The Gestalt Coaching Program™
2023 Class (Online & Face to Face) Now Accepting Applications
Dates:
Session 1: Jan. 18 – 22, 2023 / online
Session 2: Feb. 28 – Mar. 4, 2023 / online
Session 3: Apr 25-28, 2023 / in person (Istanbul)
Executive Client Day: May 31 – June 1, 2023 /online
Session 4: June 19 – 22, 2023 /online
Gestalt Coaching Program™, the flagship training from of the Gestalt Center For Coaching, is an ICF Accredited Coach Training Program, that presents Gestalt-based approach to coaching that incorporates cutting- edge coaching theories from thought leaders worldwide.
This program is founded on core Gestalt values, which hold that it is the awareness of self and others, in the context of aware possibilities, that support choice for intervention and success. A core Gestalt coaching belief is that it is the nature of the coach’s support and presence which assists the client to do the desired work in service of goals that are achievable, believable, concrete, and deliverable.
The program is designed to teach the theory and practice of coaching leadership and management using a Gestalt theoretical and conceptual orientation. Coaching theory, concept, method, and technique from the fields of Gestalt theory, concepts, and practices will shape the program curricula. Participants will develop a system of ongoing assessment, practice coaching, and receive feedback and guidance in the coaching behaviors needed for individual, executive, and organizational coaching engagements.
This program will be targeted to support effective coaching interventions with individuals, groups, and complex systems. Participants will also learn to design their coaching practice to stimulate learning, development, creativity, and intentional and transformational change.
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- Gestalt Coaching ProgramTM, presents a holistic, integrative, and integral approach to coaching individuals, groups and teams.
- The program is designed to satisfy all requirements for ICF Credentialing application for the participants within the program, which is different than many other ACTP programs, which usually ask participants to attend additional certification workshops or programs.
- Graduates of EGCP will only need to take a short applied exam with EGCP faculty after the program ends to receive a certificate of completion, which will enable them to apply for ICF Credentialing through ACTP track.
- Gestalt Center for Coaching approach is rooted in:
- Gestalt Psychology which explores how perception and awareness defines subjective experience and reality,
- Field Theory which explains how self – definition, self – expression and identity is also a function of the changing context we find ourselves in,
- Mindfulness based practices which stresses the importance of being aware in the moment, of outside, of inside, and the interaction of both as the only possibility of making conscious choice and using free will,
- Wisdom traditions that regard self as presence and not an “it”.
- Given this strong philosophical, theoretical and experiential base, Gestalt Center for Coaching has been able to design and offer a unique approach to coaching and human/systems development.
- Many schools of coaching, as effective as they are, have formulated their approach as a collection of intervention tools and techniques, leading to a more or less algorithmic stance.
- Gestalt Center for Coaching, on the other hand teaches an approach to coaching and human development that is based firmly on a process model of how organisms cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally and socially operate, and is thus presence, mindfulness and awareness based.
- This allows gestalt coaches the freedom to bring their awareness, presence, spontaneity, and richness in co-creating coaching processes with their clients fitting to the context, client, situation and needs/wants of the moment.
- In this way, we call our selves as Gestalt Coaches not as change agents, but awareness agents, as we believe it is only awareness that creates lasting and satisfying change and movement.
- This approach shows up in the center leaders’ work: Dorothy has created an approach called Awareness Intelligence™, Dost has developed his model of Strong Body, Open Heart, Clear Mind™, and Gila has designed her workshop series Coming Back to Centre. These developments have enriched our teaching and offerings as a coaching program.
Gestalt Coaching ProgramTM, an ICF – Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP), is structured to offer the right balance and mixture of in person sessions, remote learning sessions (teleclasses), theory and concept transfer, application and experience, personal development work, group experience, learning cohorts and individual study.
Our program consists of:
- Four sessions over 5-7 months, a total of 20 days face to face (in person or online) teaching
- Online teleseminars between sessions
- A student – faculty ratio of 4 to 1 to support and accelerate earning
- A faculty mentor assigned to each student
- An approach and structure that supports not only cognitively learning the material, but also somatically embodying it through:
- Experientially structured program,
- Constant mentor coaching through faculty observed practicums,
- Directed and observation based feedback from supervising faculty to help you assess and further your learning and development,
- Opportunity to practice with real world, executive clients,
- Learning, practice and support cohorts that meet through-out the program,
- Ongoing professional development groups run by senior faculty that meets several times each session,
- And, as a result, a full – immersion, experiential – learning environment that will support participants to develop and embody the teachings.
Gestalt Coaching ProgramTM teaches how to coach:
- Experientially, by inviting clients to become aware of their immediate contextual responses (e.g., physical, psychological, emotional, cognitive). The heart of the Gestalt approach lies in internalizing and applying the power of awareness. The Gestalt coach works with awareness to facilitate clients’ self identification of habitual, unaware patterns of response, particularly those that interfere with their ability to respond in changing situations.
- Experimentally, by collaboratively and creatively supporting clients’ safe exploration of alternative perceptual and behavioral choices. Gestalt coaches offer creative experiments to strengthen clients’ awareness. Experiments interrupt habitual perceptual or behavioral patterns and invite opportunity. Gestalt coaches creates “safe emergencies” for clients that enable expanded possibilities and new choices.
- Existentially, by encouraging clients’ awareness of self and others, which yields “data” that informs actions to achieve desired outcomes. The Gestalt coach keeps clients focused on whatever emerges in the moment. Gestalt approach uses whatever occurs in the moment as the experiential and existential ground for coach and client to explore and experiment with. As Kierkegaard says “be with what is, so that what is possible, may become”.
To be able to work in this way, a coach needs a toolbox consisting of (click items to see more):
Cycle of Experience (COE) is a deceptively simple but very deep and effective model of how organisms, individual or collective, become aware of needs, wants, possibilities, and how they mobilize themselves to reach desired satisfaction, as well as how they stop themselves short and create habitual patterns that keep them stuck. We use and teach COE as an awareness/assessment tool, enabling coaches to support their clients to pay attention to and become aware about their unaware processes that keep them stuck and unsatisfied, as well as what supports movement and change.
This quote, from Arnold R. Beisser’s article “Paradoxical Theory of Change” is the essence of Gestalt coach’s stance on creating change: Awareness, more than anything, creates change and movement. You cannot create, or maintain a change by coercion or will solely.
As Kierkegaard says, “be with what is, so what is possible, can become”. We, at the Gestalt Center for Coaching, teach how to become awareness agents using Paradoxical Theory of Change, in order to help clients be fully with what is, so their possibilities will manifest themselves.
In the Gestalt Coaching Program, participants will learn to design and target their coaching interventions based on their assessment of the Level of System (LOS) the contact or change needs to happen (individual, interpersonal, group, etc.), as well as generational, cultural, developmental forces impacting, and other contextually critical information.
The dates for the 2023 (Online & Face to Face) Program are as follows:
Session 1: Jan. 18 – 22, 2023 / online
Session 2: Feb. 28 – Mar. 4, 2023 / online
Session 3: Apr 25-28, 2023 / in person (Istanbul)
Executive Client Day: May 31 – June 1, 2023 /online
Session 4: June 19 – 22, 2023 /online
Participants need to attend all sessions. Partial attendance is not possible