Coaching for a Changing World
Traditional, linear career paths are fading, and coaching needs to keep pace. That means coach training has to rise to the challenge too.
As coaches, we need to move beyond “plan and implement” towards a more creative “test and learn” way of working. We need to recognise that external ‘change’ and psychological ‘transition’ are different, helping clients navigate complexity, ambivalence and paradox, while still delivering real results.
At Wise Goose we bring a seriously playful curiosity to the questions of the kind of work coaches are being asked do and what the field of coaching might become in the future.
With Wise Goose, you’ll experience an ‘Integrated Coaching Pathway’ – a psychologically-minded, systemic approach grounded in:
- Established coaching theory and practice – helping you become a trusted thinking partner who creates clarity, ownership and meaningful change.
- Action Research – a continuous cycle of acting, reflecting and adjusting, so your coaching style develops through real practice rather than memorised technique.
- Psychosynthesis and positive psychology – a framework for understanding identity, motivation, strengths and the parts of ourselves that don’t always pull in the same direction.
- Contemporary psychology – keeping our methods grounded in current, evidence-informed thinking about how people actually change.
Together, these give you more than a toolkit. They build the self-awareness, presence and an ability to stay with uncertainty that today’s coaches need; the capacity to help clients hold complexity and paradox, rather than just applying a framework and hoping it fits. Our aim is to serve deeper, worthwhile purposes, transforming how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Our approach builds partnerships with clients to create a better world -what we call “success with a soul.”
By “soul,” we don’t mean anything religious. We mean something closer to what the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist describes: we humans are less like a machine built from parts, and more like a river – a process that keeps renewing itself, understood only in relationship to the whole. It’s a perspective that is close to the ‘Way’ in Daoist philosophy, ‘Interbeing’ from Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh or ‘everything flows’ of Greek philosopher Heraclitus.
The myth of the quest for the Holy Grail captures something of what we mean. King Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable set out on a quest for the Holy Grail. A young knight, Parsifal, finds himself travelling through a wasteland, to castle with a wounded king. The only hope of healing both land and king lies in asking two simple questions. But Parsifal has been taught that questions are impolite, so he says nothing, and the castle vanishes around him. He spends years wandering before he’s ready to ask what he could have asked at the start: What ails you? and Whom does the Grail serve?
The Grail stands for something close to the soul. And the myth’s real insight is that healing the wasteland and the king doesn’t depend on having the answers – it depends on being willing to ask the questions. That second question, whom does it serve? in other words – What am I doing this for? Is the question we have asked about the purpose our work and of the field of coaching since we created Wise Goose. It’s why we decided to create our training programme and it’s close to what we mean when we talk about worthwhile purposes: coaching that asks not only what someone wants to achieve, but who and what their work is ultimately in service of.
Soul, in this sense, is a quality of aliveness and process of relationship we participate in, not something we possess. Psychosynthesis reaches a similar place from another angle: beneath our roles and achievements sits a centre of awareness – the Self – connected to something larger than the individual. This isn’t just a concept we teach from books: one of our own trainers, Diana Whitmore, trained in psychosynthesis directly with Roberto Assagiol its founder. We call the result of training with this lineage in mind “success with a soul”.
Our Founder
Ask around and you’ll hear Wise Goose founder Helen Sieroda described as straightforward and open, with a light touch and an impish sense of humour – someone who asks patient questions, listens deeply, and isn’t afraid to give a direct response or probe a contradiction or challenge an inconsistency when it’s needed. She’s fiercely committed to the work, and at the same time doesn’t take herself, or life, too seriously.
Wise Goose began, in 2011, as a conversation over coffee between Helen and a coaching colleague, not long after the 2008 financial crisis had exposed a dramatic breakdown in corporate governance and ethical fragility of institutions. A book published at the time asked ‘Where Were All The Coaches When The Banks Went Down?” It framed a sharp critique of the coaching profession. The central argument was that coaches, especially those working with senior leaders in large organisations, must move beyond merely enhancing performance or polishing behaviour.
The question Helen and her colleague were trying to answer was simple to ask and hard to answer: in uncertain times, what kind of coaches does the world actually need? That grew into another question: what would professional, purposeful, values-led coach training look like, if pro-business and pro-future didn’t have to be in tension? And finally, into a third: why weren’t they the ones stepping up to create it? Wise Goose grew from that small beginning.
Helen started out in management before training as a psychotherapist in the 1980s with Diana Whitmore. Helen has spent the years since applying psychosynthesis to leadership and coaching. You can read more about Helen and the rest of the Wise Goose on our Who We Are page →.
What keeps her doing this work is a belief she’s held since her twenties: “I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.” It shows up as a conviction that personal change and systemic change are connected and that only way to create real, lasting impact is to stop being the person with all the answers and become the person who develops better thinking in others.
She often returns to a line from the poet Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?” — which is, in a way, just another version of the Sacred Question this whole page has been circling.
Why do I love coaching? It’s the joy of making a difference — not just in one person’s life, but creating ripples that impact their teams, families, and communities. Coaches are powerful change agents, capable of huge impact. This is why I chose this work. Plus, coaching offers a flexible, viable career, especially in changing times.
Helen Sieroda, Director Wise Goose