore. This type of problem doesn't phase you.

Charly Cox: Mm-Hmm.

[00:20:26] "Having an agenda" vs living your values as a coach

Jeremy Blanchard: I wanna go back to something you brought up earlier when you said that people discouraged you from climate coaching because, oh, you're having an agenda. Sure, you can do sustainability because it's just leadership coaching, but, you can't do climate because that's a political issue, presumably.

And this is, we can't, we can't touch that. That's having an agenda. I was just talking about this in the episode that, just released episode three with Dara Silverman.

We were talking about this tension between can we have an agenda for clients and what does that mean? You've talked about it a lot already in this conversation, how you've helped people move along the spectrum of action, from resistant to, you know, willing to consider it.

I'm curious. You write in the book about the difference between having an agenda and having values, and so I'm curious to hear more. How do you think about that distinction?

Charly Cox: One of the things I found myself writing in the book was, what climate change coaching can help with and what it can't. And one of the things in the can't column was making people care about something they don't care about. And then we wrote, but we're not sure there's any modality that can do that.

Because I think often when I get asked that question, it's actually what people are actually asking is, how do we make people care? You know, how do we make people care about this? Well, you don't. But actually I think the good news is most people do care. They just feel really disempowered or a bit indifferent.

They've got other stuff going on. Maybe they care more about, the state of social care. Well, there is a direct link. All of these things sit under the umbrella of climate ultimately because they're all happening on the planet we live in.

So, we can always make links with people. So there's kind of a spectrum, I guess. There's people who are kind of like, I'm interested, I'm probably gonna start a conversation with you 'cause I'm interested, but I'm not doing anything. And we have to hold those very delicately and that's where we have to ask lots of questions and try and find out what people do care about and maybe try and show them those links.

And then, you know, there's people who are wanting to get on the pitch but don't really know how and where. And that's when we might start using a bit bit more of a coaching approach and like really sort of like, okay, so what could you do? And let's look at the different things you've tried.

So the point is that you're not really holding an agenda. If you're not wielding it, it's okay to just ask questions about what do you think, what's happening?

But as professional coaches, I think there's a bit of a, is it paradox that basically we tell our clients they should have a purpose. Purpose is very important. You should have a purpose and you should live by your values. But somehow, as coaches, we're supposed to be these kind of neutral entities that don't have either of those things. And I actually don't think that's true. I mean, it's obviously not true, but I don't think that's true for why clients buy us because whether we try to squash that or not, it does come out on our websites.

It does come out in our sample sessions with people. And that's partly why they like us. They say, this is someone with integrity, or this is someone who, cares about honesty. You know, so people can see our values in everything we are doing. And trying to pretend we don't have them is just impossible.

So I really make a stand for coaches living by their sense of purpose and if their purpose tells them that they want to be stewards to the planet, then why can't they bring that into coaching somehow?

And then the question then is how you bring it into coaching. And there's lots of different ways, and sometimes you don't, sometimes it's just not appropriate, it doesn't come up them.

Jeremy Blanchard: So I'm hearing a couple things in there. One, which I talked about with Dara as well, is who are our clients?

Right. So the most base permission that a coach can give themselves is, I'm putting this on my website, that these are my values, right? That I don't have to subscribe to. What I think is a very dominant culture paradigm of, okay, you're a professional.

You're like, not just coaching, but professionals in general. Professionalism in white supremacy culture we keep politics out of this and dah, dah, dah. dah, dah.

So that's a very base permission that a coach can give themselves is cool, I'm gonna, I'm gonna name my values, I'm gonna name what I care about. And that allows you to, invite in clients who might be aligned with you. And then there's automatically more space to have certain kinds of conversations, right? People know you're a climate change coach, they're coming to you, they're already interested in that pretty explicitly, right?

But then I'm hearing this other level where there's a way that you can also bring it in that is, just reminding people that they exist inside these systems, right?

We haven't considered this, right? Most coaching might stop at the individual level of, cool, you've got a plan for you that considers you and maybe your project. And what I hear the invitation from you is, you can say, have we thought about your connection to the environment, your connection to climate and our collective wellbeing. Is there some way that you want to consider that as a gentle invitation, just so it doesn't get missed?

Charly Cox: There's a really obvious one, which is I remember working with someone on their five year plan and I said like, should we think about what's gonna be happening economically, politically, and environmentally in the next five years? Yeah, we should, but then actually with that exact same person who isn't climate related, they predate my interest in climate. We've been working together for about nine years. I've never explicitly mentioned climate to them except for that moment. But the funny thing is that since I've become a climate change coach, that person has started to adopt more sustainability measures at work and will come back and report to me.

And I think it's just the proximity to someone else who has badged up. So, even though I've never said, you know, you really should be doing something about club, I've never done that, actually, just my kind of subtle influence or my soft influence on her, because I do it and she likes me and therefore she wants to do it too.

There's so many different ways of influencing people, and I've met so many, environmentalists who've said to me, I've done all these things in my life, and I never talked about them because I didn't wanna shame other people. So I, I stopped flying 10 years ago, or one person said I only had one child because of climate.

I never told anyone. And that was a massive mistake. So, even if coaches don't want to bring it into their coaching practices, just living their values in the world and telling people why is really powerful as an a in a movement of change.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. One of the things that makes me think about is what are we actually talking about when we say having an agenda for a client?

And there is, I'm getting so much out of your distinction between having an agenda and what that actually means and having values that you can invite in.

Having an agenda, in my understanding of it is, alright, you're bringing up your romantic relationship and I have an evaluation, an assessment of that, that you really need to leave this relationship. This is really not good for you. And then all of my coaching is shaped around my belief that this, we really gotta get you out of this, right? Because now it stopped being a partnership and it really did become my agenda.

It's so valuable to have different language for it, of saying, I do as a coach have values and you can count on me to bring them into our session, and I'm gonna bring them in in a way that is still in partnership, because that's what we're doing, is we are partnering together around this.

That's just so valuable. So thank you for that distinction. I find that very helpful.

Yeah.

Charly Cox: Yeah, I would definitely say that. So there's this piece of agenda which is, I know best for this client as you articulated. There's a smaller agenda, which is in this tiny bit of this topic, I've got an idea and you should totally do it 'cause my idea is brilliant. And then there's like a bigger agenda, which in a way we were encouraged to have as coaches, which is who you could become.

And that is, it should be co-designed. You know, if you said to me. I want to be one of, America's top five podcasters, then I should want that for you as much as you want it for you, because I'm your coach and I wanna partner with you in that and get you that

If that's what I want for you, but you don't, don't care about that at all. That's not why you're doing this, then that's problematic. So there's this kind of big piece agenda as well. But I think that gets collapsed with us having our own purpose and we are absolutely allowed to have, why are we not allowed to have a purpose as coaches as a little foot stamping on the ground there?

Like, I want a purpose too, you know?

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I love this conversation. So helpful. I wish I got to listen to our conversation when I was, brand new to coaching. I'm sure you do too. you know, these are like the messages that our former selves,

wish we had and that we've earned, through hard work.

So I really appreciate that.

I am curious to hear a little bit about your own coaching growth areas or the areas where you're experimenting. Is there anywhere at this level of coaching where you're trying something out or a question in your coaching approach that you're moving with or curious about that?

Charly Cox: I think that the bigger thing I've brought in is probably Buddhism actually.

And that's influenced by my husband, who used to be a Buddhist monk, for about seven years in Thailand. And, and also influenced by, people like Joanna Macy, people like Margaret Wheatley, who you've got coming on. And their approach.

And, and I think, again, in traditional coaching, I didn't really see the need for this stuff, you know, I could sort of see the need, but, well, it's mindfulness, isn't it? It's helping people calm down, helping people feel relaxed. It's not that at all. It's how we relate, you know, and realizing that and also doing a bit of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy training and realizing it's, everything's in this space between how we relate to our thoughts because our thoughts are not us shock, you know, that was a new one.

How we relate to the climate crisis, how we relate to other people, how we relate to systems.

Often it's that kind of helping them to move towards acceptance. Except not. As David Loy, the, the, author Eco-Dharma, who I interviewed for our book, he said, acceptance isn't about giving up and saying, well, that's that then It's the way it is. Acceptance is about responding appropriately. It's about saying, so this is what's happened. And rather than hang on to what should have happened instead or what should happen in the future, I'm gonna say, as they said on the West Wing, what's next? You know, what's next? What's next?

You know, I'm going to respond appropriately to what's right here. And actually, if you think about it, so often we're hanging on tight to, the government shouldn't have pushed, shouldn't have, promulgated that law, that company shouldn't have been allowed to do that thing. And it hurts so much. But we are suffering not the company when we have those painful thoughts. And so we can acknowledge them, we can say, I'm really hurting, I'm gonna just put them down and I'm gonna say like, what's next?

So that's coming into my coaching more and more I would say. I, I

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I love that. I feel like it's, some of the particularly potent coaching sessions I can remember are ones where the takeaway from the coaching session is, making space to be with what is actually happening now. Not what you thought should be happening or what used to be happening, and to just arrive fully in this is what's so. This is what, so can I, can I relate to what, so, and yeah. Then what's next?

Charly Cox: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just noticing that in the, here right now, there is no anxiety, there's nothing that needs to be done in the next minute, there might. In the last minute. There might have been, but here right now, we can just connect to now and it's so soothing. Again, this was stuff that was sort of over there when I trained in coaching.

This was sort of the, the woowoo end that you couldn't do in boardrooms. Well, I can tell you I've done it in boardrooms. It just, it just about the language you use to make it acceptable. But everybody gets this stuff and, it's really powerful to help people relate better to each other even, but also particularly to their own feelings.

Jeremy Blanchard: I, love that. Thank you.

[00:32:39] Finding Nourishment

Jeremy Blanchard: As we draw towards a close, one of the questions I, ask all my guests is, where you're getting your sources of nourishment right now? Now that you might wanna recommend could be books, it could be someone you're following, it could be a place of nature, a practice you do. Wondering what you wanna share with folks, and along those lines.

Charly Cox: The main thing I do that I have missed so terribly in the last five months is I go paddle boarding and I go canoeing.

And it's just been too rough. The river's been too high, it's been too wet and too cold.

And we are just weeks away from now being able to get back out on the water.

My family and I in our big Canadian canoe, or me on my paddleboard and I, I've got a ruck sack that I bought from a cheap outdoor shop for like $20. That's big enough for my paddleboard. And I shove everything in the rucksack and I strap it on and I go for mini adventures on my doorstep. So I get a bus to somewhere that's sort of roughly near and water, and I walk to the water and sling the paddleboard in and I go down the river, get out and get another bus home.

And just the ingenuity of finding those bus routes, which in the UK that buses are a bit of a disaster. It's just so rewarding. You feel like you've cheated the system 'cause you've had this adventure, but yet you've been just down the road from your house and often you spend an hour, two, three hours paddling down the river to then whip past it in 20 minutes on the bus.

And it gives you a totally different relationship to your environment and to the countryside and the locality. And I really love that. And I often, Jeremy, the, the workaholic in me says, take a notebook and pen and I don't write anything. I take it, but I don't write anything. so that's the big thing that I've started doing.

And, I never thought I would be an outdoorsy person, but having children has made that feel urgent. And so we tried to find the thing we loved and we, the water was the, the thing we loved.

And we can't wait to get back on it.

Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, I love that. I love that, relationship to nature in the ways that you find your connection outdoors

[00:34:42] Closing

Jeremy Blanchard: How can folks stay connected with you if they want to? Obviously there's your book Climate Change Coaching, that the link to that will be in the show notes, but what are other ways that folks can connect with you?

Charly Cox: Please connect with me on LinkedIn and feel free to drop me a message I love having, really interesting conversations with people, and I'm often chatting there with people. Look out for our website, which is climatechangecoaches.com. There's lots of interesting resources on there.

And also, look at our courses. We have a course for professional coaches, the Climate Change Coaching Mastery course that starts, on the 12th of March, and then it runs as a fast track in November. And so it's every March, every November we run that course.

So that one is, and it's got like 28 ICF cus attached to it. So if you're looking to re-accredited your credential and realizing as I often do the, you don't have enough, cus we can give you almost all of them on that course. And then the other thing, if you are not a coach, but you are working in social change, we have a a six week program called the Green Transition Coach Course, which is so fun.

And it's, two hours a week for six weeks. And in that time we'll teach you how to change your, your conversations completely around climate change.

So those, those two things would be the things I'd point bill to, but I'd also just say, just get in touch. We love talking to coaches and to change agents. That's where we get our hope and positivity from. So don't be a stranger.

Jeremy Blanchard: Hmm. Thanks.

Is there anything else that we didn't cover today that feels like important that you want to, touch on or share before we wrap up?

Charly Cox: I think it's just that if you've come away from this conversation thinking that was okay, but I, I don't think I can do, I still don't feel like I can step into this. Then there's one other thing that coaches can do. Well, everyone can do actually, but the coaches are even trained to do, but anyone can do this, which is to be something different in relation to this topic.

So many, conversations about climate involve shame and blame. So many conversations online are polarizing and angry, and we are trained to be non-judgmental, and compassionate. We are trained to be able to be skillful with conflict, to have safe challenge, to issue challenge in a way that's safe.

And let's not forget that when we become go back to being citizens, we take our coach hat off. Let's just remember that. And so even if you don't want to be taking climate action or having these avert conversations or training to be a climate change coach in your everyday conversations, be the person that says, oh, so you fly.

Okay. You know, that's fine, but is there anything else you think you could do rather than the person that says, I can't believe you're still flying. You know.

Just be something different because we need to make this debate feel safer to engage with. And so you can play a big role in doing that, even if it's to say, yeah, I don't really know what to do about it either.

I'm still learning too. Do you want to go try and find it out together? That's another great way of helping people into this space and we are trained to be that way as coaches, so let's, let's take that out there into the world, even if we are not overtly being climate change coaches.

Jeremy Blanchard: Hmm. Yeah. I just appreciate the incredible dedication that you have to empowering people. That that's the note that you want to close on, is we are all capable of making this space of compassionate empowerment. For folks. I see that in everything we talked about today and in how you show up in your work.

So thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for the work that you're doing and yeah, so grateful for this conversation.

Charly Cox: Thanks for having me, Jeremy. It's a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on.

Jeremy Blanchard: .

Thank you so much for listening to this conversation with Charly Cox. You can check out the show notes for links to the resources that Charlie mentioned and other ways to connect with her.

Episode seven comes out in two weeks with my dear friend, Jess Serrante, who you may remember from episode one this time. She and I are going to be discussing her new podcast, which is about to come out with eco-spiritual teacher, Joanna Macy.

We're going to discuss her big takeaways, both from her conversations with Joanna and her lessons learned from making this project to reality. And what kind of coaching learnings we can take from that?

So I'm going to play a part of the trailer right now for you.

Jess Serrante: All right, our recorders are on for the first time.

Joanna Macy: We're in a situation that humanity's never been in before. You know? There've been wars, plagues, huge migrations. But this concerns every human being. One on Earth, and this is not something we know how to even begin to think about.

Jess Serrante: I'm Jess Serrante, host of Sounds True's newest podcast, We Are the Great Turning.

In this 10 part series, I'm going to bring you into the home of my beloved friend and teacher, Joanna Macy. Joanna is 95 years old, and she's revered in peace, justice, and ecology movements around the world. I'm an activist myself, and Joanna has taught me a lot about how to live with my heart intact in these times of global crisis.

Joanna Macy: I want to reach and take hold. Of that life wire of reality, I wanna be here. If I, I can't avoid climate change, then I wanna be here with all my attention, with all my trust in life.

Jess Serrante: In these episodes, I wanna invite you into a deeper sense of your belonging and love for our world into connection with the great possibilities that still exist for us.

And into action.

Joanna Macy: We Are The Great Turning comes out April 22nd, Earth Day. And you can listen at wearethegreatturning. com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jeremy Blanchard: I am so excited for you all to have the chance to listen to these episodes that Jess and Joanna have been working on for the last year and a half. And really excited to share the conversation that I got have with Jess coming out in a couple of weeks.

So make sure you subscribe in your podcast app to get notifications whenever a new episode comes out of this show.

Really big, thanks to Kristin and Chelsea who helped review this episode.

And thanks to wild choir as always for the theme music for the show, you're currently listening to their song. Remember me, which will play us out.

All right. See you next time.

Charly Cox: Awesome. Well, I mean, when we wrote the book, we realized we were, we were writing two books and then we wrote one. You know, I would used to write, if you're a coach, do this. If you're not a coach, do this. And then I realized I was writing the same thing and I'd be like, actually, just do this.

Because they're just human skills. And so like, you know, yes there's some, there's some sort of witchcraft and coach coaching that we can teach you, but actually just like listening really well, like everyone can do that,

Jeremy Blanchard: Totally, totally.