What IMD's Coach Training Weekend Taught Me
5 Oct 2026
Coaches spend their days listening to other people. This weekend at IMD, we listened to each other.
Coaches spend their days listening to other people. This weekend at IMD, we listened to each other.
Module X of the IECC brought coaches from seven cohorts back to Lausanne. I was one of the panel speakers, and I co-hosted a break-out on coaching as a business with Séverine Jourdain and Cesare Zavalloni . 🙌
Many of the faces were new to me.
Three days of learning together stuff like:
→ Conflict and holding boundaries with Mark Clark MBE. WS. FRSA.
→ Improv and Secure Base Leadership in coaching
→ The coach as the instrument with Matthias Leybold 🎻
Truth be told, between the sessions is always the best part: connecting.
Coaches rarely get this. A room full of people who do the same work, ask hard questions, and want to get better at it together.
I hope to see many of you again soon.
Who listens to you?
PS. Thank you Susan Goldsworthy PhD OLY REV and Dr. Silke Mischke for doing this, for inviting me and thanks to the whole IMD team and amazing ambassadors of the IECC program for the year long organization. 🙏
How Secure Base Leadership shows up in a room full of coaches
The panel topic was conflict and holding boundaries. Mark Clark, who led that session, made a point that stuck with me: a coach who cannot hold a boundary with another coach will struggle to hold one with a client under pressure.
That lines up with Secure Base Leadership, the framework I use with my own clients. The idea itself is simple: people take more risks and think more clearly when they feel safe enough to be challenged. A coaching cohort tests that directly. Thirty or so coaches, several cohorts, people who had never met, inside three days of exercises designed to expose exactly where each person avoids conflict.
I go deeper on what a coaching culture actually requires in what is a coaching culture and why organisations need one.
I co-hosted a session on coaching as a business with Séverine Jourdain and Cesare Zavalloni. The questions in that room were practical: how to price a first engagement, how to say no to a client who wants therapy and not coaching, how to keep a practice solvent in a year with fewer corporate training budgets.
Matthias Leybold's session on the coach as the instrument reframed the weekend for me: the coach's own ongoing work matters more than any model or framework they carry into the room.
If you lead a team and want a practical version of the conflict and boundary-holding work coaches train for, I have a free 5 Tips for Courageous Conversations guide, built from the same IMD-inspired thinking. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources