ICA Graduation Speech, June 2008
by Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland
Last week, 81 students graduated from ICA’s Certified Professional Coach Program. The graduation ceremony was an opportunity to not only celebrate our graduates success, but acknowledge their enthusiasm for lifelong learning, and contribution to the coaching profession.
Kurt Stewart, ICA’s Global Strategy Manager, spoke on behalf of ICA as I was traveling from China to Australia. I wanted to include his speech in this newsletter as it so perfectly summarises our global vision and how the notion of expansion relates to ICA, our students, and our graduates.
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Graduation Speech
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by Kurt Stewart
Bronwyn, our CEO, is on a plane to Australia as we speak and so regrettably will not be able to be with us today. But she wanted me to offer her congratulations to each and every one of you and to let you know that we all have high hopes for you in your coaching careers.
I’m Kurt Stewart and part of the ICA management team. My role here, simply put, is to help ICA expand its training program across cultures, in different languages, so that students who don’t speak English can access our programs in their language. Already the CPCP has been translated into Chinese and we have ongoing projects for other languages.
So as ICA expands across borders, all of you too, as professional coaches are “expanding”, going beyond your own borders, and traveling into new territories. As you may have found for yourselves, coaching is very much about EXPANSION – expansion of the soul, heart, mind and vision of the self. Expansion of our innate capacities and the skills we are learning
As you’ve learned throughout your course, asking a powerful question can help to move a client forward. So here’s mine, something for you to think about as you go forward:
“How will you all, in your own lives, as human beings and as coaches, carry on expanding your “borders”?”
Today, I really want to pass this message on to you: This is truly an exciting time to be a coach. The coaching field is expanding all over the world – the opportunities for you to apply what you’ve learned in our course are enormous. And people of all backgrounds and cultures will be calling on your skills more and more.
Just recently, ICA conducted a survey among top, middle and lower level managers in companies from around the world. It was astounding to learn that out of around 120 respondents, about 75% rated their knowledge and understanding of coaching as “high or very high”!
67 percent said they had already hired a personal coach for themselves and about half of the respondents said that their organization had hired coaches or used coaching throughout its departments.
When asked to weigh the importance of different benefits coaching can provide to an organization, 80% rated “Develop self-awareness in individuals” as “Important or Extremely Important”.
So how amazing is that? What these leaders and influencers are telling us is that yes, we need our people to be self-aware, to expand THEIR borders, so that we as a company can expand ours!
Take a deep breath everyone – you – all of you who are in this profession to help grow our world – you are the EXPANDERS! You are the ones who will boldly go where no man or woman has gone before, crossing frontiers, passing the old borders that limit our forward progress.
And let me just remind you that you are not alone in your expansion. ICA has a fantastic group of alumni that is growing with each graduating class. We are currently building a new online community for the graduates.
American author Gale Sheehy wrote in her book, Passages:
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
So I leave you now to think about how you will allow for the greater expansion of your distinctiveness. And as the amazing coaches that you all are, how will you support others in their own expansion?
I wish you all the greatest of joy as you go forth and expand our coaching world.